Dry Hopped Creamsicle Saison
Blindman Brewing

8oz glass at Beer Revolution YEG Oliver Square. So Saisons are now getting the North East treatment?

This beer appears a hazy, pale golden straw colour, with one skinny finger of wispy and faintly bubbly bone-white head, which leaves some disintegrating limestone cliff lace around the glass as things slowly progress.

It smells of bready and doughy cereal malt, faint domestic citrus rind, mild earthy yeast notes, and equally understated leafy, weedy, and floral green hop bitters. The taste is fresh-squeezed orange juice, grainy and bready pale malt, a lesser biscuity wheatiness, ethereal yeast, and more tame leafy, herbal, and musty floral verdant hoppiness.

The carbonation is fairly benign in its bored-seeming frothiness, the body an adequate medium weight, and generally smooth, with nothing really getting in the way of a perfectly good time here. It finishes off-dry, the citrus character receding, while the wan malt holds its hair.

Overall - well, both of the purported guest treatments kind of fall flat in this offering, as no Creamsicle or real edgy hop assertiveness really ever emerge. Kind of strange for Blindman, as they typically knock it out of the park. Ah well, can't win 'em all!