365 different beers from 365 different breweries in 365 days with random musings on beer, food, music, sports, dogs and anything else interesting along the way
Day #595 Fruits Des Bois / Brasserie St. Feuillien, Le Roeulx, Belgium
Previously from this brewery: the Saison and La Blanche
Welcome to the weekend! Keeping with the recent theme and just recapping a beer from Belgium rather than boring you with the details of my day (Hint: I'm making pickles today).
Today's beer is a Fruits Des Bois, a grisette beer from St. Feuillien, a brewery in the southern part of Belgium. This beer is brewed with fruit, and poured a Kool-Aid sort of raspberry color with a somewhat pink fluffy head. When you take a sip, you get a tart flavor of black cherries and raspberries, with a very, very mild salinity. While this beer does have a clear sweetness, it's thankfully nowhere as sweet as it looks. Rather light and refreshing (only 3.5% ABV), this beer is quite tasty and comes in a fun glass, as seen in this picture below.
Thankfully, not Kool-Aid
I found this one on draft at Moeder Lambic, a superb beer bar in Brussels we hit before the biking officially commenced. One thing I noticed was that despite Belgium being the beer capital of the world, many restaurants kept their beer lists small (perhaps due to the fact each different beer they serve gets a set of unique glasses that need to be kept somewhere) and stuck to the very well known brand names - Duvel, Leffe Blonde, etc. That isn't to say there aren't fantastic beer bars or unique finds, but you just can't expect to walk in to any restaurant, bar, or cafe and expect to find something as unique as this grisette.
As a reminder, grisette is a style of beer that originated in France and was named for the plain clothed working women would bring beer to the miners and workers. The name of this beer translates roughly to "fruits of the forest." Now you know.
Things to Think About Today:
If grisettes were working class women, we leave you today with The Rolling Stones and their rollicking ode to hard working ladies, Factory Girl. It's about as close to country as I'm ever going to get.... so enjoy!
OK so the name of this beer from Tired Handsis not Lil Lady 2 Electric Boogaloo, but it totally should be. Why? Because this is the second iteration of Lil Lady that I've had and every movie sequel's subtitle in my book--thanks to Mr. Blog Named Brew--is Electric Boogaloo. If you don't get the reference, please see this IMDb site for more information.
Sometimes I just want to drink beer and not have to think about it so there isn't a review of the original Lil Lady. This one is made with Rooibos tea, wheat and honeybush
tea. It's then fermented with Pennsylvania wildflower honey. It poured a very cloudy, deep orange-y tan color with a white head. The smell is very wheat-y and mild. The flavor is a little on the tart side, which I loved. It has an earthy flavor. There's some unripe fruit in there. The beer's description mentioned strawberries and I think that's pretty accurate.
This is another excellent offering from Tired Hands and I highly recommend it. And if this doesn't sound like your kind of beer, go anyway because you are guaranteed to find one you love.
Beer stats
Style: Grisette
ABV: 5%
IBUs: Unknown
Rating: Excellent
Previously reviewed from Tired Hands
I'm dropping Vonnegut knowledge and a review of Bokonon
Is this week whipping by for anyone else? All week I've had the "Holy crap! It's 4:45 p.m.!" panic. I imagine this will continue the remainder of the week at which point, I'll just run away from all the work I didn't get done this week. New year. New start.
Another creepy hand photo. Sweet.
Today's beer is from Hill Farmstead Brewery in Vermont. Hill Farmstead is a great family story that starts with a great-great-great-grandfather who was a tavern owner and continues through today with some phenomenal beers with great family connections. I encourage you to read more about them here.
This particular beer is the Clara--named for the brewer's grandfather’s sister. The brewery rests upon the land that was once home to her and her 13 siblings! This Clara is a grisette, which is a style of beer I've come to enjoy thanks to my beer adventure.
It is to coal miners what a saison is to farmers. It also may be served by French prostitutes. So there's that...
Clara poured a hazy wet straw color with a small white head. There was plenty of lacing left behind as I enjoyed this one. The smell is mellow fruit and fruity hops. The taste is pepper and grass and very bright. At 4% ABV, it was quite sessionable.
Day #371 Grisette / Sly Fox Brewing Company, Phoenixville, PA Previously from this brewery: Phoenix Pale Ale, Ichor
Our first award for the past year was the Worst Label Art category, so let's put a more positive spin on things and present an award for the Best Label Art.
And your winner? A round of applause, please, for Brasserie Fantome!
Winner!
I tend to gravitate toward designs that are clean, classic, and noticeable in a crowd. Fantome definitely hits those marks with their simple, but effective and fun ghost logo. I realize this category is unfair, as I wasn't considering any of the breweries or beers we had on draft, just those we had in a bottle. Hey, life isn't fair.
Plenty more awards to come over the next few days, so stay tuned. I'll go ahead and shift gears to today's beer, the Grisette from local brewery Sly Fox, which was on draft at Teresa's Next Door. In the glass, this beer has a cloudy, hazy straw color with a fluffy white head. There are aromas of citrus and yeast, and when you take a sip you find more yeast, with grain, grass, and lemon, with a touch of peppery spice. This beer is really well done - dry and light, with a manageable 5.6% ABV. I could (and at some point probably will) drink this beer all day.
Tastes as good as it looks
If you aren't familiar with grisette, you will be in the future as more breweries are turning out their version of a traditional Belgian ale. A Grisette is similar to a saison, and takes its name from the the French working class women who wore plain gray dresses and handed beers to workers as they would leave the mines (and were sort of also prostitutes). The grisette is a popular figure in art and literature, and features prominently in the popular show Les Misérables, as the character Fantine is considered a grisette. Although, I think I would like Les Mis more if they handed out beer, like back in the old days. Just saying.
Thing to Think About Today:
Okay, so I'm dropping Les Mis references into my beer write up today. Yeah, I try to pretend that I'm all cultured, but in reality, I don't terribly enjoy Broadway musicals. I'm sorry, they're just not my thing. We see shows every now and again, and I can certainly appreciate the immense talent those performers have, but it's not my preferred form of entertainment. UNLESS.....
Unless, of course, that Broadway show features extremely profane puppets, such as the delightful Avenue Q. The tale of a young puppet who moves to New York after graduating college and learns lessons about life, love, lowered expectations, porn, racism, Gary Coleman, and the reality that life sometimes just isn't all that that great. This show is without a doubt one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my adult life, and if you've never seen it, you need to think about getting tickets to the next possible show. For a preview, check out this wonderful rendition of It Sucks to Be Me. I highly recommend listening to this whenever you have a bad day - guaranteed to make you feel better about yourself!
