New Belgium Saison

Brewed by New Belgium Brewing Company
Style: Saison
Fort Collins, Colorado USA

12oz bottle, served in NB’s worthy snifter. Golden yellow color with an off-white head. Crystal clear, no botlte conditioning. Aroma is yeasty, lemony, and spicy with plenty of banana esters. Taste is more of the same, chalky yeast flavor with citrus, banana, and spice. Good, but a bit of a cookie cutter saison. Now that it is available locally, I am sure I will have a chance to revisit it many times and maybe I’ll end up liking it more.

Aroma is yeasty with lots of spicey notes. Bready malts start this brew before the spices kick in. Lots of yeasty earthy flavours throughout. Well made but not tongue blowing.

This beer pours with the perfect golden, cool, crisp, sunny color and texture of the labor-day weekend on which I enjoyed it. Which is part of the problem. I expected something a little cloudy, turbid, and complex like the front that had blown through the day before. The yeast spiciness is there, but it seems isolated from the rest of the beer, almost as if it were added as a flavor packet, like the little silver package of spice you shake into a steaming pot of ramen noodles. In fact, I’m surprised at the level of clove and nutmeg (and other spices too exotic for my vocabulary), considering the bartender told me this beer is not spiced. Still, the rest of the package is just too clean, too text-book, to really transport me to a warm harvest day on the farm spent in honest anticipation of a reward for a day’s labor.

Bottled. Pours a pale yellow amber with a fluffy white head that descends to a ring of foam. Some flowers, apples, grass and spice in the nose. Light body, lively carbonation. The taste is lightly sweet with fruit, bread and spice. Cloves and corriander finish.

Pours a light honey gold with a white head. Aroma is mild yeast, some spices, and a hint of banana. Flavor is fruity and sweet. Has a just a tiny bit of tartness in the 1st sip. Lots of spices with banana being the notable fruit. The finish is sweet. Lots of spices to this one.

Aroma of citrus, dusty flowers, and yeast. Dark gold color, fluffy white head and some lacing. Starts with a tast of clove and coriander, sweet/tart in the middle, and spice and hop at the end. The spice overrides any hoppy citrus notes. Very refreshing, a good bit more flavor than most saisons from the Flanders region (in the widest sense).

At Hops in Humboldt Micro-Brew Festival in 4 oz glass. Gold in color with a nice clean white head that left good lacing in the glass. Clean nose of hops wihth lots of fruit and flowers. Mouthfeel was clean and crisp, and it was nice going down. Flavor is a bit yeasty, and finish is a little like a hefe. Overall quite good.

Yellow gold. Broken layer of tiny white bubbles cling to the glass. Ordinary nose of floral hops, toasted straw, peach, coriander, and honey. Very yeasty. Carbonation is firm but airy on the palate. Sweetness is delightfully subdued, initially, which enables the snappy plasticy phenols to exude. Oversweet mixture of clove, candy sugar and crushed coriander soon overrides the deeply rooted phenols and waning glimpses of brightness. Fairly wet and limp in body, and the fruity yeast compounds this. Although relatively insignificant, the yeast does lend a meaty astringency, as well, along with the typically overstated fruitiness. Finishes heavily grainy and flabby with lingering notes of baked apples, coriander, and floral hops. Much to my chagrin, rather than allowing the phenolic esters to shine, they instead pummeled them with coriander and candy sugar. Pretty uninspiring, dull, and predictable for the style, but I suppose it could be worse.