Brasserie Dupont Avec les Bons Voeux

The name simply means "With the best wishes from the brewery Dupont". Originally it was given as a gift by the brewery to their best clients, but with its popularity they decided to commercially sell the beer. It's an unfiltered light beer, in the same style as the famous Saison Dupont, but brewed in restricted quantities. The brewery is still independent and family run.

This beer poured a cloudy golden brown, with some floating white sediment appearing in the glass. There was also a huge rocky off-white head that had amazing retention. Lacing was left all over the glass from the beer.

The smell was somewhat bitter, with a touch of skunk apparent in the nose at first, but really not in an unpleasant way. There was a huge wildness to the smell, grassy, earthy, with some wild flowers mixed in. Spice comes through a bit as well, but it's mostly the smell of wild Belgian yeast. There's always this amazingly natural and wild smell to saisons that I just can't get enough of.

The taste just overwhelms the mouth with the very definition of a wild beer. It's like Ommegeddon mixed with Duvel. There was banana and wild flowers present in the taste. It just had this raw quality to it that's hard to describe. It's really not all that sweet tasting, but rather a nice grassy hop bitterness coats the tongue. Normally I wouldn't like a hop dominated flavor but this beer pulls it off so well. It's just wild and untamed. It's a bit tart tasting, but just amazing.

The beer is light in body, with strong tingling carbonation. It even feels good in the mouth. There's a bit of smooth coating left on the teeth, and some warming when it went down the throat. Overall the feel is just light and a bit airy.

Wow. This was an insanely easy beer to drink. I think saisons may be at the top of my favorite styles, and this is definitely the best I've had yet. It even beat out Ommegeddon, which was one of my favorite beers. It's hard to believe that something this good is only rated #4 on Beer Advocate, but I haven't had any of the ones rated higher yet. It's also pretty hard to believe that this beer was 9.5% ABV, since it barely had any indication of the level of alcohol in it. I don't think beer gets much better than this.

- Adam

Learning experiences Part 2

For those following our adventures in home brewing, you probably know that we had an issue with the fermentation of the stout we've been brewing. The specific gravity of the beer was too high, meaning there were still a bunch of sugars in the beer that the yeast weren't fermenting. The danger with this is that if we went ahead and bottled this beer, the yeast should resume fermentation of the additional sugars in the bottle, and since there would be more sugar than normal, the bottles could explode. These are called "bottle bombs" in the home brewing world, and can be extremely dangerous. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not have hundreds of glass shards flying at me when I go to get a beer out of the fridge.

Originally we had tried adding a new yeast packet and some yeast nutrient to the beer. This was the advice given to us by the owner of the home brew store, so we figured it was probably pretty sound. Well, turns out it had no effect. To be fair, we're still not sure that the issue was just that the yeast gave up, it could also have been that there wasn't enough oxygen in the beer for them to reproduce properly and get to the level where they could ferment all the sugars. I'm actually leaning towards this explanation.

Anyway, as a last ditch effort, we decided to make what's called a starter. Basically, it's a concoction you put together to get yeast going, that you then throw in the beer. We got some water boiling, added about half a cup of dry malt extract to it, boiled for a few minutes, and then got it cooled down. Basically following the same procedure as when we make beer, just with a lot less time and no hops. We then put it in a bottle and shook the crap out of it, to make sure there would be plenty of oxygen in the wort. We added a packet of yeast to that, once again using Nottingham yeast. We loosely covered it with foil to keep any nasty bacteria out, and left it overnight to start fermentation. The next day, Dan took the mixture and shook it up again to get oxygen in it once more, then dumped it in our beer.

Sure enough, not long afterwards he told me we were getting bubbles in our airlock once more. In fact it continued to increase over the next few hours, to the point where he had to take the airlock apart and put in a blow off tube instead. 48 hour later, the bubbling is still going and we've had krausen form, so we're pretty sure it's going to finish fermenting just fine. If this ever happens again, I'm sure we're going to make a starter right away instead of using it as a last resort.

