Millions of Peaches, Peaches for me

First off, a big congratulations to Upland Brewing Company for their win at the Indiana Brewers Cup. They won pro brewer best in show for VynoSynth Red and they also won pro brewer of the year and the Grand Champion Brewer! Great job! Keep the sours coming!

According to the Presidents of the United States of America, peaches come from a can, but Upland Brewing Company in Bloomington, Indiana is proving that peaches can come in a bottle too. Upland makes a base lambic, and then age it in barrels. They have barrels that are more than a decade old sitting in their cellars. Each bottle of lambic that you drink is a blend of different aged barrels and fresh lambic to get the right level of sour determined by their head brewer, Caleb. That blend is then aged in a barrel with a whole lot of all natural fresh fruit. Upland is big on sustainability and sourcing locally for everything they can, so the fruit they use is important to them. Often though their sour lambics are so tart that its hard to find the fruit. I was pleased with the peach, not because it was a heavy peach flavor necessarily but because it did a good job of adding to the big sourness of the beer.

The Peach Lambic pours out a very light orange color with just a bit of haze and sediment and almost no head. All the lambic style beers by Upland are bottle conditioned with wild yeasts, so they have some floaties in the bottles. When pouring a beer like this, make sure you don’t pour the last inch or so out of your bottle. That lets you leave most the yeast and some of the heavier sediment in the bottom of the bottle instead of your glass. The beer has big, acidic-sour aromas with just a little bit of peach in there. The flavor follows it nicely. Huge tartness, and I mean huge. Upland makes these guys sour enough to take the enamel off your teeth, but in a good way. The fruit mellows the sour out just enough to make it incredibly enjoyable.

At this point I’ve had just about all the lambics that Upland makes and the Peach is by far my favorite. The hints of sweet peach fruit flavor compliment the sourness of the lambic so well. I encourage you to get your hands on any of these sours— this one most of all— but sour newbies beware.

I give it a 5 out of 5

Recently, Upland formed the Secret Barrel Society (SBS), a reserve club that gives members better access to these amazing beers. Members are helping the brewery ramp up their sour program and add more barrels of this amazing beer to their warehouse, so in the future bottles can be on shelves throughout Indiana. If you’re interested check out their website to learn more about the SBS.

Oudbeitje, You betcha!

I've put a lot of sour things in my mouth.

For example, in summer camp as young lads, we would spend all our money at the canteen on sour warheads and see who could hold the most in their mouth without spitting them out, crying, or suffering from acute organ failure.  Despite burning off the lining of my cheeks and rendering all camp food tasteless (which was for the better), I still have an affinity for sour things.  Chocolate bars are great, but my preferred candy boon are sweet tarts and their ilk.

With the previous anecdote illuminated, it should be no surprise that from my first taste of a lambic, there has always been a special place in my heart and digestive lining for sour beers.  Ironically, I picked this up right after Prof. Beer and I had a discussion about how he feels like a more sour beer is just over the horizon and nothing really has accepted the challenge of his ambitious palate.  Literally twenty-four hours later and boom, this little unassuming and hard to pronounce strawberry lambic (or aardbeinenlambiek) is staring back at me from crowded Dutch style shelves, whispering soured black magic and making my poor, scarred cheek lining glisten with anticipation.

Have you ever been punched in the face?  It really sucks the first time, but after that, it's never as bad as the first time.  That is until you met Mike Tyson and he left you with a shattered jaw and negative three teeth.  I processed Prof. Beer's words as I poured out this strawberry blonde ale.  I smelled its acidic barnyard nose with strawberry buried deep, and I was excited to pucker and smack, but then all thought was washed away in what felt like a tidal wave made of fireworks, if those fireworks were made from the boot of every all-powerful god that smote men like ants.  So yeah, Mike Tyson.

This deceptive strawberry lambic sounds unassuming, but is one of the more powerful lambics I've had.  This is not for the sour faint of heart.  The strawberry is buried deep in the grassy lemon peel/apple vinegar, very similar to Upland's strawberry lambic.  I served it chilled.  You should definitely serve it chilled.  As it warmed up, the flavors opened up, including the sour funk.  Don't get me wrong, I am in love with all these things, but this is sipped, not thrown down like the girlishness attached to its strawberry moniker would make it seem.  I suggest breaking out the champagne flutes with some friends on this one.  Quality, not quantity.

Summer camp taught me a lot about extreme tastes, hazing, and dehydration, which are all things that have helped me survive my career as a formidable drinker, which is exactly how I would describe Hanssen's Artisinal Oudbeitje.  Formidable.

