I happened across this today and since I work for a cranberry company I had to pick it up even though I know nothing about this beer. It says Batch 1 on the label, and since it says it is brewed with fresh cranberries I assume this is last years batch? The price wasn't bad, but is my assumption correct that this is approaching a year old? Any ideas what I can expect from this random find? Reviews re not highly favorable, now tht I look.
No idea. Depends what Mystic has done with it. I know Cisco aged theirs in barrels and it's only being released in September. Barrel.Aged.Cranberry.Lambic... Given how sour I would expect it to be, Mystic should age OK in the bottle, no? But no wood... I find all the buzz around Mystic a bit premature. Tree House and Trillium had scored some home runs right off the bat (obligatory baseball cliche overload), and Night Shift and Mystic were supposed to be right in line behind them. But every time I look up one of their beers, the reviews are disappointing. I've begun to wonder if I should even try them. Got two growlers from Trillium on Thursday and the first one is right up there... But Mystic? I'm going to sit them out for a few months. PS: Reading the reviews, it might be better now than it was when first released. But it also looks like they were afraid of sour. One reviewer wrote "sweetness of cranberries"--WTF? The rest al said no cranberries at all. Makes me anticipate Cisco even more...
10 months old. Bottle conditioned beers develop a cotton candy flavor with age so it might taste more like cranberries that it did early on since it will seem more sweet. That why the reviews are low. It didn't taste like cranberries...it tasted like fermented cranberries...which was our intention. Were are focused on trying to get interesting aromatics in our beers which is why we liked this beer...but by law we had to put "cranberries" on the label so everyone judged it by its cranberry-coctail-ness while we were going for something weird and Fantome inspired. Oh well...this years will be more tart and might seem more cranberrish. Also...we never put extracts or additives in our beer so its straight from field to fermentation...there will be no pseudo-cranberry flavor! I think its going to develop into a great beer as we improve the recipe and techniques each year. In general...we don't brew hugely popular styles and for that matter don't care much about style, which makes our beer very hard to judge. Look closely...our table beer is one of the highest rated saisons in the world at that ABV. We are mostly focused on rediscovering methods and approaches to brewing that were largely forgotten. A few years ago you couldn't sell a saison at all and you still can't sell much of a Gruit. But thanks to PT and HF we have a brewery surviving by doing virtual all saisons and we are blown away that people are coming out to tasting room just try our saison/gruit hybrid experiments. Give it some time. Cheers! Bryan Founder Mystic Brewery
Interesting that the two takeaways seem to be "cranberry is tart" and "cranberry is sweet". Cranberry has a distinct flavor aside from been either tart or sweet (would you not say the same about an orange, a Meyer lemon, a kumquat?). No brewer, so far, has been able to replicate that flavor by adding cranberries. A good Kriek is not just sour and/or sweet bur reminiscent specifically of sour cherries. A good Framboise evokes specifically raspberries, not a generic sour berry flavor. A pear cider has a distinct flavor of pears even if the base is mostly apples. I'd like to be able to say that about cranberry beer some day. Otherwise, there is no reason to use cranberries at all. Have you considered cooking up your own extract to add along with fresh cranberries, perhaps at different stages of fermentation? No one forces you to use commercial extracts and that position is admirable. But there's more than one way to brew with beer. If you put cranberry on the label, it has to feature the cranberry. Otherwise it looks like gimmick, which is what the negative comments have been about. Let's hope so. Yo might want to label the vintages, in that case and not just go by bottling date which suggests that the recipe is not changed. Judging from the buzz that Mystic has generated both on BA and in the beer press, everyone's not only willing to do just that but are giving props on credit already. That's an accomplishment in itself. But, sooner or later, one has to deliver on that promise. Trillium is delivering on their promise now with more than one product. Table beer is a good start, but it needs more partners at the top for you to say the same. I don't mean to be a harsh critic, just want to be realistic and constructive. Please try to take it that way. I really do want to like your beer.
I'm not going to say you're wrong, but I'm going to disagree with you. Saison Renaud is awesome. Mary of the Gael is great. And Hazy Jane is wonderful. What happened with Entropy is a shame, because that was phenomenal. I could keep going, but I'll stop. Nobody likes a fanboy, except maybe the recipient of the gushing. But if you're within a reasonable distance of the taproom, I highly recommend a visit if you haven't been already. I wish I still lived right down the road.
I don't live down the road but close enough to get there on occasion--when transportation is available. And I won't disagree with you either. Have no reason to. A bit more consistency and easier availability would be great. And I'm going to continue boosting locals, including Mystic as much as I can--I like more options, not less, and there's plenty of room at the top.
I love everything Mystic is doing right now. Three Cranes was a rare swing and a miss for them. I can't agree with anyone who didn't detect cranberry in there, though. What were they expecting, Ocean Spray? As for Treehouse and Trillium, I'll let you know if they ever get bottles into distribution.
