New Belgium/Red Rock Paardebloem

It's funny that I have been having so many beers from New Belgium lately.  Exactly one year ago today, I was typing a review for New Belgium Tart Lychee which would eventually become my very first blog review less than two weeks later.  Ah, I miss that beer.  Hopefully they will make it again, as it's definitely the best I've had from them.

Paardebloem is definitely not as good as that one, but it is much better than the last two experiences I had with this company.  Then again, it isn't strictly New Belgium; it's a collaboration between them and Red Rock.  It is a strong Belgian pale/golden/blonde ale spiced with dandelion greens and grains of paradise which is fermented with Belgian yeast and peach juice, then blended with a small portion of "wood-aged beer."  For New Belgium, that is the code phrase for blending with Felix, a sour wood-aged beer they pretty much only use for blending.  Dandelions, it should be noted, were historically used as a bittering agent in various foods and alcoholic drinks.

It looks like this:

It has pretty good head retention and lacing too.


 The aroma is far too heavy on the grains of paradise, though the dandelion smell is nice.  I can faintly pick up some lemons (most likely from the wild yeast) and peaches.  Overall this smells pretty good.  The flavor is moderately spicy from the grains of paradise, which still taste like they were used too liberally, but it's a mild distraction.  The wild yeast character is subtle but tasty, a mix of earth and lemons, with the dandelions adding a touch of bitterness that is distinct from hop bitterness.  Well, it has to be; this beer is only 14 IBU, so there's no way I'm tasting any hops here.  The peach juice is extremely subtle, which I expected....juice is mostly sugar, so it all would have been fermented out anyway.  I don't taste any of the wood-aged beer.

The texture is dry, well-carbonated, and a bit airy.  It is a far cry from the last two beers I had from New Belgium, both of which needed more carbonation.  Tartness is very subtle, and presumably is from the wood-aged beer.


A pleasant, interesting if odd beer to say the least.  In a way it sort of reminds me of a spicier, less tart version of Bam Biere or Calabaza Blanca, although without that brewery's house yeast profile.  Speaking of which, this would have been better served if it had more of that wood-aged beer blended in, and it definitely needs fewer grains of paradise.  I like it nonetheless though.

For the record, this is the version brewed at New Belgium with help from Red Rock.  There is also a version brewed at Red Rock with help from New Belgium, which you can read about here.

New Belgium Pluot

This is another odd one from the makers of Fat Tire.  Not quite as bad as the last one I reviewed (which was truly a kaleidoscope of failure), as this was a promising idea.  Actually, there really is only one or two things that they really messed up; they should fix those next time and maybe it will be good. 

It's a Belgian pale/blonde/golden ale fermented with pluots (a hybrid between apricots and plums) and wild yeast ("brett").


It looks bright gold, like this:

It neither produced nor retained much in the way of foam despite that trail of bubbles you see there.  It did have some lacing.  When I smelled it from the bottle, it mostly smelled like plums.  When I poured it out and smelled it from the glass, it smelled like a mix of brett (largely lemons and apple skins) and soap.

The primary thing wrong with the flavor is that it does not hide it's alcohol very well, and it's alcohol flavor resembles that semi-plastic, semi-fusel flavor of malt liquor.  Additional notes of plums, raw grape skins (tannins), red grapes in general, and brett make the whole package come across like a classier King Cobra brewed with brett and a ton of fruit.  If you can imagine that, you might get an idea of how this tastes...King Cobra with more fruit and more plastic.

The second and final thing that unwinds this package is the texture.  The only reason there are any bubbles in that picture up above is because that glass has a laser-etching on the bottom (and unlike most laser-etches glasses, this one actually backs up the marketing).  If I poured this into a standard beer glass, it would have been a bit flat and too thick.

I had no expectations for this beer, both because I have no idea what a pluot tastes like and because the last fruited beer I had from this company was a mess.  Still, this was a disappointment.  If I want something that resembles malt liquor, I'll just have some malt liquor that is properly thin and fizzy; and leave this thick, plasticy mess to its own devices.

New Belgium Cascara Quad

Well, this was an unfortunate experiment.  New Belgium decided to make an abbey ale brewed with cáscara, the berry of the coffee plant.  Cascara is commonly called "coffee cherry."  The beer was also fermented with date sugar.  I had it in April but forgot to upload it.


It is a well-carbonated beer with a fiery hue and some modest head retention:

It smelled decent enough, mostly cherries and plums with a faint hint of toffee.  The usual quad aromas of figs and/or dates were not present.  The flavor profile was all over the place, and not in a good way.  It started with coffee---bold, acrid, burnt coffee.  This isn't something I ever want to taste in a quad.  And I especially don't want it to taste like boozy coffee.  The alcohol is not hidden very well.  I continue to not taste the date sugar whatsoever, but I do taste plums and cherry cough syrup.  Cough syrup flavors in beer earn an instant F from me.  I also taste chalk (what the hell?). 

In the interest of disclosure, I should probably note that I drank this about five hours after licking some envelopes.  But I had plenty of food between then and this, so I don't think my palate was all that affected by it.  This just wasn't very good, which is why I poured just under half of it down the drain.

Avoid.

New Belgium Rampant IPA

Name:                 New Belgium Rampant Imperial IPA

Style:                   Imperial IPA

Twist:                  None

Strength:             8.5% alcohol, 80-ish IBU

Notes: poured from a 12oz bottle into a Boston Lager glass.

First time having a new one from this company in a while.  The appearance is copper-gold with about a finger of white head on top, which recedes at a moderate pace.  Lacing is good, as is the carbonation.

The aroma has a nose-tickling hop oiliness which is a bit off-putting (literally, I had to sneeze after taking a deep whiff), but apart from that first sniff I like it.  It is a mixture of bitter citrus fruit (like grapefruit) and…cantaloupe, I think.  Mosaic hops are supposed to have a weird melon flavor to them.  The bottle proclaims this to have peach flavors, which I’m not getting in the nose.

The cantaloupe flavor is much more toned down than it was in the nose, though it is still there.  Peaches continue to be absent for me.  The primary flavors are grapefruit, hop oil and pine resin.  I could definitely do with more fruitiness in my IPA’s as a general rule and that is the same thing here, particularly tropical non-citrus fruit.  I guess the main drawback here is the beer doesn’t really taste that much like it smells.  The aroma: semi-bitter, grapefruit, and cantaloupe.  The flavor: grapefruit and full-on bitter.

Not bad at all, especially for the price….there aren’t really any other double/imperial IPA’s at this price point except maybe Lagunitas Sucks depending where you shop.  This is no Sucks, but it will do in a pinch.