Rogue FestiveAle

Brewed by Rogue Ales
Style: Saison
Newport, Oregon USA

Draft at Frisco’s. Slight haze, pale body no head. The aroma is floral, pepper with light bread. The flavor is very herbal, spicey, moderate sweetness with some pepper coming through at the end. Medium body with soft carbonation.

Wow. I was adventitiously surprised by this one. I stopped off at the Rogue brewery after visiting my uncle and cousin in Portland, and I ordered this by bottle since it was out on tap. Hands down, it’s the best, creative, US-made excursion into Belgian territory I’ve sampled. Despite its complex ingredients (ginger and orange?!), it simply works, automagically (sic). Top-grade effervescence, generally successful creative blending of spices, and all around scintillating. (If you have distributed sediment, by the way, you haven’t let it rest long enough before serving--you can’t drink this with the bottle conditioning additives diffusely dispersed throughout the beer. That changes the flavor completely, as it does with any bottle conditioned ale. Try again, if this happened.)

Bottle. Pours cloudy golden orange, thick and fluffy white head. Very faint aroma of sour apples and funky yeast. Taste is kind of funky. Starts with some kind of weird orange taste and finishes with apple peel. Very dry finish, unpleasantly dry. Flavor seems off in some way.

Drain pour? Almost. Had this on tap at Monk’s and it looked like apple cider, tasted like sour fruit and smelled like nothing. That was the best part.

Funny, my bottle doesn’t have the "e" in FestiveAle ... it says FestivAle. Anyway .. This muddy but bright orange brew poured with a massive tower of white, rocky foam to top it off. A nice authentic Saison-y aroma penetrates the head ... that musty yeast and sweetness. This has an interestingly complex flavor .. kinda like orange kool-aid, mostly. Extremely effervescent on the tongue, and finishes with a sweet-tart tanginess. It’s good, but kinda off-centered in some way.

Bottle. Orange golden color with a thick off-white head. Spicy aroma, with orange peel, I can pick out hints of saaz. Somewhat on the heavy side for the style, very sweet, loads of yeast, vanilla and cream, occasional tartness. Resembles a tripel more than a saison. Good but not quite up to par with some other saisons.

Beer is a clear medium amber with a huge, frothy, off-white, mostly and rapidly diminishing head. Residuals look like particulates on the surface. Big first impression on the nose! It smells like buttery (not buttery in the DMS way, but in the creamy way), decadent pastries! Count me in! The aroma is malty with light notes of toasted grain, buttery shortbread cookie, pound cake; Hoppy with a moderate herbal note;Yeasty with heavy notes of sourdough bread dough; Miscellaneous notes of moderate green apple, sage, oregano, orange zest, tamed pineapple, spicy alcohol, perhaps a trace of cinnamon. The flavor is moderately sweet, moderately bitter/dry, lightly acidic with an average-length lightly bittersweet, moderately warm finish. The body is medium, the texture is velvety and the carbonation is lively. In the end, it’s a bit dark in appearance and missing a lot of the funk of it’s Belgian-born cousins, but still fairly compelling and yummy.

Cloudy golden color with thin white head. Aroma is of sugar and fruit. High carbonation brings about a fruity, spicy and sour flavor. The sourness gets to be just too much.