06 January 2014

Crushing hard

What are those people with the exploding stockpots up to? Why are they so terrified? As usual with Brasserie De La Senne the entertainment starts before the cap comes off.

Crushable Saison was brewed in collaboration with Tired Hands brewing of Pennsylvania. It's 5% ABV and certainly looks like a saison: yellowish and hazy to the point of opacity, and it has the massive amounts of fizz you'd expect from the Energizer bunny of beer yeasts. The similarity more or less ends there, however. While there's a hint of wheatiness and barnyard in the aroma the dominant smells are sharp grapefruit and lemon zest. There is less sharpness in the flavour and far more juice: mango, nectarine and peach, with just a rasping dryness on the end as a final reminder of its true nature.

Taking an innocent saison and C-hopping it nine ways from Sunday is probably neither big nor clever but it does make for rather good beer. This is one for drinking hyper-fresh, so you've probably missed the best of it by now, but hopefully there'll be a repeat or a clone. I can see this being a very agreeable younger sister to Taras Boulba.

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