Afterthought (2021)

Personally I think afterthought does a great job of balancing their saisons, and rarely does go too sour IMO. If you are looking for a more classic profile the saison meer series will work. I particularly like the lilac variant. All of their gin barrel aged saisons are fantastic, while not traditional, they tend to be a less tart than the wine barrel ones.

 

Their Biere de Garde (which I last had about 1.5-2 years ago) was an excellent and, to me, classic example of that style. None of their core offerings really tend towards the DuPont profile in my view, but for the cost and relative availablity, a four pack of Afterthought Ale is an excellent, not overly tart, sufficiently complex saison that is a staple in my fridge.

 

To my knowedge, afterthought has never made a completely clean saison. They have made some mixed culture saisons that strictly used house culture to bottle condition.

I think beers like Modern Tradition, Citra & Riwaka, and possibly Afterthought ale would suit you from the afterthought portfolio.

isWas would be the best place to start if looking for classic belgian style ferm. Just chose any beers that have brettanomyces on the from label. Their Biére de Garde named Good Sitter is absolutely brilliant so track that down first if you can

 

Speaking of Afterthought, I saw on Facebook that they will be opening their tasting room in Lombard this Spring.

 

I typed this wrong. Avoid the brett beers. Anything that doesn’t have the word brett on it is clean ferm with either a classic belgian or French saison yeast.

 

Some of the old Meer batches tended to get a little acidic because they spent more time in barrels. Once afterthought hired a staff and got more eyes on barrels that issue went away. Meer and petit Meer are excellent. The Meer beers with fruit additions will generally have a touch more acidity than the non adjusted Meers. Petit Meer would be a great one to start with cuz it’s pretty fresh at the moment.

 

The Biere de Pieces beers are my favorites from Afterthought. They all have that Champaign dryness with a nice balance of tart and fruit sweet. They are all very smooth

 

I asked when picking up yesterday and they've got inspections and other finishing touches lined up in the next few weeks. Looking very good for a June opening so stay tuned!

 

This is so exciting!!!

 

Just noticed this thread so thought I would chime in especially with regard to the original question on “clean” saisons. While it’s correct that we are yet to produce a saison that doesn’t have any Brett or other bugs (and I’m not sure we even could given how pervasive our mixed culture is within the brewery), we’ve started doing a decent number of clean-ish saisons that are with a fresh Saccharomyces pitch in stainless and then packaged with a bit of our culture. The culture ends up coming through a touch but without much, if any, acid as the stainless fermentation gets the beer very dry and we hop to 35+ IBUs.

Current examples of beers like that are Extra Noble and Lantern, with the former acting as our tribute to some of our favorite European beers like De Ranke XX Bitter and Thiriez Extra. Lantern is more toward the Dupont/Blaugies mold with flavors of honey and orchard fruit.

Both are available in our taproom for $12 per 4-pack (plus 25% off all “to go” on Thursdays). Subsequent batches of these beers should see distribution as well.

Finally, for those of you who haven’t tried Is/Was, you absolutely need to do so! We just had Will Be on as a guest saison and I enjoyed quite a few of them.

 

I’ve stopped in to the tap room several times now. Fantastic stuff!

A nice selection of Afterthought beers on tap, and a huge bottle selection. The bottles are great for sharing.

 

How crowded does the taproom get? What's the atmosphere like? My wife and I are driving up for the Rev release and looking for a new, fairly chill place to try.