I will try the beer and see what it tastes like. Since it is bottle conditioned, I would expect the flavor to have changed. Will keep an open mind...at this point, it is what it is, as much as I hate that phrase. Since I have worked with those little red berries for the last 33 years, anything that pushes the envelope is of personal interest when it comes to cranberries. Cranberry flavor is very distinctive, yet at the same time there is not a lot of complexity. High acidity, low sugar content fruit. Not a ton of aromatics, and loaded with phenolics. If you don't have the backbone of the juice to give a rounded flavor, cranberry distillate (the volatile aromatic flavors) mostly taste and smell like alcohol and vaguely fruity. Fermentation isn't something my company strives to achieve but it happens and the results are wildly unpredictable and mostly unpleasant. While cran juice will ferment, it takes a pretty robust yeast due to the low pH. Even though the results are not what we want in production, every once in a while we can get something that smells great - totally by accident and we drain pour it - but us research types go "hmmm...what if we could capture that". From a brewing or winemaking perspective, this is not the easiest fruit to work with even with controlled fermentation. Kudos to anyone who tries. I can also state that raw cranberries and juice taste nothing like the juice cocktails made from the fruit. You can find "raw" juice on the market, but I can guarantee since it is available all year it comes from frozen cranberries. Which, by the way, taste somewhat different compared to freshly harvested. Cooked fruit yet again changes the flavor profile. So I will drink what I have and await Batch 2.
I understand wanting to look at reviews before trying a new beer, but in this case, I would say to grab one each of their base beers - the Saison and the Descendant (and maybe a Table beer, for good measure) and try them before judging. First of all, the beers are pretty reasonably priced - $10 for the Saison and Descendant, around $8 for the Table, and I find them more than enjoyable. They may not be up to the level of Dupont or the other world class representations, but I don't find them lacking at all.
So you never tried any of their beers, is that correct? Yet, you pass a grand judgement that It's one thing to use reviews in order to decide whether to buy/try a beer. But to form one's own opinion relying exclusively on somebody else's and then declare that the beer/brewery is lacking... Really?!? It shows. Especially in regards to realistic.
I would not have said anything if I hadn't tried them--in fact, I did not say that I haven't (the word "reviews" only appears in the specific context of cranberry beer). So who is passing "a grand judgment"? Furthermore, I have a limited budget and can't try them all. The fact that the reviews are few but the scores are consistent (and rather in agreement with my own assessment) all I'm saying is that I'll spend that money elsewhere until I have better cause. And, realistically, Table Beer is the only one available with any regularity outside the brewery. I can always take my lumps when I have to. Apparently the same is not true for others.
This never appeared at my local haunts this fall, and I finally found a bottle in VT in May. I though it tasted quite nice then, and yeah, I tasted something cranberry-ish. I'd drink another bottle.
I don't understand this post. Tree House opened May 2012. Trillium opened this spring. Night Shift launched March 2012. Mystic's been selling beers for (I think) more than 2 years now. I'm also not sure where you're getting "all the buzz around Mystic" from. FWIW, I think Mystic's saisons are better than Trillium's, which I really don't find particularly good. Not sure why people have loved them so much. Fort Point is absolutely phenomenal, on the other hand.
Can't really argue taste, so we'll have to disagree. Both Trillium and Dry Stack have been quite to my liking so far, which I can't say about Mystic. I haven't had the above-mentioned Mary of the Gael and Saison Renaud, but I thought Table Beer was just OK and some of the others turned me off. I recall one of the wine-barrel-aged ones that I tried that (to me) tasted like diluted grape juice that someone left on the counter for a couple of days--I thought it was a lab experiment gone wrong. Yet, it's one of the higher rated Mystics. Tastes differ--can't appeal to everyone, I guess. But my mind is more open perhaps than my palate. I'm always willing to give multiple chances--until it becomes redundant.
I thought Dry Stack 2 and Sunshower were both good beers but pretty hard to drink. Really didn't think Trillium was very good at all. But as you said - we can't argue taste, and no point in doing so. I'm mostly just confused about your discussion of "all the hype" and "buzz" Mystic is getting. Since when?
I had Trillium only at tastings and was impressed. And had no difficulty with Dry Stack at all, but this week is a new batch. As for Mystic "buzz", I've been seeing glowing reviews both here and in the press roughly since December. In fact, some reviews were pushing Mystic as if it were revolutionary and the only new craft brewery in MA (not even Jack's Abby got as much press in the spring, but that's changed now). I call it buzz. YMMV
Let's remember, there is no best beer, there is only the perfect beer for certain people. We don't brew for ratings; we brew archaic everyday beer for cranky old hermits to drink while dreaming up Rube Goldberg machines. Obligatory: http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html
