Holidays and a good friend’s visit created the perfect occasion for me to open one of California’s rarest and most exciting beer projects. Isabelle Proximus is the collective work of Avery Brewing, Russian River, Dogfish Head, Lost Abbey and Allagash – a true list of U.S. superstar brewers.
The Art of Lambic
Back in 2006 the brewers from each of the breweries listed above took a trip to Belgium together and tasted through as many Geuze lambics they possible could and searched for the secret tricks of this very complex and difficult to make style of Belgian sour beer.
Geuze lambics are traditionally made with indigenous wild yeast cultures that create some extremely interesting, and, at first glance, ‘off’ flavours. In other words, if these yeasts were used in wine the result would be disgusting.
Through history and accident, however, a great brewer can tame the beast of the wild yeasts and create one of the world’s most interesting beers.
These bold Americans decided to take on the challenge on their home turf.
Mastery and Collaboration
It was understandably difficult for five brewers of the stature involved in this project to get together and brew something at Tomme Arthur’s Lost Abbey brewery near San Diego. However, I am thankful they finally managed to do so four years ago and that Tomme’s master plan for this beer came to fruition.
The idea was to get four oak barrels sent from each of the five breweries along with yeast indigenous to that particular brewery. Then, the brewers would get together at the Lost Abbey brewery and blend the various components together in order to make a Gueze style beer unlike any other that had been made before.
The Greatest Sour Beer in the United States?
This beer tops the list of sour beers that I’ve had. Only Russian River manages to get to this level, but they don’t make anything quite like the Isabelle Proximus. It has the cellar-like and yeasty aromas you expect from a Geuze, but everything is under extreme control and I would even call the beer poised.
The sourness, unlike many lambics, is not overwhelming and in fact is balanced incredibly well with the oak and some secondary fruit characteristics brought from the used oak barrels. These fruit notes come from the Festina oak barrels that were provided by Dogfish Head. The Festina beer is made with ripe peaches and it is amazing to see how the fruit notes are carried by the oak into a separate beer and how well these flavours integrated into the overall balance of the beer.
This is something you should drink slowly and out of a wine glass. It is a remarkable creation and I would not hesitate to call it a masterpiece of the art of brewing. It is too bad that this beer was only made once. I aged this in my cellar for 2 years before drinking.
Excellent+
$40 at Lost Abbey Night at Toronado SF during San Francisco Beer Week 2008.
I am a little late with this brief note on a great holiday beer, but there is still some of it floating around the market and it’s worth picking up to drag out your festivities for a few more days! Anchor is a pioneer in the U.S. microbrew scene, making its first beer (Anchor Steam) in 1896. However, in my opinion it is Anchor’s Christmas Ale that is their true paean to craft brewing. This is a special beer that sees a change in recipe every year and carries with it significant aging potential. They also change their label every year, but consistently keep the hand drawn tree as the basis. This year the tree was based on San Francisco’s famous Monterey Cypress near where the Panhandle meets Golden Gate Park. The 2009 ale is the 35th edition of Anchor’s Christmas Beer.
On my recent trip down to Seattle I picked up a bunch of winter and Christmas beers from some of the very excellent U.S. microbrews available south of the border. Here we have a very interesting hybrid style ale from Great Divide of Denver, Colorado, a great brewing city and state.
A beer from the brewmaster’s collaboration series, this ale was a joint effort between Dirk Naudis of De Proef and Tomme Arthur from Lost Abbey/Port Brewing. Both of these guys are lauded in the craft beer community, and the idea of a collaboration between them on a crazy hybrid Belgian and American wild ale is pretty exciting. I’ve had and written up the second beer in this series made by De Proef and Jason Perkins of Allagash. It was awesome. This confirms the trend.
In an exciting development, I am writing up this beer procured not on a trip to the United States, but rather on a trip two blocks away from my work at a local beer speciality shop. That’s right, a true blue bourbon barrel aged stout has made it across the border and into our stores. I’ve been ranting about the beauty of wood aged beers ever since I lived down in California where such things are not strange oddities but much loved companions. If the recent shipment of this rare beer from North Coast is any indication, we may be able to begin moderate rejoicing here in British Columbia.
A brief note today for this beer made with peach juice from concentrate. I guess Dogfish Head was going for refreshing, but they got unbalanced muck in the end. This pours a very pale yellow, and smells like a light wheat ale. The palate is pretty much equivalent to canned peaches pureed into a basic wheat beer and a high level of acidity/tartness. It’s a simple beer that just didn’t come together well for me.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever written up what is perhaps not only my favourite go to stout, but also one of the best balanced and most ageable stouts out there. Brooklyn’s Black Chocolate Stout is actually not brewed with chocolate, but rather with copious amounts of chocolate malts. One can certainly taste and smell all levels of dark chocolate in this wonderfully made beer. Further, as part of an ongoing debate on twitter about chocolate and wine, I want to come out on my blog to say that in my opinion no alcohol pairs better with chocolate than stouts. The huge range of stouts is versatile and able to pair with the huge range of chocolate styles, which is precisely what I did with this amazing stout that I aged for 3 years before consuming.
I’ve written about the diversity of lager before, and the unfortunate dominance of mass market beer in the lager department. Shmaltz Brewing is taking the challenge, though, with their Coney Island line of lagers in a myriad of styles. Unfortunately, this particular iteration did not work for me and felt quite unbalanced compared to the basic Coney Island Lager or the Albino Python.
It’s somewhat ironic that this review finally made it up on the site one day after Vancouver’s first major rain storm of the fall/winter doldrums. So, if you’ll excuse my seasonal anachronism I’ll tell you that I was expecting a lot more from this wheat beer from New York.
