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.
