Extra
Brasserie Thiriez

This particular beer is an interesting joint effort with an English brewery. It uses one hop varietal, a rather unusual hop grown in Kent called ‘Bramling Cross.’ The malt is from 2-row spring barley grown in France. (The English brewer is brewing to the same recipe, with the same ingredients, for sale in the U.K., under the French name.) The result has certain characteristics of an English bitter: it’s not too strong, very dry, and eminently drinkable. The idea is of course that you should be able to drink a lot of it over the course of a long sit-down with friends, in the English ‘session beer’ tradition. The English, of course, excel at creating deeply flavorful beer at a low abv — the ideal beer really, since you can enjoy that flavor rolling over your tongue for hours without leaving your lunch on the floor — and Extra is in that vein. With all those hops, you might even see Extra as a more traditional English IPA. Yet since Daniel Thiriez is a little ‘Belgian-oriented,’ by his own description, and uses a Belgian yeast that he obtained from the Belgian brewing school where he studied, the beer also has a good bit of the earthy, spicy character of a saison.