Goose Island won me back

Lolita is a Belgian Strong Pale aged in Pinot Noir barrels. Goose has never used bourbon barrels for Lolita.

 

You mentioned one was Gillian, personally my favorite beer by far in the GI portfolio. Just bought 3 bottles last night. The price tag sucks, but I think it's well worth the price. I love that the strawberry note is strong, but extremely well balanced. If I were you, I'd buy one.

If you saw Halia, it is a saison with peach aged in wine barrels. I am not terribly impressed with it and have no idea how it sells at it's $20+ price tag. Lolita is a great beer, but crazy sweet, on the level of a New Glarus fruit beer level of sweet. I opened one at a bottle share this past weekend, it has a strong fruit and sour flavor that was enjoyed and is a great beer overall, but one best shared given the 750ml format.

 

I do not think there IPA is an English style IPA. The last time I had it fresh, it was dry, with a grapefruit/citrus, piney finish. Had American IPA written all over it

 

It's a self described English style IPA, look it up. It's their description.

 

Halia is aged in Chardonnay barrels and has A LOT of that buttery Chardonnay oak character. I've always been a fan of Russian River Temptation, especially aged, so it's right up my alley.

 

I went to the Goose Island website and there is zero mention of yeast one way or another.

The Total Wine website mentioned:

“Illinois- Saison/Farmhouse Ale- 6.5% ABV. GABF Bronze Medal 2011. Champagne in color, Sofie is fermented with wild yeasts & aged in wine barrels with orange peel. It's tart & dry with notes of subtle, spicy white pepper, a hint of citrus, & a creamy vanilla finish.”

To your knowledge is there a definitive source of information here?

@RobH

If you would have attended the Dave Janssen presentation at the recent NHC (Homebrew Con) you would have learned that this is an incorrect statement. A Saison brewed at 6.5% is entirely OK.

Cheers!

 

You clearly aren't using BJCP or Cicerone guidelines if you think that 6.5% is too high for a saison. The BJCP gives saison three classes; table, standard and super. Table is 3.5-5%, standard is 5-7%, super is 7-9%. It isn't a "table beer".

I've had over two hundred different saisons. It's a standard saison.

 

Hmm, if Sofie at 6.5% is not a Saison that would mean that Saison Dupont at 6.5% is not a Saison either.

 

Guidelines are for losers. Everybody knows that "feel" is the best way to objectively judge something. When your "feel" is strong, they call it "the force".

 

I am not into the details of brewing, but if anyone follows GI on Twitter, they just mentioned yesterday that Sofie spends 3 months in wine barrels with orange peel and brettanomyces. Does that end the argument (if we can trust them )?

Maybe I'm biased, though...I love Sofie.

 

Thanks for being a bit more savvy than me and being able to post proof! I just stumbled into this thread tonight and thought it was strange that people were discussing this considering they've been posting about Sofie and Matilda quite a bit over the past 3 days. Hopefully the debate about that has ended. Whether people like their style of this beer or not...that is obviously personal taste and a whole different discussion.

 

Your local craft beer scene must be pretty bad if you're excited over Goose Island.

 

Having been down the road of this Saison debate with someone else a few years back, I'll simply suggest that historically Saison was not a uniform beverage all. It was simply a lower ABV beverage for consumption by farmhands with meals. Being a locally produced product that used only locally sourced ingredients there would be little to no consistency from place of brewing to place of brewing except that imposed by nature and the ingredients used. In other words it didn't have a definition or the was no "style", it just was.

The only folks who would have determined or cared where the best ones were made would have been the better farmhands who voted with their willingness to work on a particular farm. In all likelihood that farm used home grown ingredients from fields where nature had conspired to produce grains and/or other ingredients which a more talented, probably amateur, brewmaster could turn into a flavorful beverage that quenced thirst and helped to re-hydrate the farmhands.

Eventually, it seems, the practice of farmhouse brewing had almost completely died out. But then Saison is introduced into it's modern context by Belgian brewers who made the first choices as to what a modern interpretatioin of a farmhouse ale would be, but they did so to accomodate the way their customers tastes and circumstances had changed since the days of truely local farmhouse brewing. (e.g., one of the reasons so many Belgian beers are of high ABV is simply that the Belgians had their own post WWI version of Prohibition. But it did not apply to beer, so the public demand changed and the Brewers responded accordingly.)

So I'd suggest that if one wants only to brew "the historically correct Saison" it can only be done as a low ABV beverage using local, untreated water, and only locally grown and processed ingredients used by someone who is the (amateur?) brewer for that particular farm and having only very local availability/distribution. But I'd then I'd also suggest that if one really wants to recreate a "the true historically accurate Farmhouse ale" it is necessary to go even further back in history and abandon totally the use of hops and use instead a locally produced gruit.

In other words, I suggest there is no particular reason to favor one historical time period over another in deciding on what is or is not really a Saison. As with many other things in life it is a moving target and should also be dealt with in it's modern incarnation as influenced by the forces of history and popular demand.

 

I'm pretty excited about some of what Goose Island does, and I'm in one of the best craft beer markets in the country. They do good stuff; no shame in that.


On topic, I don't profess to have much knowledge of how accurate to the style most beers are (and I don't really care; I'm more of a "drink what tastes good" guy anyway), but even though I'm genuinely really enjoying the back and forth on this thread (it's a nice change of pace from "when is this beer coming out?" and "I didn't like this beer, why did you?"), I feel like people are getting a little too hostile. There's clearly a lot of knowledge being shared by different people in the thread, and I think that should be the focus, not who is more accurate about which points (for example, the infected/bad BCBS threads are at their best when everyone is throwing around hypotheses about cause and effect, as opposed to arguing over whether or not someone's palate is to blame for thinking the beer tastes weird).

Either way, though, carry on!

 

Hi Jack. That description was written into the Total Wine system in 2011 based on what the GI website said at that time. Thanks for the heads up. I just updated it and it'll propagate to the website overnight.

 

Boy o’ boy, lots of spirited debate in this thread.

As regards the strength of beers like Saison and Grisette the other aspect to be considered is that there are plenty of differing sources of historical information and often times they have conflicting data. Dave Janssen was very clear on this point as he gave his presentation entitled “Brewing Grisette and Saison: Insight from Historical Records and Modern Producers” that he gave at the recent NHC (Homebrew Con).

The other aspect that Tom (@drtth) brought up was that these beer styles ‘evolved’ over time and therefore a ‘typical’ Grisette (or Saison) of circa 1880 would be different from one of circa1950.

I would encourage the interested student to visit Dave Janssen’s blog and learn more. For example there is some good discussion on Grisette and alcohol strength in the below link.

http://www.horscategoriebrewing.com/search/label/Saison

@zid

Cheers!

 

And that's all without even getting into the "Lolita isn't a lambic" debate

 

Yeah, you've got it right. The beer scene in SE PA is so bad when it comes to flavorful beers I'm pretty much compelled to purchase and enjoy Sofie once in a while. It's sad.

 

Hoping to get there in August the Sunday between the Pearl Jam Wrigley Field shows.