Wednesday beer — Saison Dupont (with a little nod to Orval)

Dupont’s bottling line when I visited
the brewery in the autumn of 2009

I had an Orval at the weekend and as soon as I smelt it in the glass, the words ‘This is Belgium’ crash-landed amongst my thoughts; for me the aromatics of orange peel and that rusticity you often find out in the country on approaching a farm were Belgium. You can get that with quite a few key beers, which immediately remind you of their home country; Pilsner Urquell and Schneider Weisse. 

Last weekend, I also had a bottle of Saison Dupont and the same crash bang wallop of word association trampled through the undergrowth of my mind. I just loved the austereness on the palate, the flintiness, the herbal-like spice, the restraint on sweetness, the champagne-like effervescence and the quick dry and spicy finish. This was Belgium (or Wallonia if you want be pedantic and someone undoubtedly will be) and even though I was in Exeter I knew one of the first places I will be visiting when I travel again will be Flanders and Wallonia. 

I visited the brewery as well as Cazeau for an article on saison that was my first ever commissioned article from All About Beer — if you are so inclined you can read it here.  

On a visit to a brewery

The space/place/location is where we imagine ourselves living; imagine ourselves being part of, imagine how each morning we will look out of the window and reimagine how the day will go — the aroma of the wood smoke awakens within memories of a place that we didn’t really visit, but we feel that somewhere in our lives we were there. We mourned for the dog hit by the car, we scowled at the cat and imagined its role in our lives; we drank the beer our employees, whose names we know, but whose names we don’t really know, make, the beers that they package, the recipes they devise; we belonged and yet we didn’t. The land across which we looked towards the small white-washed chapel is not ours, the land in which the brewery is placed is not ours, but yet we feel for that one sparkling sunny Monday morning that we are part of it. We drink the saison, the dubbel, the farmhouse IPA, the wood-aged noir and we know and bask in the nuances and nourishment of the beer inside these sturdy bottles. We feel and field the flinty vinous notes, the shades of vanilla and coconut, the bitterness and the dryness and chocolate and coffee and dried fruit and wood and we grasp the nature of this brewery to which we feel for that brief morning in the middle of Ohio we felt we belonged to (and as we leave the brewery a fleet of empty yellow school buses trail along the road going from who knows where to god knows where, it was that kind of morning). 

God knows when I first drank a saison

God knows when I first drank a saison, sometime in the early 1990s perhaps, maybe after reading Michael Jackson and thinking that the beer he described was rather interesting; at the time I was drinking wine (as well as beer) and also thinking about the wine I was drinking and I wanted to do the same with beer.

The first beers I really thought about were Bavarian Weizen (back in 1988 they were a revelation and I can still pour a bottle into a glass super quick as was shown to me by a barman in an Eindhoven pub then), but Belgium followed — there was a deli in Stoke Newington in 1992, which is where I then lived, that sold Delirium Tremens, and of course there was Belgo, whose Camden branch was very close to where I worked.

In 2005 I co-organised a British Guild of Beer Writers trip to Wallonia that included visits to Silly, Lefebvre, Du Bocq and Cantillon (my second, I was first there in 1996). I do remember being excited about Silly Saison but several years later when I wrote a piece on saison for All AboutBeer I thought it had become much sweeter. 

On the other hand, saison as a beer style/variety/expression was starting to really dig away at me. What on earth was a saison? And when I wrote my AAB piece I contacted Garrett Oliver who came back with the following quote: ‘In my mind, there are really only a few things truly required of a saison. It must be dry – residual sugar would have a considerable effect on the beer’s ability to keep through the summer. They should also be fairly hoppy. Moderate alcohol, 5- 7%, would make them strong enough to last for a while, but not so strong that they’d stun the farm workers who drank it. So perhaps it is not a style that lends itself to orthodoxy, but rather one that originally existed to answer a question – “what can I brew that’s nutritious, refreshing, tasty, and will last for at least a year in the cellar?”’

