Ovila Saison – Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.

Ovila starts with a magnificent champagne-like pop as you pull the cork. From there a highly carbonated orange-y (Orval-ish) in color North American attempt at a saison. It’s peculiar in that N.A. brewers make great abbey styles, sours, and white beers but an excellent saison is hitherto elusive.  It may be that what skews our N.A. saisons is the idea that these are well attenuated beers. While no doubt that’s true, what makes Moinette, Saison Dupont, Bons Voeux and the various efforts by Blaugies, Fantome and Vapeur so fantastic is not they dryness so much as the interweaving between the residual sweetness of the malt and goldings hops. It’s a serious contrast between how saison’s are described in books and magazines and how they taste when you pour a glass of the best examples. I think N.A. brewers would do well to try a saison recipe with a Helles-like mash regime in the hopes of getting the fantastic goldings flavor and bitterness on the backdrop of a wonderfully sweet beer. Once established tweaking the mash for a more highly attenuated beer could be done as a fine tune rather than an initial bearing. Yeast likely plays a part too. Six years running now of trying to perfect a saison at home has me, for lack of a better word, stuck at a place very similar to the taste profile of Ovila. An idea worthy of experimentation, cultivating yeast from the aforementioned Dupont brews, may yield better results than the commercially available brewers yeasts in N.A. that call themselves saison yeasts. In sum, Ovila inspires two ideas for a better American saison, an initial helles style approach (try the Paulaner Munich Lager at a place where it’s stored and served perfectly such as Café Berlin in Denver for the taste profile I have in mind) and bypassing commercial yeast in favor of yeast cultivated from a bottle of one of the excellent old world examples.

Brasserie à Vapeur D’Antan

Denver continues to offer up unexpected treats for finding rare and wonderful beers. The Bull and Bush has entered my personal list of the city’s finer beer appreciation establishments based on the strong credentials of their vintage beer list. The treat of a recent evening was Brasserie à Vapeur D’Antan 1996. Full disclosure, I became a fan of Vapeur with a visit to the brewery in 2007. Sampling their array of beers accompanied by both an amazing meal and the hospitality of Jean-Louis Dits is a recipe for lifelong intoxication.

D’Antan 1996 is an excellent beer but requires some perspective. A quick look at online reviews shows it is often seen through the lens of British and American pale ales, and from this perspective may come across as a bit of a disappointment. Carbonation is extremely low. Hop flavors and aroma are nearly nonexistent. The beauty of D’Antan lies in the textures and flavors rarely found in contemporary beers. There is an earthy spiciness and a leaning towards coppery colors characteristic of the beers of Vapeur. A wine loving friend said the beer presents the vinous notes of pinot grigio. The texture of the beer, well attenuated without the bolstering mouthful of strong carbonation is reminiscent of a true lambic.

Antan is French for yesteryear. Phil Markowski nails the proper framework in ‘The Organoleptic Profile of Old Saisons’ section of Farmhouse Ales. Here D’Antan ticks all the boxes: light toward amber color, lightly carbonated with little to no head, slight sourness, wine-like, well attenuated, a fruity component to the flavor and reminiscent of a gueuze. The only difference between old saisons as presented in Farmhouse Ales and D’Antan is alcohol content, where the latter meets higher contemporary expections.

Culling the excellence from a bottle of D’Antan requires putting aside notions of pale ales and contemporary saisons. A little time with the lambic doux or lambic blanc at the Café à la Bécasse in Brussels sets the tone. It’sTimmerman’s lambic served properly in a crock, Bruegel style if you will. D’Antan 1996, darker, earthier and spicier than the Timmerman’s is the next, wonderful step.

The Big Beers Friday Dinner - Odell's and the Lost Abbey

Friday's Brewmaster's Dinner at the Big Beers, Belgians and Barleywines Festival invoked excellent pairings of wonderful beers with inspired cuisine. The audience at the Friday dinner was conspicuously different than the night before. Thursday night was a almost entirely professional brewers and their significant others. Friday brought many of the same along with a healthy mix of beer appreciating festival goers.

