by Lee Williams | Jan 9, 2015 | Lock Box: January 2015
| 6.6% ABV. | Saison | Caerphilly, Wales | 330ml bottle | An unfiltered Belgian farmhouse ale brewed with a boatload of tart and luscious pomegranate and aged for 2 months before bottling. We’ve featured a few saisons in our beer boxes during our first two months of business here a The Beer Vault – both British brewed and Belgian. This noble and storied Belgian farmhouse beer style went for far too long unnoticed and thus underappreciated here in the U.K. Not only was it hard to find saisons on shop shelves, save for the occasional bottle of Brasserie Dupont’s classic, it wasn’t a style that any British brewery cared to brew either. Thankfully all that has changed now. For a few years now, many forward thinking British breweries have turned their hand to this beautiful and most versatile of beers, some even brewing many variations of the style – London creatives Partizan spring to mind immediately, as do new Brighton based brewery Burning Sky. Both seem to have a particular affinity for the style and thus brew saisons throughout the year, many brewed with all manner of interesting flavouring ingredients. Caerphilly based Celt Experience are another brewery that in recent years has made no secret of their love of farmhouse ales, and not just saisons either, but it’s even more esoteric French cousin the Bière de Garde. We have discussed the story of saisons at length in our reviews of previously featured beers, Buxton Saison, Partizan Iced Tea and Blaugies La Moneuse, so if you fancy reading about the style in more depth that’s a great place to...
by Lee Williams | Jan 9, 2015 | Lock Box: January 2015
| 5.5% ABV. | Smoked Beer | Bristol, England | 500ml bottles | A bold mashup of traditional British and German beer styles. Loaded with dark chocolate and smokey bacon notes. Impressively decadent and characterful for a session beer. Smoked beers or Rauchbier (“smoke beer” in German), are traditionally the domain of Bamberg, Germany. It’s here that the art of beers brewed with wood smoked malt has been elevated to an art and has been perfected over many generations. The smoky bacon flavour is imparted by drying malt over an open flame. In the era before more industrialised indirect kilning technology, this flavourful method was a point of practically more than anything else. Smoky flavoured beer was at one point pretty common all over the World, but new brewing technology meant that this, and many other old beer making techniques were eventually supplanted in favour of producing a more consistent, profitable and “clean” end product. Thankfully though, the populace in the Bamberg region of Germany rather enjoyed the smoky character of their beers and were in no rush to clean them up, as it were. And so, a small pocket of the World retained its much loved smoky beer. In today’s lively and creative international craft beer industry, many brewers around the World are eager to try their hand at every beer style imaginable. Smoked beer is one such style that many brewers in the U.K. and U.S. are have been keen to experiment with. The smoked malt produced by Bamberg maltster Weyermann is the most highly prized in the World. Proof, if ever, that holding on to old ways and means, isn’t...