So with that in mind I tasted Firewitch from Cheddar Ales, a brewery more known for their solid cask beers and when I got a press release and the offer of a bottle I was interested to try it. As soon as I popped the cap I could smell Soriachi Ace; it dominated the nose, a sort of soft, meringue lemon, dank hop sack character, and then it was followed by a soft lemony and bittersweet and flinty and bitter and spicy template of flavours on the palate, a billowing of flavours with a high dry finish — a modern saison indeed and I must say that it’s rather good.

A heady stroll on a blustery clifftop

First bottled beer from Burning Sky is a beautiful beer, a ramped up version of the brewery’s saison, called Saison à la Provision, which is then aged in white wine barrels, now that’s the kind of thing I like, something that’s a bit different, something that’s not mild and bitter or stout and porter or a lot of hops chucked into a boil because they’ve travelled a long way across the oceans or the introspection of crystal that makes whatever beer that’s newly launched different apparently (not that I dislike those kinds of beers, apart from the ones where crystal keens its deep mellow moan, but I just want something different something that takes my palate out for a heady stroll on a blustery clifftop where the wind booms and the sea churns), and yes this was sent to me, for the purpose of entry in a book out later in the year and thankfully it’s a beautiful beer, did I mention that already, and I drank it at the weekend, pleased as the proverbial punch with its juicy, voluptuous, Seville cathedral-like mouthfeel, as if the beer was taking up every corner and every angle and every space of my palate, spreading its acidity, its citrus fruit, its restrained sweetness, its quenching character, its moussec-like carbonation, its gentle not-up-the-nose carbonation, and if I really want to split hairs about it, I would say that this for me is closer to a gueuze than a lean and austere saison, maybe the wine barrels have added that body I associate with a gueuze, but it’s still a beautiful beer, the memory of which is still haunting me several days after I drank it.

Burning Sky gets its timing right

Mark Tranter

Morning has broken in the East Sussex village of Firle and at the brewery Burning Sky the working day has began. The bells in the flint-faced church opposite sound the hour and the muffled clang of metal casks banging together beyond the wooden doors of the brewery entrance reach out as if in friendly response. Brewer Mark Tranter looks at the clock as if to confirm where he is at this stage of the day. It’s time to go to work.

Time, indeed. Time will be the fifth ingredient (or the fifth element if you will) in the beers produced by Tranter’s new brewery Burning Sky. Within the old barn with its brand new concrete floor, assemblage of shiny stainless steel vessels and a boiler whose tuneless humming puts me in mind of an elderly guy who’s a regular in my local, there is also a quartet of 2500-litre oak barrels. Two of them sit on their side, formerly filled with red wine, while the other two, upright, pot-bellied, are newly made; medium toast French oak I’m told. A further 16 225-litre wooden barrels gather in the corner, with another four on order. Someday soon these barrels will hold plenty of beer that will sleep the sleep of the just.

‘These barrels are a statement of my intent,’ says Tranter, who made his name as the head brewer at Dark Star, the creator of beers such as Hophead and Revelation, a former home brewer who started working with Dark Star’s founder Rob Jones in the 1990s (there’s an irony that Tranter’s current assistant Tom is also a home brewer — the wheel turns full circle).

‘I was proud of the part I played in what I achieved,’ he says of his time at Dark Star. ‘It was a real wrench to leave, but one of the reasons for getting out was that I didn’t want to look back and regret not doing things. I had an itch I wanted to scratch. I also wanted to do this brewery properly and didn’t want to sit in a van dropping a nine here and there. I wanted a decent sized brewery (this is 15 barrels) and everything has to be good.’

He left Dark Star in the spring, went over to the States and then having secured the building, undertook the alterations and got hold of the kit, the first brew was at the end of September. Three cask beers are regularly brewed: Plateau is a 3.5% pale winsome beer that is juicy and fruity (mandarin, peach, pineapple, hop sack pungency) and finishes with a dusty, dry bitterness; Aurora is 5.6% and is, as Tranter insists, ‘a strong pale ale not an IPA’ — it has a Cointreau-like orange character, a husky dryness that demands another taste and a slate-like dryness in the finish; finally, there’s the 7% IPA Devil’s Rest, which is almost red in colour and has a fragrant cherry/cedar nose (with a hint of amaretto), a nutty, stone-like centre, sensuous citrus and ferocious dry finish. This is a rugged IPA, Mount Rushmore with stubble perhaps.

