Sour beers on tap

If you're interested in trying some sour beers now would be a great time to head over to The Porter.  They have a handful of well balanced sours that would be a good introduction without being overwhelmingly sour.


Hitachino Red Rice: I mentioned this one yesterday in my last sour beer post.  This is a great sour that mixes flavors from Japan and Belgium.

Smuttynose Brett & I: This is a little fruity and doesn't have as much Brett funk as I was hoping, but still delicious and refreshing.

Ommegang Hennepin: Nice example of a farmhouse saison that I previously wrote about here.

Then head over to The Brick Store for Allagash Interlude, a complex, fruity, fairly intense American wild ale and Kasteel Rouge, the beer that started the Flemish red style.  There's not much real difference between a Flemish red and brown except the color.  This one was seen as so beautifully red that it deserved a style of its own.

Update: Sorry, I just happened to re-read this and I realized I confused some sour beers.  Rodenbach is the original Flanders red and Kasteel Rouge is brewed with cherries.

Allagash at The Porter

The Porter continues to raise the bar in this city for catering to beer geeks.  You can get a brewery's biggest 1-2 beers all over, but where besides the brewery will you find 11 on tap?  Starting this past Friday you could find 11 Allagash brews at The Porter.  There were 8 I wanted (the other 3 are more readily available) and fortunately those 8 could be had in sets of 4 oz tastings that Les and I split.  Yet again, this shows how The Porter raises the bar for beer geeks: we each got to try 8 beers, but only drank a pint.  Here's my quick take on the beers we had:

Odyssey-strong, dark wheat beer.  It seemed complex, but I had a hard time picking out specific flavors.  I would like more of this without being surrounded by 7 other beers (the slight disadvantage of tasting this many beers).

Fluxus-A saison brewed with sweet potatoes and black pepper, but I wouldn't have guessed that.  I thought it had some character of a light bodied, spicy tripel with a little bit of pear.

Burnham Rd-I'm not a fan of rausch beers (beers made from drying the malt over a flame).  The smokiness in this was more subtle than some I've had, but I still don't care for drinking beer that tastes like bacon.

Victor-Molly said that she was expecting this to be winey based on Allagash's description that it is brewed with grapes and a wine yeast.  Like her I didn't find any wine quality, but there was a lot of grape juice flavor.  That's not a bad thing, just what it is.

Four-Made with four malts, four hops, four sugars and four Belgian yeast strains.  Piney hops dominate nose, but balanced taste.

Hugh Malone-Very nice.  I usually don't like when simcoe hops dominate, but it didn't bother me at all in this one.

Interlude-My favorite of the bunch, but I am biased in favor of any beer with even a hint of Brettanomyces yeast.  A little light fruit (pear, plum, apricot) and that awesome Brett funkiness.

Tripel-Good example of a standard tripel.

I'm looking forward to the Smuttynose takeover this weekend and the B. United takeover the next week.  And don't worry if you want to drink something else.  The Porter has enough taps that even the with giving 11 to Allagash they still had one of the best selections in the city on the remaining taps.