North Coast Merle Saison

[phrieken2]

all I have to say is wow. the sour in this beer is great, doesn't cover up the esters provided by the yeast and lends a slight pucker and complexity to the taste. I highly recommend and will likely try to culture the bugs out of my next bottle and pitch them into the fermenter on my next saison. Finishes a little sweeter than I expected, but the sour more than makes up for this. Also don't know the age of the bottle, so the finish might be drier if it's allowed to get some more age on it. It also isn't clear as a bell either, makes me think the bugs are still in suspension and still working slowly but surely. Pick yourself up a bottle!

[snafui]

I agree, I'm a huge North Coast freak and this beer is great. I recently did an "American Saison" flight where I picked up some of this, some Victory saison, and Southern Tier's Cherry Saison and sampled them side by side. Le Merle was clearly the winner, it had a drier finish than the others and wonderful esters. The Victory and ST finished very sweet and just paled in comparison.
I later did a flight of Le Merle, Dupont Saison, and Dupont Avril. Sadly, as much as I adore North Coast, I preferred both by Dupont. Dupont was just so dry and balanced and flavorful, even the Avril weighing in at 3.5% ABV was delicious. I mean its hard to beat Dupont in the Saison department right?

(PranQster rules!)

So anyway, I've been on a kick with flights of saisons lately and really want to do some more with Dupont and Le Merle in the flight but compared to a bunch of other ones as well, it's been a wonderful experience so far and I have a lot of admiration for the NC brewers.

[Dubba_Brew]

I'm with you guys... I'm a big fan of the Le Merle. Just went to a Beer Fest this past weekend and all I really wanted to try was every saison that I could get my hands on. Love the Hennepin (right now, my favorite saison). Brought back a bottle of North Coast anniversary ale from a trip this summer - great farmhouse!! Very tasty. Got a bottle of the Ommegedon waiting on my shelf (Funkhouse ale) - the brett should be going strong in that one by now.

Got to try an interesting saison from a local brewery Voodoo Brewery, called White Magick. They use something like 12 different types of peppercorns in their saison. I was surprised how good it was. Not great, but still pretty damn good.

my 2 cents.

(PranQster rules!)

+1 on that!!

[Mylo]

Ommegedon rocks. Awesome beer. Let that one age at room temp for another year...


Mylo

[Dubba_Brew]

Ommegedon rocks. Awesome beer. Let that one age at room temp for another year...

I've been sitting on that one for about 4 or 5 months now. I'm gettin' itchy about it. The first one I had didn't have a ton of brett character (still very tasty), so I've been holding off on this one to let that brett really eat as much sugar as it can (not that there's a ton of sugar left in a saison). I'm thinking that's going to be one for the holidays.