And then we come to time, Tranter’s fifth element, fifth ingredient, burning passion perhaps. He’s always been interested in what breweries outside these isles do, there’s a restlessness about his creativity, which I recall from a trip we made to several small Czech breweries a couple of years ago. Then I recall the first time I tasted Dark Star’s exciting, extravagant Tripel, a gorgeous beer that possessed the fatness and ringing, chiming, jellied fruitiness of some of the tripels I’ve had in Belgium. Then there’s saison of which he is a devotee.

Burning Sky currently brews two saisons. At the moment there is Saison l’automne, a beer for this time of the year, complex, dry and spicy, and a reflection of what is available in the hedgerows of Sussex. For this beer, Tranter collected a load of rosehips and after steeping them in boiling water added the juice to the fermenting beer. ‘I love saisons and I love the countryside,’ he says, ‘this saison’s base recipe will remain the same all the year round but its seasonal ingredients will change. I had this idea that my seasonal saisons would reflect the seasons and whatever was in season at the time would be added to the beer.’ Saison l’hiver will feature hawthorns.

Then there is a Saison à la Provision, which is a different beast altogether. Though it has the same recipe as l’automne (lager malt, spelt, wheat, carahell, East Kent Goldings, Saaz, Styrian Goldings and Soriachi Ace), it’s accordingly amped up to 6.5%, has no rosehips or anything from the hedgerows but instead Brettanomyces and Lactobacillus are added towards the end of fermentation. The glass I drunk in the fabulous Snowdrop Inn in Lewes was hazy orange in colour, with a leathery, lemony, bitter, orange, dry, bracing character while the large long dry finish reminded me of one of those long endless runs that I seem to vaguely remember on Ski Sunday. I drunk it with the ferocity of a wolf coming down on the fold — I wouldn’t mind a barrel of this permanently on tap at home. It’s also a magnificent food beer, being a wonderful companion to the Snowdrop’s magnificent battered gurnard and chips.   

This would be the last time I drink it this way. On the following morning when I was at the brewery, Tranter was brewing the Provision and from now on it would be transferred to one of the 2500-litre oak barrels, and time would take over for the next two to three months. There will also be a 6% stout that will go into wood and a Flemish Red Ale, which Tranter reckons will need 18 months in wood.

There is a calm concentration about the way Tranter is going about his business. He can do the PR with meet the brewer nights and getting writers to visit his brewery but he’s not going to be using the word awesome any time soon. He’s a brewer first and foremost, inclined to the creative side of making beer but hasn’t forgotten that brewing is also a business. ‘Yes I’m nervous about it all,’ he says, ‘there’s a lot riding on what I am doing — what if it doesn’t work out, people have been kind, but if it doesn’t work out, what is there?’

I don’t think he has to worry. On the basis of the beers I’ve tasted and the skill and invention of the brewer I think Burning Sky is here to stay — after all it’s got time on its side.

a statement of intent

Three-C’Son — my Brains Saison

Three weeks ago I went over to Brains in Cardiff to brew a saison as part of their continental beer challenge, which has seen a group of writers swap laptops for lauter tuns and come up with a beer with its roots in the European mainland. I immediately decided that I wanted to do a saison, a pale golden one albeit with a  rigorous transfusion of American hops. We choose Centennial, Columbus and Citra, hence the name. On Sunday I was able to taste a couple of bottles of the beer and found it rather delicious, especially when paired with an aged, blue-veined Cheddar from Green’s of Glastonbury. It is pale and hazy in the glass, almost like a sunset seen through the filter of a disintegrating summer’s day, perhaps with the promise of something less benevolent to follow on the morrow. A sweet-sour nose, led by a snappy green apple note (plus a hint of fresh ripe peachiness); on the palate there is green apple snappiness, medium sweetness, a hint of white pepper and some fatness from the alcohol. The carbonation is sprightly with a moussec-like mouthfeel, while the finish has a initial light sweetness that is followed by an good dry finish. I loved it and am looking forward to trying it on keg at my local pub in the next couple of weeks. I like these brewing awaydays — I like the idea of suggesting various malt and hop combinations, I like the idea of trying to play with beer styles. It doesn’t make me a brewer anymore than the time I went up in a Hercules made me a pilot, but it all adds to the richness of life and given that 30 years ago you would have been hard-pressed to discover the ABV of most beers, never mind suggest that a major family brewery make a beer based on your own ideas, demonstrates how things have so changed for the better.