I puckered up and gave it a 4 out 5 heads

Upland Brewing Co. Strawberry Lambic

Within the craft beer community, locally and nationwide, Upland and its head brewer Caleb Staton, have been getting recognition for their growing sour program. With each release the number of people trying to obtain one of these rare bottles increases dramatically, leading to some gaming of the release system that Upland currently employs. Upland chooses, for better or worse, to use a lottery system where the person picking up their single bottle* need only show a drivers license with the winner's name on it- this means anyone (this means you lambic lovers in Alaska!) with an ID and a photocopier could win and receive their bottle provided they could a) go to one of the Upland taprooms or b) find some generous soul to pick-up and ship the bottle to the them (aka muling). At times this tends to cause a lot of grumbling among the Indiana craft beer fans who happen to lose the lottery, but I digress.

*Single bottle? Ha, their were stories of people picking up 40+ bottles at a time for "friends and family"... because who's grandma doesn't love tums-inducing liquified sweet tarts in a bottle?

Mmmm pink dregs!

Now that all the frenzy of the Upland Sour lottery/muling/pick-up has subsided, it's time to actually enjoy these beers! And enjoy them now you should! In talking to people close to Caleb, he has brewed these beers in a way that they are intended to Drink Fresh. Okay… seriously on to the beer. So what do we have exactly? According to the bottle: "Upland Lambics are fermented by wild yeast and aged in oak casks for a year… we then add whole strawberries from Huber Orchard in Starlight, Indiana…" 

I've heard stories of gushers on this release (be patient and properly chill your beer people), but nothing like that here as the cork comes off with a satisfying pop. It pours a murky, nearly opaque, pink with tinges of orange around the edges. Some light pink head with a vigorous pour (picture shows the last of the bottle and has some dregs), and forgiving the murkiness this is a very pretty looking beer. Aroma is very bright and fruity as one would expect, with notes of wild strawberries, lemon, green apple, and some general funkiness. The flavor mimics the nose, but the funk and strawberries takeover with additional notes of lacto and oak, before finishing with some sharp (but not unpleasant) acetic acid on the tip of the tongue. The mouthfeel starts off light and full of prickly carbonation, but the beer gets fuller because it's so damn sour that you're mouth starts producing a bunch of saliva. Once you get past the swallow the beer finishes dry.

Upland takes great pride in its sour program and this is a fine example. Imagine a strawberry sweet tart without all the artificial crap and that's a good place to start describing this beer. Very sour, but you still get the strawberries and some oakiness from those casks. It's difficult to rate beers like this in a vacuum because of the cost and effort involved to obtain, but I would still give this a solid 3.5/5 

I Heart Deesko

When it comes to beer, Germany is THE WORST, aber ich lieben sie immer noch*

The Berliner Weisse style typifies the discombobulation that is contemporary German beer culture.  As made evident by previous posts of German brews, I have made an effort to connect with brewing, drinking, and my own personal heritage. I have been doing a lot of digging into the beer of my mother country, since a cultural bastard has to pick which parent he spends Christmas with, right?  I had this utopian idea of German beer.  German styles are a part of American beer vernacular, but in Germany, the Lager Revolution in the early 1800's killed 99% of German styles.  The US and Germany suffer from the same problem, massive overcapacity has led to a cut throat supermarket beer industry where the cheapest beer wins.  I could go on and on about the ills plaguing the modern German beer culture, but there is one major difference that leads to my frustration: Germany hasn't had a mircobrew revolution...yet.

Germany has about 1200 breweries in a country with the same land mass as Montana.  There is only ONE brewery that brews and bottles the Berliner Weisse syle of beer.  ONE.  Yes, Berliner Weisse is like Trappist ale and Kölsch in that it is protected by the AOC and can only legally be brewed in Berlin, but Berlin is not a small place.  I need both hands to count on where I can locally find a Berliner Weisse.  There's always been discussion about the pedestal of quality German beers sit on.  The Reinheitsgebot and an inflated sense of importance have led to a severe lack of introspection.  It is unfathomable to think that Americans have helped unearth Germany's mythical old styles and brought them to the forefront of the US beer culture.

So here enters the American brewery, Three Floyd's, with their Berliner Weisse, I <3 Deesko.  Traditionally, Berliner Weissse is served with a shot of raspberry syrup (ein Rotes), a shot of woodruff syrup (ein Grünes), or any other flavored syrup (mit Schuss).  At their brewery, Three Floyd's carries on this tradition as well, a tradition that is definitely warranted.

