Paste Magazine Blind Tasting: Saisons

My only issue was that they included some 100% Brett beers in the tasting. Not sure how they can be saisons, even if they're marketed as such. Quite a few of my favorites were high up on the list though. I wanna see where some SARA saisons would have ranked, especially Bernice, Cellarman, and Cask 200.

 

What's wrong with a 100% Brett saison?

 

I think as the selection of craft beer expands, breweries, BA, the brewer's association, etc. need to expand the number of official styles. Because it is absurd that barrel-aged sour farmhouse ales are compared with Saison DuPont. Yet, someone relatively new to craft beer or a casual drinker might try something at a beer fest labeled "saison," try it because they love Tank 7, and wonder what the hell infected that awful sour mess in their glass, when in reality it was probably a very well-crafted, highly regarded barrel-aged sour. (Yes, that happened to me)

As the number of beers available skyrockets, I see no reason why Paste can't split up its tastings.

 

It seems like on an annual basis the Brewers Association expands the number of beer styles in their Style Guideline list. I suspect that if you brought this particular situation to their attention in another year or so there would be multiple beer styles for Saison.

Cheers!

 

the Allagash hoppy table beer I really enjoyed. i'll pick up that Ommegang if I see it

 

If was spring seasonal. Be wary of dates if it's still around. Should be good IMO I'd less than 4 months old.

 

Nice to see Funkwerks get some well deserved love there.

 

I get it, and these articles are always fun whether you agree or not. But, I'm under the impression that these paste blind tastings with 100s of "entries" *are* for us beer geeks. And they always have "rules" for their IPA tastings as arbitrary as they are (abv and color/malts), so why give saisons less care just because Brooklyn isn't a hotbed for the latest hip millennial saison brewers (yeah yeah I'm sure there are some)

 

Nothing as long as it's delicious

 

If there isn't any saison yeast in it, how is it a saison then? Isn't it just a Brett beer? If there's a mix of both then that's fine.

 

I'm not sure breaking these beers down into fairly arbitrary, potentially overlapping categories would really be an improvement anyway. I think it's better to just accept that saison is an extremely wide-ranging style and rank everything against everything else.

I wonder about the age of some of these beers. Most of the highly ranked stuff is bottle conditioned, and a lot of them are bottled with other live cultures as well. They will evolve over time in the bottle, potentially in unpredictable ways. For instance, I was surprised HF Arthur wasn't ranked higher, but to me that is a beer that needs some age on it to be at it's best, and even then you're never quite sure how much. Each batch, maybe even each bottle can develop a little differently. Sometimes you crack one and it's Arthur, and sometimes it's ARTHUR, and you never really know beforehand.

The other thing that jumps out to me is how many highly regarded beers/breweries didn't even crack the top 40. Burial gets the number one spot, and their other beer doesn't even make the list? Crooked Stave can't get a beer in the top 40? Or beers like Saison Brett or Sorachi Ace, which plenty of people who know a thing or two about beer will list as some of their favorite beers in general, not just within the style.

I think Paste did about as good a good job here as they could, but everything about this list just emphasizes how difficult a style Saison is to pin down in any regard. It's a wide ranging style that can't even be precisely defined much less ranked. Many of the best examples are living creatures in the bottle that are never quite the same beer twice. All of which makes it difficult to rank them, and endlessly fascinating to drink them.

 

Don't worry about it.

 

Sorry I'm a brewer, it's kinda my thing

 

Interesting and informative.

 

I think it has a lot to do with the catch-all labeling of saison/farmhouse. In the case of a saison, you would be correct, but in the case of farmhouse a 100% brett designation seems perfectly fine. Breweries label each as if they are the other.

 

Unfortunately for me, no. I like Paste's tastings. I pretty much stick to drinking beers that are distributed to my area, so there's always lots on their lists that are essentially meaningless to me (and this was no exception).

I don't mind Paste casting a wide net with the different beers they chose. Their logic makes sense.

My favorite saison remains Dupont's, and I've never had any of the beers that Paste ranked higher. I tend to really push my own blind tastings as far as I can go with them. What I mean, is that I don't like to just drink a bunch of beers and declare a "winner" for myself. I'll repeatedly put beers in multiple tastings so I can look for reoccurring tendencies. I've put Dupont's (along with others) through tasting after tasting, and I just really like that beer. It's one of the very few beers where I actually thought to myself "this is a God damn masterpiece." I almost never use that term with beer.

Regarding Burial, I haven't had the beer they ranked as their number one, but I've had a different Burial saison. They can make some very nice beer, but I personally really disliked the saison that I tried due to it's heavy-handed qualities. It made me partially uninterested in trying any other saisons by them... and the fact that the other Burial saisons available to me were 750s loaded with what-nots (bourbon, beets, ginseng, etc.) sealed the deal. Needless to say, if the one on Paste's list pops up for me I'd probably grab a bottle.

Anyway, sorry to ramble... my comments only really have value for me. I'm not in any way suggesting that there's anything about Paste's list without merit. I made a point to try Revolution's Straight Jacket after it was number one on their barley wine list even though I prefer my barley wines without any bourbon/whiskey influence.

Cheers.

 

I love this, as saisons have definitely moved up there as one of my top favorite beer styles. They are my favorite Belgian beer style. I wish Brooklyn Sorachi Ace had been listed higher, (I'm drinking one now, actually) but I'm glad to see Allagash Saison, Boulevard Tank 7, and Saison DuPont got the praise they deserve.

 

Yeah, some beer friends of mine and I were talking about Praire and we concluded that their saisons/funky brews (Prairie Ale etc) and big stouts (Bomb and variants etc) are some of the best in the World for those respective styles. Fact that they are nationally distributed and found in bottle shops keeps the hype train traders/buyers from rating them as highly, so who cares, I think they are great, and glad I can acquire them somewhat easily.

 

This tasting is just plain silly. By their own admission they have beers included that aren't alike and have very little to do with saison, with the exception of the name on the label. Saison isn't a catch-all style of beer, even though a lot of people would like it to be.

Yes, we realize the inherent level of absurdity and difficulty in comparing them to one another. In the end, a puckeringly tart, wine barrel-aged saison has little in common with a classic Franco-Belgian example of the style, such as Saison Dupont. But as in previous Paste tastings, we’d prefer to be inclusive rather than exclusive. As long as the beer in question is marketed as “saison” or “farmhouse ale,” then it’s A-OK by us for inclusion.

IMO, saisons with Brettanomyces or lactic acid bacteria should be labeled as mixed fermentation beers and 100% Brett beers as just that, 100% Brett and not saison.

 

So we're really reviving a year old thread to have this debate? Well, I look forward to it being settled quickly and to everyone's satisfaction.