Good to know, Peter. Thank you.
Looks like Wally’s has Upright 4,5,6,7. Now that’ll be interesting to try.
Much preferred the named Upright bottles over the numbered.
Good to know. I can get one of names from K&L.
I’ve had a couple of the numbered Uprights. One was very good to low-level excellent, and the other was horrible. The horrible one was probably too old, but I have no way of knowing b/c Upright doesn’t put bottling dates on their bottles/labels. With their not-cheap price tag, I believe they tend to sit on the shelves for awhile in the SoCal market where they are largely unknown/under-respected. I’m not a buyer until they have some way of letting me know when the beer was bottled.
Ugh. I’ll buy carefully. This is good info yo have. Thanks, Brian.
mystic is a good brewery, but ironically their flagship saison is not my favorite. it’s ok, but a bit more on the sweet and fruity side than i prefer. they have recently made a version of their saison fermented in sauternes barrels however, which was much more to my liking: slightly drier and more complex. my favorite regular beer of theirs is called “descendant”. it’s basically an english dark brown/porter fermented with a belgian (saison?) yeast. it’s delicious and dangerously drinkable.
finally, after YEARS of complaints, dupont is transitioning to brown glass. their 330ml formats were already brown, but finally all their cork-and-cage formats have been newly arriving with brown glass as well.
A lot of the breweries in the Saison area used to recycle each others bottles, so you could find bottle size and color variations within the same cases. Once found a Dupont bottle with part of a Cantillon label underneath. I think green was the default as the regional tradition, but I also think that as the style has gotten more popular worldwide there has needed to be better protection of their product, including better bottles.
Never heard of the ‘Saison area.’ Must be a large area since Tourpes (Dupont) is quite a distance from Brussels (Cantillon).
Wallonia more or less, but much of the Farmhouse style developed between Brussels and Lille. The area around Lille was the strongest region for French microbrewing by a long shot for a long time, and much of their production paralleled the Belgian Saison/Farmhouse styles. Nowadays beer styles know no geography, but that region definitely was the heart of where this style developed.
I wonder if they could make an appellation by yeast strains to put some sort of standard to the term saison. I guess I mostly get burned on American versions but there’s not a lot of commonality in the genre.
If you can find someone that will pay us to go yeast-hunting, I’m in! ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
On the recommendation front, recently had the Perennial/Prairie collaboration ‘Dual Artisanship’. Very chewy, earthy, rustic and not tramped up with any exotic ingredients. Just good funky.
I’ll see what I can scrounge up from Mystic.
Finally tried the Upright 5 and 7. Pretty good, no issues with age, but these are not as good as several others I’ve had. Perhaps a little better than Commons.
Ironically, yeast selection won’t help you too much–a lot of American breweries that make a Saison are using a cultured version of Dupont’s strain. Bigger issues are the lack of sugar and inclusion of crystal malts in the mash bills of a lot of US Saisons. (Also, there are sort of AOC-style guidelines in the BJCP/GABF award catagories–but like the AOC guidelines, they tend to reward convergence to the mean rather than exceptionalism).
Also surprised that Saison D’Erpe Mere hasn’t gotten more love on this thread. Absolutely classic is in a slightly crisper vein than Dupont. Conveniently paper wrapped bottles, too–no worrying about lightstruck beer.
What have you found more impressive than Upright other than Logsdon I presume? I’d like to try those. TIA.
I had my first bottle of Stone’s Enjoy After the other day. Surprisingly, I found it to be a fantastic beer. Pretty much, it’s a hoppy saison. I have one more bottle, but will probably buy a few more before they dry-up from the local shelves.
Is this actually a Saison? I ask because Stone’s Saison was probably the most repulsive thing I’ve had to drink in ages.
I don’t think it is, Michael. It’s certainly not advertised as one, but that’s the way it comes across.
I’ve actually never had it, not a big fan of Stone or what I see as the SoCal style of IPA. Two Hearted is more my archetypal IPA, lots of citrus in the hop profile.