   

At Brains, or enjoying a brief holiday in other people’s working lives

Three Cs being added to an FV

It was Thursday morning at Brains, and I was helping to brew a saison on the brewery’s pilot brewery, which, as I tasted later on at the Great Welsh Beer Festival, has produced some gorgeous beers including Coopers Reserve, a 10% barrel aged beer that has so much depth I half expected to find the Titanic at the bottom of the glass. You can see me talk about it here.

The grist was pretty simple — lager malt and wheat, which means that it should be light in colour and hopefully slightly hazy. No spices were used but three hops — Centennial, Citra and Columbus — were added throughout the process with a handful going into the FV. With the aid of Brains’ head brewer Bill Dobson, I wanted to get the flinty, spicy, near-austere character of a saison (we used saison yeast), but also wanted to give it a bit of an aromatic kick. From what I remember I think it’s going to have over three weeks of fermenting and lagering before it goes out into the world. Oh and it’s called Three-Cs-son. If you try it I would like to know what you think.

My time as a journalist has always seen me parachute into other people’s working situations. I have been out with the oyster fishermen of Falmouth, gone up in the air on a Hercules for a piece on female RAF pilots and been backstage with a band about to go on at the Albert Hall. It is the same with brewing when you become very briefly part of a team, though I always know that I wouldn’t last two minutes in reality (I have a chemistry and general science deficit). For a moment though, on a morning like the one I had in Brains there is a sense of a different path I could have taken. But on the other hand I think it’s the fact of this holiday taken in other people’s lives that I have always enjoyed in journalism.

Philosophical musings over I went along with Bill and a couple of lads from the production team to the Great Welsh Beer Festival and enjoyed beers from Brains, Otley and clean sweepers Tiny Rebel. What did I learn? Not to drink a 10% Belgian Pale like it was cola and then run to catch my train.

Bermondsey saison country

Bermondsey is hardly saison country, and by that I mean the province of Hainault in Wallonia:  a landscape of flat fields upon which cattle graze and stalks of ripening corn and sheaves of wheat wave in the gentle breeze. Farmhouses dot this sylvan landscape, places where farm-workers once gathered in the hay, working up a thirst, which a bottle or two of home-brewed saison would quench. I’m in Bermondsey, Druid’s Road. Railway arches, which upon one there’s a plaque to the victims of a direct hit from a Blitz bomb, the rumble and tumble of noise that marks the passage of a train, the waspish buzz of traffic from the Tower Bridge Road; patches of builders in high-vis vests banging and clanging as the city’s landscape continues on its never-ending cycle of change. Saison country? But within the brick-built cave of an arch I try one of the best saisons I have ever had. At Kernel brewery I am, a brief visit, my curiosity piqued by what drives one of the best breweries about and also in connection with a feature I’m writing. Inside and under the arch, a jumble of equipment: the brewing kit here, the open fermenters there, bottles, kegs, brewing schedules hanging on the wall, the whole paraphernalia of making beer. Brewery founder Evin O’Riordin is not about so Nate shows me around, a brief tour and then ‘would you like to try a couple of beers?’. Yes please. First up the Export Stout, kegged, a magnificent wraparound taste sensation of espresso, roast coffee beans, milk chocolate, juicy fruit and dry cereal graininess. Then would I like to try the saison?  Yes please. I love saison, I love the fact that it’s a moveable feast, a beer that changes with breweries; it has its sense of place but this, like its flavour and character, is also a movable feast. I have enjoyed saisons from Pennsylvania, New York State, Vermont, Flanders, the south coast and South Wales (as well as Wallonia) and now I hope I will enjoy one from south London. Kernel Saison is 7.2% and dark coral in colour, orange with gold highlights. Its nose is austere and flinty with tightly laced bitter lemon notes. The palate is dry and tart, sprinkled with orange, peach and tangerine notes with an undertone of pepperiness that discourages the fruitiness from toppling over into a blowsy old caricature. Amarillo is the hop at the start with Mount Hood at the finish. No sugar or spices either, though that’s not something that’s discounted for further expressions says Nate. It’s a beautiful beer and I can close my eyes and be in saison country for a moment before the rhythms of the city reel me back in. Bermondsey: saison country. 