Westvleteren 12

It's not the hardest in the world to come by, although getting a bottle isn't so easy.  Someone has to go to the monastery that the beer is brewed at and pick it up.  Thanks to the wonders of the internet, my fiance was able to pick up a bottle on ebay that she purchased from someone in Belgium.  It's also not the most expensive beer in the world, that title is generally given to Samuel Adams' Utopia, which originally retailed for $100 a bottle, but now goes for $400 or more.  However, it is generally considered to be THE best beer on the planet.  It's voted as #1 on both Rate Beer and Beer Advocate, which I think says quite a lot.  The fact that it's also somewhat attainable should be pretty exciting for beer lovers.  While you're likely to pay upwards of $20 a bottle, it's something that pretty much anyone can do at least once in their  life.

Like the 8, it comes in a fairly unassuming bottle, plain brown with no label.  The only markings it has are a ring in the glass neck of the bottle that simply says Trappistenbier, and a bottle cap marking it as the Trappist Westvleteren 12.  The beer is a Quadrupel, which is a strong Belgian style, usually in the 10% range.  It's also supposed to be stronger in flavor than either the Dubbel or Tripel.  I haven't had a lot of this style.  In fact I think the only other Quad I've tried was Ommegang's Three Philosophers, which as I recall I didn't enjoy all that much.

Pouring the bottle into the glass was a little whiff of Belgium.  The smell was fruity, of cherries, apple, and candied sugar.  Around the edges of the smell there's a bit of round hops that have just a bit of bite.  It's a fairly strong smell, but mainly sweet, with little bitterness present.  Underneath was just a touch of roast, but it's faint.

The beer poured a deep brown color, fairly cloudy, and with quite a bit of sediment in the bottom.  There's nearly a finger of yeast sediment at the bottom of the bottle, in large white flakes.  There's almost no head, just a slight dusting of off-white head.  The ring of bubbles around the edge of the glass left a touch of lacing.

The taste was initially of chocolate and fruit, with a good candy sweetness, but still some tartness in the mouth.  Towards the back of the tongue, a smooth hop bitterness took over.  The malty chocolate flavor sat just in the middle of the tongue.  I noticed just a hint of alcohol flavor as well, not nearly enough to indicate the 10.2+% that this beer contained.  The flavor was very strong though, absolutely filling the mouth, and leaving a fruity and bitter aftertaste for quite a while.

It's a very full bodied drink, absolutely thick and syrupy.  There's quite a bit of carbonation though, much more than I'd expect from such a thick beer.  It left a filmy coating on the teeth as well.  The beer warmed the throat going down, a much better indicator of how strong it is.

It's definitely a very good drink, and well worth getting your hands on one.  I didn't like it quite as much as the 8, but it's probably more a style preference than anything else.  I'm not sure exactly how old the bottle was, at least 4 months, and probably older.  It would be interesting to see how the flavors change between a fresh bottle and one that's aged.  I can see though why it's earned the reputation it has, although it's not the single greatest beer of my life, it's one that I thoroughly enjoyed, and am very glad to have experienced.

- Adam

We've Moved!

Well after discovering that there's already a blog called the Beer Odyssey, and talking it over with Dan, we decided to change the name of the blog.  We through around a few options and this is the one that stuck.  So from now on we'll be know as the Daily Dubbel.

No, we probably won't be updating daily.  It's just a fun beer related name.

What Makes a Beer?

Last night I was having a rather unusual brew, and it got me wondering what exactly it is that makes beer beer. Is it simply the presence of alcohol, hops, barley, water, and yeast? Is it some particular flavor profile? The process used to make it? Obviously I'm ruling non-alcohol beer out completely. That stuff is just nasty.

It gets a little tricky when dealing with a drink that's labeled as a beer and brewed like a beer, but really doesn't taste like one. Of course, there's a lot of different flavor ranges with beer, from watery to bitter and burnt tasting. There's a lot of room for variation from lagers to ales and hybrids. It just seems a bit unusual when you have a drink that's completely dominated by a particular flavor that really isn't very "beery". For instance, Samuel Adams Chocolate Bock. It's a wonderful drink that's very easy to get down, but when I had it I couldn't help but think to myself that it was more like drinking an alcoholic version of Yoo-hoo than an actual beer. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Anyway, feel free to leave your comments. What do you consider "beer" to be?

If your answer is Bud, Miller, Coors, or contains a variation on the word "light", go read a different blog.

