Saison du Must II
Burdock - Kensington Market

Poured from fridge temp. Pours yellow with almost no head. Nose is lemon, orange, pine, horse saddle, Taste is horse saddle, barnyard funk, leather, pine, grapefruit peel. Mouthfeel is dry and thin. Overall, an exceptional saison.

Bottle: Poured a nice yellow color ale with a large white foamy head with good retention and some lacing. Aroma of light tart notes with loads of grapes notes is quite enticing. Taste is a nice mix of grapes with some tart notes, light residual sugar notes with some oak and a light funky finish. Body is about average with good carbonation. Enjoyable saison with right amount of complexity.

 

375ml bottle - aged on Riesling skins, and then in unspecified wine barrels for a year.

This beer pours a slightly hazy, medium golden yellow colour, with one finger of puffy, loosely foamy, and mostly just fizzy off--white head, which leaves a few instances of approaching landfall lace around the glass as it quickly blows off.

It smells of gritty and grainy pale malt, white wine lees, a bit of estery lactose, wet barrel staves, faint yeasty notes, a touch of earthy spice, and ethereal leafy, musty, and floral hop bitters. The taste is grainy and crackery cereal malt, mashed white wine grapes, a subtle yeastiness, mixed earthy spices, a fading oaky woodiness, and more well-understated musty, herbal, and gently lit-up floral hoppiness.

The carbonation is average in its palate-soothing frothiness, the body a decent middleweight, and generally smooth, with all the adjuncts somehow not really making any sort of fuss here. It finishes off-dry, the yeasty white wine essence predominating.

Overall - this is an affable enough offering, with the Riesling treatment quite obvious, and enjoyable, providing you're okay with the base style being pretty much obfuscated. Easy to put back, as the elevated alcohol is not really noticeable in the least. Worth checking out.

This is a very good tart Saison, giving that life you would normally expect from Lactobacillus but from reisling grapes and wine barrels. Clean but very complex. A very good beer.

This one pours a slightly hazy orange color, with a small head, and not much lacing.

Delicate but firm grape aroma takes over this beer- you don't get much of the saison underneath in the aroma. The grape aroma is nice, though, so that's something.

As we go to the taste section of this review, we find many of the same thing. It's all grape, almost like wine really, with a dry and delicate, slightly sweet Reisling flavor, along with light citrusiness, and just a hint of oak.

This is light bodied, crisp and very clean, with a very high level of drinkability.

I dig this, but I wish the grapes addition melded more smoothly into the base beer.