Otley’s Saison Obscura — launched on Friday

Name of the beer is Saison Obscura, the one I brewed in the company of Otley a few weeks ago. Launching it, Nick Otley and I are going on a pub crawl on Friday, starting at 3pm in the White Horse, 5pm at Cask Pub and Kitchen, 7pm at the Rake (where I also hope to try Glyn’s Motley Brew, I think it’s called, didn’t know he was a closet glam metaller) and 9pm at the Southampton Arms, Kentish Town. Please come along and join us. The genesis of all this comes from the British Guild of Beer Writers do at Brewwharf last summer where I cheekily asked Nick if I could come and brew. I suggested a saison and the idea developed from there. 

What we have come up with is a dark saison, which I tasted at the start of the month at the Bunch of Grapes, the brewery’s murderously magnificent pub in Ponty. I found it had a flinty, lemony nose (sweetshop lemons was the phrase in my notebook) trending towards sherbert; it was bittersharp and snappy on the palate, with a whisper of orange (there’s dried Curacao orange peel in the mix) while the alcoholic strength of 5.5% gives it some weight; oh and there’s a black pepper catch at the back of the throat. I really loved it and was really over the moon (home brewing was never a strength of mine, I flunked both chemistry and physics, I don’t have a scientific bone in my body). Matt at the brewery really pushed me on the brew: I thought it would be a case of saying try this, try that and let them do the work. But no I had to suggest the percentages of different malts (5 plus wheat malt) and hops (3); and as well as the orange peel black pepper was added. We talked about fermentation and maturation as well (this has given me the bug for brewing, so if anyone would like to do a rye mild …). If you’re around please come and join us, tell us what you think, whether it’s bad or good, and let’s just talk saison. For instance, should it be dark? On that point I can point to three people whose opinions I value.

Steven Pauwels at Boulevard Brewery (with whom the godlike Jean-Marie Rock at Orval did a collaborative beer some time ago, an imperial Pilsner I seem to remember, I was shown the empty bottle): ‘Saison beers are the perfect “trash can style” for brewers that experiment with Belgian beers. There are no rules, yet everybody has an idea of what the beer should taste like.’

Phil Markowski at Southampton Brewery and author of the fascinating Farmhouse Ales: ‘That's the 10 million dollar question, what is a “real” saison. You could argue it is a special brew (perhaps brewed on a farm but how many are actually still brewed on farms, any?) made for a particular season, perhaps with ingredients that echo a particular time of year. They are hard to define and that is essentially the point. Saison is loose, full of individual expression, the “anti-style” beer style.’

Garrett Oliver at Brooklyn: ‘Modern saisons are pale, but I think we must assume that many were relatively dark and even possibly smoky until the mid-1700s at least. So perhaps it is not a style that lends itself to orthodoxy, but rather one that originally existed to answer a question – “what can I brew that’s nutritious, refreshing, tasty, and will last for at least a year in the cellar?”’

Here are my thoughts on saison in general, a beer I have always enjoyed, at AAB.

So whatever goes seems to be the thing with saison, hence Saison Obscura — and if you can manage it I do hope you can join me and Nick for one on Friday (it’ll also be on at the Bunch of Grapes that night). Oh, Nick and I will also be Facebooking and Tweeting about the beer during the crawl using the hashtag #saisonobscura, whatever a hashtag is — and I might even try a live blog. Oh and that picture is ’Arry from Otley, their young Italian brewer who is totally passionate about beer and brewing, now where have I come across that before…

Otley Otley Otley. Oi Oi Oi.