The evening was hosted by the Ocotillo restaurant located in the Vail Marriot. The participating breweries were Odell’s of Fort Collins, Colorado and Lost Abbey of San Marcos, California. Appetizers consisted of a ridiculous variety of caviar (truffle, ginger, black tobiko, beet-saffron, wasabe and brandied trout flavours) along with three soups (Normandie brie with black truffles, vanilla scented lobster bisque and roasted red pepper bisque with roma tomato and aged balsamic vinager). Still in the appetizer course were carolina pulled pork sliders (tasty mini-barbeque sandwiches marketed for the extreme fajita crowd) and Rocky Mountain oysters (fried to order and served with chipotle aioli or yellow tomato vinaigrette). They're still Rocky Mountain oysters. All of the above were paired with Odell's Imperial Pilsner and Lost Abbey Lost & Found. Odell's seems to go all out with the Imperial pils, using expensive European barleys and hops to create a hoppy, nicely balance, almost (based on gravity, not esters) Belgian blonde like beer. The Lost Abbey was dark-ish, in the vein of a Scottish ale rather than a porter, wonderfully Belgian-esque with a hint of it's American micro pedigree only in it's uniqueness. It was a fine lead in for the next 24 hours.

The first sit-down course presented Odell’s India Pale Ale and Lost Abbey Ten Commandments. My preference typically is for a Belgian ale over a west coast style pale ale. Odell's IPA is inspired by the west coast pale ale but its perfect. A beautiful orangey hue, nearly to match it's label, strong at 7%, aggressive bitterness with a powerful citrusy hob aroma well balanced with a judicious quantity of malt attenuated down and brought to effervescence to present a nearly perfect hoppy American beer. The Lost Abbey Ten Commandments, and I wish I was drinking one now, was simply lost in the beauty of Odell's IPA. The food presented at this first sit down course was a Baja shrimp gazpacho with spicy tortilla sticks. The shrimp were flavorful and the gazpacho wonderfully and aggressively spicy.

The third course was where Lost Abbey really struck me as being something special. It was the entree course, tenderloin wrapped with pancetta bacon served along with quail breast with parsnip puree and a chocolate port wine reduction. Ample but not excessive portions (leaves room for beer) and delicious. Odell's presented their Imperial Stout. Lost Abbey served Veritas 002, a sour ale blended with raspberry mead from the Redstone Meadery in Colorado. After a sip of the Veritas I started re-arranging the table setting of the empty place to my right so the waiter would bring an extra pour to the table. It's a fantastic classically sour ale, more in the Flanders than lambic fashion, blended with Raspberry's, and the honey note from the mead comes through in a distinct fashion yet blends to perfection. I did get an extra glass.

The fourth course was warm cambazola cheese in filo with lavender honey and poached pear. The offering from Odell's was their Extra Special Red. Something of an ESB, which are never particularly bitter, and a higher gravity brew in the Flanders red color (no flavor similarities whatsoever to what the Flemish do with their reds). Lost Abbey served their Veritas 001, lighter in color than the 002 and again with a nod toward a Flanders red, blended with cherries and if I'd tasted it before the 002 would have declared it amazing. Was it Tim Webb a few years ago who was mentioning the Americans were starting to brew sour beers but were years away from producing something of the quality of a true lambic ? The 001 is one of those intermediate beers. Solid, inspired, and wonderful in its own right but holding fewer dimensions than 002. Webb would do well to track down a Veritas 002. The Americans, more with innovation than tradition but with an extremely respectful nod to Belgium for inspiration, are now doing amazing things with sour beers.

The fifth course was a dessert station. The people who run things in Vail are masters of subtle crowd control. Desserts were set in the hallway outside the dining area to get people out of their chairs and on their feet with a tasty pause before heading out the door into the cold. Desserts this good will start bringing women to beer dinners. I'm not a tiramisu fan, something about how it's always different wherever you go is unsettling . Here, round and wrapped in chocolate it was the choice of the evening. Other options were a warm chocolate cake, something called paradiso, a chocolate opera torte, white passion, chocolate marquie and ice cream chocolate truffles. The beers paired with the final course were Odell's dopplebock and Lost Abbey Angel's share. The Angel's share was at this moment similar to the Lost & found. It's obvious they're doing wonderful things at the brewery, but not quite as distinctive as the Veritas. The Odell's I will need to try later--next time I'll save more room.