Leipziger Gose

This beer had 2 things going for it right off the bat.  One, it came in a crazy bottle unlike anything I'd ever seen before.  In fact that was at lest 75% of the reason I decided to pick it up.  Second, the name reminded me of a word they always used in one of my favorite shows, Firefly.  I think it was a curse of some sort, but oh well.

There were a few things I didn't know about the beer going into drinking it that I wish I had known.  First, Gose is the style, not the name of the beer.  The beer is made with 50-60% wheat, and has coriander and salt added, making it one of the few styles of German beer that doesn't conform to Reinheitsgebot, the German beer purity law.  Because it's a region-specific traditional beer, it's allowed an exception to the law.

The beer was originally "spontaneously fermented" meaning that it didn't have yeast added to it, and the containers it was stored in were just left open to allow airborne yeast to enter and do their job.  The long neck on the bottle was to allow room for the fermentation, and the bottle would then be sealed by the leftover yeast as it dried out in the opening.  Obviously this bottle wasn't made the same way, but they use a top fermenting yeast now and lactic acid to get the same type of result, and it was sealed with a ceramic flip-top lid.

I found all this very interesting, and had I known it when I drank the beer, it would have drastically changed my expectations.

The aroma of wheat grass was fairly strong on the nose, but there were also hints of lemony citrus.  There's also a salty brine smell, and some spice.  It was a rather unusual combination of sweet and salty smells.

The beer poured a light golden color, and very cloudy.  I'm sure the yeast it was bottled with had something to do with that.  There was a signficant sized white head at first, which dissipated at a normal rate to leave a thin head.  Despite this, it didn't leave a lot of lacing on the glass.

The taste was dominated by wheat, but was also a bit on the thin side.  The saltiness stayed around the sides of the tongue, and I noticed a bit of a metallic quality to it.  The bitterness of this beer was extremely low, even finishing, and I noted that even though I don't like bitter beers, this was a bit weak tasting for me.  However, apparently the lack of hop presence is normal for this style.  There's no trace of alcohol in the flavor at all.  I thought it was similar, if not as flavorful, to Hoegaarden.  It's a bit tart, but not overwhelming and I really didn't notice the spice coming through in the flavor.

The mouthfeel was definitely on the light side, but that should be expected for a wheat beer.  It really wouldn't seem right for a beer with this light of a flavor to have a heavy body.  It's fairly well carbonated too, with nice prickly bubbles.  There's surprisingly a bit of a refreshing quality to it, and it wasn't overly dry.

It was definitely easy to get down, and pretty smooth too.  The flavor wasn't overwhelming by any means, though I now realize it wasn't supposed to be.  However, I did enjoy it.  I could see myself drinking it again... if it wasn't for the cost and scarcity of the beer.  The very cool looking 1 pint 9.4 oz bottle cost a whopping $14.99, making it one of the most expensive beers I've tried yet.  At least the bottle seems like it could be reused, so I might have to fill it with some of my own brew at some point.

- Adam

Learning experiences

This week has been a crazy learning experience when it comes to brewing.  We decided to bottle our Cherry Wheat in the same week that we transferred our stout to the secondary.  We ran into a number of problems with both.

Apparently chopped up fruit is small enough to get into the siphoning tube.  It's also small enough to get through the bottling wand.  Anyone seeing the problem yet?  It's not terribly bad, only a few pieces made it into the bottles.  Still, we like to keep thing light hearted, so we've named it the Chewy Cherry Wheat.  The advice we've been given is to put a nylon bag over the end of the siphon in the future so stuff can't get into the bottling bucket.

And the stout... it hasn't finished fermenting properly.  Our Munton's yeast apparently comes in a smaller quantity than other dry yeast packets, and has a tendency to give out early on fermentation.  Consequently, we had a beer that stopped fermenting while it was still only at about 2.6% alcohol.  So aside from spending way too much time reading everything I could find on yeast, we got some Nottingham yeast and yeast nutrient from our local home brew store, How Do You Brew?  It looks like it did some more fermentation after adding the additional yeast and nutrient, although we won't be able to check for a while to see if it's gotten anywhere close to where we need it to be.  I guess in the future we'll know to either use 2 packets of their yeast or make a starter first to build up the cell count.