Couple of weeks ago, I fetched up in Pontypool Pontypridd, at the Otley Brewery to try the dark saison I helped to brew a few weeks before. It really met my expectations — a flinty, lemony nose, sweetshop lemons even with a trend towards sherbert; sharp, bittersharp and snappy on the palate, some orange peel, and a black pepper catch at the back of the throat. I loved it and I felt myself and brewer Matt had created a little bit of Wallonia in Wales. We also tried four different bottled versions that had been dried hopped: the citra gave it a pungent lemony nose, it was a bit too sweaty, sort of changing room after a few games of squash; the soriachi ace didn’t work either; hallertau gave it a Pils-like nose and it was dry on the palate with a slight pepperiness on the finish; while Columbus muted the beer. Just a little experiment but good fun all the same. The beer, which still hasn’t a name (I like Saison Obscura), will be launched in London on March 25 when Nick Otley and myself will be hitting the bars where the beer is on sale and talking about it and tasting it with anyone who’s interested — naturally we will be tweeting and blogging our way around so you can find out where we’ll be. So far we have the Rake, Southampton Arms, White Horse and Cask involved — it should be fun. Oh and while I’m on the subject of Otley my review of their marvelous Bunch of Grapes is in today’s DT and you can read it here.

Making beer

Lunchtime at Otley Brewery and I would hazard a guess that a similar scene to what is happening here might be seen and heard at hundreds of breweries up and down the land at the same time. The boil rolling to its natural end, an FV being made ready to welcome the new brew — washing, cleaning, waiting, washing, cleaning, waiting, the clanging of metal kegs, a ringing metallic sound as keystones are banged in, radio on (Radio 1 in this instance, what an education for a Radio 3 listener it is), the swish of water from a high-powered hose outside as a cask is dowsed and washed and made ready for its next journey. This is the hour when the labour of the day starts surging to its climax; the time when the 8.30am start spent discussing malt varieties and how they would work together comes to its glorious fruition. And then it’s here, the time, the FV is full, I get off the cask I was sitting on whilst watching the others work and the beer that I have collaborated on with Otley Brewery has gushed its way into the fermenting vessel, while the yeast stands by. Up the step I go, bucket in hand and into the FV goes a stream of liquid, ready to run amok amongst the innocent malt sugars all relaxing after their rigorous 90 minute boil. This all makes me think that although the making of beer on the outside is a mechanised process, what happens in miniature in the boil is where the magic, the transformative process, takes place; it’s almost as if there’s a big bang, the formation of a universe, the creation of planetary systems, all happening in the roiling, angry bull of the boil — and that’s all before fermentation has started, with its own sleight of hand, now you see me now you don’t brand of magic.

And the beer that I hope will emerge in a couple of weeks?

It’s a dark saison, for after all saison is one of those beer styles that are a moveable feast. No names yet, some ideas, but nothing set in stone. We used lager malt for the base with the rest of the grain bill being black malt, Munich malt, caragold and a pinch of crystal (plus of course some wheat for head retention). Hops are Goldings for bittering, while I plumped for Sorachi Ace and Columbus for the late hops; black pepper and Curacao orange were also added. The intention was to make a dark beer that wouldn’t have roasted notes (we drank Steel City’s black IPA Shadowplay at the magnificent Bunch of Grapes on the previous night for inspiration on how to avoid that very thing) and having tasted the wort I think we might have succeeded. Now it’s up to the yeast, a Weisse one, to do its work. I look forward to trying it and will be posting regular updates on the beer’s progress.

Cornish saison

When I was writing a piece on Wallonian saisons last year I asked Garrett Oliver what his interpretation of a saison was, given that in his magnificent Brewmaster’s Table (in my eyes one of the best beer books ever written) he had note-checked the beer as the one style he could drink every day. 

He came back with the words: ‘In my mind, there are really only a few things truly required of a saison. It must be dry – residual sugar would have a considerable effect on the beer’s ability to keep through the summer. They should also be fairly hoppy. Moderate alcohol, 5- 7%, would make them strong enough to last for a while, but not so strong that they’d stun the farm workers who drank it. So perhaps it is not a style that lends itself to orthodoxy, but rather one that originally existed to answer a question – “what can I brew that’s nutritious, refreshing, tasty, and will last for at least a year in the cellar?”’ 

