Southern Tier Cherry Saison

Brewed by Southern Tier Brewing Company
Style: Saison
Lakewood, New York USA

6-27-08 bottle shared with lb4lb thanks to d0b
Thick orange yellow with little head. Smell is big and funky with no fruit really at all. Flavor is a touch funky and yeasty too - but is decent and not awful. No big cherries (nothing new here).

Bottle; poured an almost orange with a small, and short lived head. Aroma was very triple like; with yeast, sugarand spice; if there was some cherry or oak in there then I must have missed it. Despite the fairly poor ratings for this, I was still excited to try it. However, the flavor just wasn’t there. Pronounced dryness and the palate is familiar for the style. However, there wasn’t much fruit at all. The bigges flavor component was spice; other than that there was just a mess of muted flavor, maybe some vanilla. Not actively bad, but not good enough to justify all the effort ST went through to produce this.

Bottle Pours out an orangish topped with a small head. Aroma of spice and yeast. Tast of the spice and yeast. A very small tast of fruit. Man I was thinking this was going to be GREAT. A Saison with some cherry tast. YES. But the cherry was not around. One of the first low rates for Southern Tier for me.

This beer was not at all what I expected, but it was still pretty good. It tasted very tripel-like to me, and not at all like cherries and not really much like a saison. So, mis-named and mis-labled it may have been, but still not a bad beer. It poured an amber color with a medium amount of head. I really expected it to be red, or to at least have a pinkish tinge, and it definitely did not. Aroma was also not cherry like. I got lot of candied-sugar or candied-fruit smell and some cloviness, but no cherries. Flavor was just slightly sour, but again with no real hint of cherries, oakiness, nor of saison funk. It tasted instead a lot like a tripel, with a lot of spice, clove, and a champagne-like secondary-fermented carbonation mouthfeel. Not at all what I expected, but still good. Still, seems very off-target with what the bottle told me to expect. SurlySober brought this bottle over to my house...no idea where it came from.

On tap at Market St. Ale House. Pours a cloudy golden orange color with a thick foamy head with a little bit of lacing. Aroma is a fruity yeast with vanilla and a light touch of medicinal cherry. Some notes of coriander as well. A spicy bitter yeast flavor. A very slight fruity ester, but just a touch. Coriander and a nice spice. A pretty rich mouthfeel that leaves a nice bitterness on the tongue.

22oz bottle. Enjoyed on the 4th of July. Golden orange color nice white head. Aroma has biscuit, & citrus peal (nothing fancy). No cherry flavor at all but there is biscuit, light wood, spicy hops, and a crispness/tartness (but secondary). Mouth feel is dry. All and all a drinkable brew, but nothing that wows you. And where the heck is the cherry??

Too many draught samples at Sunset Grill, freshly tapped and all between June and July 2008.
Pours fine, though somewhat dark. Clear....Very little aroma, with light caramel and rich honey.
Saison??? Not that I expected much from these guys, but come on! This is pathetic. The cherry flavor is muted, and at least isn’t candyish or overdone, but there’s no barrel-aging apparent (or very little, gotta love that it is aged with "oak staves"....). Mouthfeel is just sticky and completely opposite from crisp and refreshing. Sweet, absolutely uncomplex and boring.
They call this Southern Tier Cherry Ale, and it gets a 3.6 or something like that. Put the word "Saison" on the label? I don’t think so.

im so pissed at this beer...pours golden with large carbonation and large head..aroma of belgian yeast, spice..flavor is the same..no oak elements, no cherry..bullshit..shame on southern tier