Beer Review: Samuel Adams Dark Wheat Ale
Sep. 12th, 2006 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feste_sylvainBeer #3 in the "colonial recipes" series is the "James Madison* Dark Wheat Ale". This is actually the second dark wheat ale from a New England brewery I've had in the last year, the first being Magic Hat's Saint Gootz.
This ale is actually lighter than Saint Gootz, but it is still pretty much the color of the bottle. The mahogany color comes from the smoked roasted barley added to the rye in the wort. Thus, I waited until we started feeling the nippy weather before drinking it. Good move, as it turns out, as this has significantly more body than most wheat beers.
I left the wonderful unfiltered wheat sludge in the bottle, and poured into a Belgian-style stemmed beer glass. This was possibly overkill; a pub-style pint glass would have worked just as well to reveal the woody nose. However, a stein or (worse) leaving it in the bottle would have been a major error. When drinking good beer, it is not necessary to clothespin your nose shut.
Unlike the more, er, "vigorous" priming of some of these recipes, this one remains well carbonated during an extended and deliberate nursing. As a result, it carries the creamy after-taste wholly appropriate to a dark beer. And while many American beers (inexplicably) brag of a "clean, crisp taste" (a euphemism for no taste at all), the wheat base of this ale creates a "dirty, crisp taste". Good dirt. Gardening dirt. Without the grit.
Think of your favorite dark whole-wheat bread, freshly baked, and still warm. Now flip the temperature, and transmogrify it from solid to liquid.
That's what this beer is like.
Nothing against the hippies' Saint Gootz, but this is a lighter body on a dark taste.
Recommended.
* By the way, President Madison was not only a brewer, as many estated folks were back then, but he considered beer so important to the national well-being that he considered a National Brewery to go along with the National Bank. Fortunately, the plethora of local breweries convinced him that this was unnecessary. Otherwise, Budweiser would be a protected subdivision of the Post Office.
This ale is actually lighter than Saint Gootz, but it is still pretty much the color of the bottle. The mahogany color comes from the smoked roasted barley added to the rye in the wort. Thus, I waited until we started feeling the nippy weather before drinking it. Good move, as it turns out, as this has significantly more body than most wheat beers.
I left the wonderful unfiltered wheat sludge in the bottle, and poured into a Belgian-style stemmed beer glass. This was possibly overkill; a pub-style pint glass would have worked just as well to reveal the woody nose. However, a stein or (worse) leaving it in the bottle would have been a major error. When drinking good beer, it is not necessary to clothespin your nose shut.
Unlike the more, er, "vigorous" priming of some of these recipes, this one remains well carbonated during an extended and deliberate nursing. As a result, it carries the creamy after-taste wholly appropriate to a dark beer. And while many American beers (inexplicably) brag of a "clean, crisp taste" (a euphemism for no taste at all), the wheat base of this ale creates a "dirty, crisp taste". Good dirt. Gardening dirt. Without the grit.
Think of your favorite dark whole-wheat bread, freshly baked, and still warm. Now flip the temperature, and transmogrify it from solid to liquid.
That's what this beer is like.
Nothing against the hippies' Saint Gootz, but this is a lighter body on a dark taste.
Recommended.
* By the way, President Madison was not only a brewer, as many estated folks were back then, but he considered beer so important to the national well-being that he considered a National Brewery to go along with the National Bank. Fortunately, the plethora of local breweries convinced him that this was unnecessary. Otherwise, Budweiser would be a protected subdivision of the Post Office.