So in other words, every man his own brewery makes his own saison. Which is a roundabout way of leading me to Sharps’ colossus of a head brewer Stuart Howe, who is currently ploughing his way through a series of 52 beers. When he asked for suggestions of what to do I said why not do a dark saison, given that most variations of the style I have seen were blonde or even a dirty yellow (with his penchant of thinking outside the box Blumenthal-style I almost suggested a bacon and egg rauchbier but sadly thought I would sound too frivolous). A dark saison I had not seen, but referring back to Oliver’s quote there is nowhere that it says that a saison cannot be dark (I bet Dany at Fantome has done one) and so Howe took the challenge and last week he sent me a couple of bottles. He has succeeded admirably. 

‘I really like the beer that has come out,’ he told me, ‘if I was marking it according to closeness to style I wouldn’t be able to rate it very highly as it is a big beer and not particularly dry but it really is lovely and quite unusual. As for strength, it has galloped up to 7.8% in the bottle.’

I tried one the other night and found myself loving it. It was the colour of an ancient oak sideboard some great aunt has seen fit to leave to you on her demise, even though you only met her twice. Juicy fruit gums and a sweet stewed potage of fruit dominate the nose. It’s a big mouthful and there is the flinty, chalky character of saison, joined by an oddball fruitiness that veers towards booze soaked currants; it has that historic edge of a saison, a peppery peripatetic edge that makes me think of Wallonia, yet look at the colour. On the other hand is there anything that says a saison has to be a certain colour? From where I stand saison a moveable feast; sure the Howe’s is a cleaned-up version, lacking the funk and junk of something like Saison d’Epeautre from Blaugies (pictured), but it’s still a delectable beer that I would love to see out in the wider world. I’ve one bottle left and fancy pouring it out alongside a massive pasty from the baker’s up the road. Now would be heaven.

I’ll meet you at the sign of the Red Barrel (not)

You see this hanging from a wall in the Wallonian town of Tournai and you look around to see if the Tardis is lurking about. Never drunk the stuff myself (was on lemonade and Robinson’s Crush in its heyday) but the legends linger — was it really as bad as everyone says? Was it the spam (the meat not the offers of millions of quid from some dodgy individual) of beer? How we laughed about it in school, though didn’t know why and when it was time to step up to the plate of heroic drinking Red Barrel had vanished in a puff of smoke, like a baddie in a fairy tale. Which makes it all the more intriguing to see this sign in this beautiful town in the centre of saison county (discovered a new favourite, Tournay Noire from Cazeau, who also produce an elderflower-infused saison — at a speciality beer bar populated by Goths and metallers…).

Is Watney’s Red Barrel still available and if so could it spark off the same retro-beer movement that over in the US has drinkers, the sort you would normally expect to linger over their craft beers, ordering the corn-fed Pabst Blue Ribbon as a sort of act of rebellion or defiance against the accepted order of things?

We had sun, we had fun, we had saisons in the sun

I love Saison, and am currently in the middle of researching a feature on it —yesterday, a 750ml bottle of Dupont and the same of De Glazen Toren Saison De Erpe-Mere. The difference is fascinating: Dupont is austere and flinty, restrained in its sweetness, with a champagne like effervescence; while Erpe-Mere is sweeter and more voluptuous, a bigger mouthfeel, more generous in its tasting profile. Both were brilliant and natural choices with food, the Dupont giving a great big hug to a creamy blue cheese, while the Erpe-Mere was a winner with roast pork. Saison is one of the great unsung beer styles of Europe — though both US and Italian brewers have not ignored it. Amongst the Italian saisons suggested by beer maestro Lorenzo Babove there are Birrificio del Ducato’s New Morning and Wayan by the incomparable Teo Musso; while over in the US I have a bottle of Victory’s Saison V waiting in my cellar and am intrigued by Saison-Brett from Boulevard Brewing. Purists might blanche at the thought of US brewers getting their hands on Saison but beer styles are surely always evolving through time and I love the idea of a Bret-influenced Saison (the pic was taken at Silly, who produce a decent if unexciting Saison).