This "sour" is not for the uninitiated.  I personally would not call Berliner Weisse a sour.  It is a tart ale, but a sour, ehh debatable.  Napolean called it the "champagne of the north."  He also said, "Woman are nothing but machines for producing children," so take his word at face value.  I <3 Deesko took the tart aspect and ran with it, stripping this yeasty Weisse away of it's fruit and effervescence into a death metal scream of sour punch.

Which I am definitely okay with.

The strong sour and apple vinegar, lemon peel notes from this brew push it more to the Gueuze Lambic side of tart beers (See my previous post about those delicious Belgian Sours).  That and it smelled like a sweaty hobo, to which Professor Beer responded with, "You have experience in that?"...maybe, but nose, mouthfeel, and clairty aside, the yaup of the sour beast of pestilence and doom turned this light summer beer to 11.

Which, again, I am definitely okay with.

With "Freigeist Bierkultur (Free spirit Beer Culture)" bucking the Reinheitsgebot and pulling pages from their Belgian neighbors and American beer anarchy, there is momentum.  For the new wave of German brewers to be successful, they face the same problems independent brewers did by convincing consumers that premium beers are worth the extra cost, as well as dealing with, or working with competition from the traditional Brauhaus and nano-breweries that litter Fanconia and communities throughout Germany.

If I were to rate this as a Berliner Weisse, I would give it a 2, but as an American Sour, I would totally make this the 4th Horseman of the Sourpocalypse

*Caveat: I realize this statement and some of the tone makes me sound like an elitist asshole.  Some of which I will own up to and some may be do to slight hyperbole as part of my narrative and sardonic wit.  I don't dislike Germans or their beer history to which most of the world stands on, its just that the punk in me is just frustrated that a country with such a rich history of brewing is stymied the same way Americans are.  I don't want to alienate German readers, but put down that Beck's and let's talk this out, brah.

The Big Guy: Damn I love this beer. El Duque said a lot... so DAMN I LOVE THIS BEER. Probably going to get into my favorites of the year.








Professor Beer:  Unfortunately I wasn't able to catch this beer on tap at Three Floyds (with the syrups), but I was able to grab a few bottles.  To me it tasted more like a traditional sour than a Berliner Weisse, but either way it was great.

The Scene: Midwest Sour Wild Funk Fest 2013 Tickets

Guess what...  Tickets hit the digital shelves at 12 midnight yesterday/this morning.

VIP disappeared like a fat kid with a piece of chocolate cake.  It was about as bad at trying to snag ANY ticket for Dark Lord Day (don't even get me started on that...).  All gone within the first few seconds of live ticket sales.

As of writing this General Admission ($45) and Designated Driver ($20) tickets are still available.

/sigh Guess I will have to wait till next year to get VIP.  I was really looking forward to the presentation, discussion, and tasting with Uplands Head Brewer, Caleb Staton.  I am a huge fan of his work.  Getting the history and process of brewing from "The Man" himself would have been AWESOME!  Hope to see you there!

The Scene: "Dude... Where's my Lambic?" Upland Lambic Spring Cleaning

This past Saturday was a bit of fun brought to you by your local Upland Beer Brewery and Tap house.  They not only found their car, but also found a few cases of their precious limited release Lambics in the trunk!

 Raspberry, Blackberry and Gilgamesh were the assortment of flavors up for grabs Saturday at noon.  Granted we got there at 11am and almost didn't end up with anything for our troubles.  Tickets were given out and rules stated plainly in the twitter feeds, blog posts, facebook, and once you received your ticket to ride.

Hi-jinks were had.  Brews were enjoyed.  Random conversations about Hopquila, HopHead Vodka and ReThinker Mead where discussed.  Yes... they are a real thing! Ticket 39 I hope to bump into you again to snag your recipe on how to really enjoy the HopHead Vodka with your favorite IPA.

Ticket number 43 got me one Raspberry Lambic.  If i had shown up at the crack of dawn with the crew in tow I could have also snagged a Gilgamesh or a Blackberry to go with it (shakes fist at ticket holder 32).  Rules is rules.

What are some of your favorite Lambics/Sours?  Are you going to show up at this year's Sour Wild Funk Fest?

Links to Last Years Sour Wild Funk Fest:

http://uplandsourfest.com/

http://uplandbeer.com/eat-n-drink/events/calendar/sour-wild-funk-fest/