Perseguidor (Batch 7)
Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales

This beer has the same reaction as I had of Surly Brewing Company's Pentagram. I wanted to like the beer because both the look (dark brown) and the smell (the barnyard funk and apple) was really nice. However, the taste was a bit too aggressively sour for my liking.

 

 

Made in true solera fashion, Jolly Pumpkin's beers that keep re-emerging, folding in on themselves and adding flavor, ingredients and maturity batch after batch finally lands at its seventh yearly installation for a tart, robust but drying taste.

Perseguidor leaps out with a rusty mauvish brown hue and suspended in a fine and yeasty haze. As a scantly driven froth decorates the rim, the complex scent of souring fruit, vinous wines, peppery spice, dried earth and woods decorate the nose. A slim sweetness then greets the tongue with hints of toast, cola and hard candy.

As the sweetness soon drifts away, its the fruit flavors of crabapple, lime, red grape, white grapefruit and dates that create both this brazen sourness but also a deep robust character akin to red wine with hints of sherry. Peppery in its spice display, the strong phenol properties of peppercorn, wood spices and a slight medicinal warmth carries into an earthen finish of soil, coffee, cork and burlap.

Highly complex and even complicated at times, the beer that keeps on giving provides us with an unwavering sense of both youth and maturity with a well melded sense of controlled rot, fruit and fauna.

Pours darker than I expected. Similar to a dark cola. Head was somewhat off white. Nice caramel flavor to go along with the sourness. Pretty easy drinking beer for a sour.