Into The Shade Saison (Unfiltered)
Cameron's Brewing Co.

 

 

 

 

 

This is a cloudy, effervescent and very enjoyable saison. There is a nice balance of fruit, wheat, and spice in the taste profile. I received this as part of a Craft Beer Advent Calendar and I am glad I had the chance to try it.

A hazy golden colour with a 3cm tall head that lasts a long time. Citrus smell, mainly grapefruit with lime and orange and a slight earthy scent (grass maybe?). Again lots of citrus in the flavour and very tart, almost sour with a bitter citrus finish. I'm also finding an earthy, grassy after taste similar to the smell. Mouth feel is kind of oily but transitions to really dry after the tartness. The beer kind of dries out your mouth towards the end of the glass. Overall this beer has a very clear theme. All the elements really compliment each other and the grapefruit/citrus is really carried through all the senses. It's clear what the intent was and a few of these would be really enjoyable with a good meal.

 

Day 7 of the Craft Beer Advent Calendar.

L: Cloudy yellow with a couple fingers of white head that stays around for a long time.

S: Sweet, coriander with some almost black pepper smell to it as well. A slight citrus smell to it as well.

T: A little tangy taste to it. and a lot of hop presence. It tastes more like a mild white IPA than a saison.

F: Full body mouth feel with a nice amount of carbination.

O: A very nice beer. Quite easy drinking but I don't feel that it has as much of a saison taste that I'm used to.

Pours to give a cloudy, orange body with a large, fluffy white head. The scent comes up strong on grapefruit, pine, and yeast, with a very faint hint of spiciness as well giving it an added complexity. The taste is wildly fruity, and definitely exhibits some sour flavours as advertised, which I've never actually experienced. The taste is however overpowered by the rapid formation of foam once the beer hits the palate, making the experience fairly short. Altogether it's a beer that's good in theory but starts falling apart in practice.

341ml bottle, day 7 of the Craft Beer Advent Calendar - this is the Into the Shade saison, in an unfiltered version 'brewed especially for the calendar', hence the new listing.

This beer pours a hazy, medium golden yellow colour, with a teeming tower of puffy, broadly foamy, and fairly fizzy bone-white head, which leaves some dissipating cloud form lace around the glass as it very lazily recedes - looks like a Saison, all right.

It smells of grainy pale malt, a touch of spicy wheat, estery yeast, muddled table top pepper mill dust, a wee underripe apple and pear fruitiness, and faint earthy, leafy, and floral hop bitters. The taste is rather perfumed off the top, over a still gritty and lightly crackery pale and wheat malt, a mixed stone fruit and citrus acerbity, some persistently underwhelming rainbow peppercorn spice, and a further plain leafy and wet hay-like hoppiness.

The bubbles are quite active in their swirling and prickly, fizzy and frothy nature, the body an adequate middleweight, and more or less smooth, as the spice and yeast don't muck things up any more than the carbonation does. It finishes off-dry, but somehow trending toward the latter - I suspect the suspended yeast, I do.

Well, looking back, there seems to be a few minor differences between this one and its mixed-pack progenitor - namely, a lessened fruitiness, and an increased carbonation. Not huge things, I know, but they render this more Saison-like in the end, if there's any point to this at all.