Saison Lacombe Noir
Blindman Brewing

 

Jesus please us - this is a suitable brew for Easter Sunday. Sampled from a day-old growler, looking out at Chinaman's Peak and EEOR from my hotel in Canmore. It's dark, cola-esque, and pops out of the glass. The smell is roasty, with undertones of barnyard and stable (in the best possible way). In the flavor department, it starts off cola, with roasted malt and happy saison banana cloveishness. Once again, Blindman has crafted an interesting twist that I would walk 500 miles to try again.

 

1L howler from Keg n' Cork (in my Sherbrooke-branded bottle, yo!) - a full fill, for what it's worth.

This beer pours a fairly solid black, but with indicative basal cola highlights, and three fat-ass fingers of puffy, finely foamy, and vaguely creamy tan head, which leaves some decent random European peninsula lace around the glass as it quickly wafts out of sight.

It smells of roasted, and slightly meaty pale and wheat malt, faintly phenolic and funky yeast, dry cafe-au-lait, a bit of black orchard fruitiness, stale Scandinavian anise candies, and plain earthy, leafy, and herbal noble hops. The taste is lightly toasted caramel malt, a lesser spicy and grainy wheatiness, some middling and sort of sweet bruised banana, plum, and cherry fruit essences, fading black licorice notes, wan free-range ash, a rather reduced generic yeastiness, and more understated weedy and dead grassy hop bitterness.

The bubbles are fairly active, but in more of a genial and come-hither frothy sort of manner, the body still on the light side of yer typical medium weight, and so-so in the way of the smoothness - both the yeast and the char kind of equally culpable, methinks. It finishes off-dry, the base maltiness complex enough to shake off the roasty character and assert itself amongst the remains of the yeasty and fruity day.

Overall, a well-made version of something that, IMHO, maybe shouldn't have even been a consideration for existence in our good craft beer world in the first place, but here it fucking is - and by the flying spaghetti monster in the sky, it actually works! The 'noir' part of the deal is respectful enough of the base Saison, and that, to me, seems like just the right amount of praise due here.

A nice little (or should I say big, at 7+% ABV?) brew, a dark saison incorporating about 5% kettle soured ale in the mix: the result is a dark, brown-to-black brew, not a tremendous amount of head, that offers a lot of interesting flavours: yeasty, dry, roasty malt, a touch of coffee, barnyard funk, grain, hay, milky sourness. I only had a glass, so my ability to describe the experience is limited, but it's a beer that pulled from a lot of different categories, having notes I'd associate with a porter, a traditional farmhouse, and a kettle sour. Quite nice, though.