Style: Wild Ale, Barrel Aged Brown Ale
Brewery: Captain Lawrence (Pleasentville, NY)
ABV: 7.5%
IBUs: unknown
Availability: single brew, limited release

Appearance: The Barrel Select pours a hazy, amber brown with aggressive carbonation and ecru head. The pour leaves slight lacing on the glass that fades away quickly.

Smell: The nose here is a blast of sour cherry that almost overpowers the other scents. As I get accustomed to aroma, notes of chocolate and oak come forward along with the traditional hints of wild yeast (barnyard funk, horse blanket, etc.)

Taste: There is quite a blast of acidic bitterness here as the Barrel Select leads with a puckeroushly sour hit of unripened cherries, tart green grapes and – in a throwback to my childhood (or last trip to the movie theatre) – Sour Patch Kids. Once you dig through the sea of sour, you get more flavors of Hershey’s chocolate bar mixed with lactic acid and a bit of musty malt. There’s also a hint of astringent tannins and oak notes but they are bonded well with the acidic overtones and don’t really stand out on their own.

Mouthfeel: The mouthfeel is pretty straightforward for a bottle aged brew… fine carbonation, medium body and a nice, dry finish from the barrel aging.

Drinkability: While the mouthfeel and finish are easy on the pallet, this is an abundantly sour beer that may be overwhelming for some people. For such a complicated, blended brew, the flavor is surprisingly straightforward which may keep you from reaching for another glass. Splitting (and sipping) the bottle amongst two people, however, should fair quite well.

Overall: The Captain Lawrence Barrel Aged Select #1 is another milestone for the brewery. It’s incredibly tart and and unlike any of their other offerings. While it was a bit over-acidic for my taste – which is a rarity so non-sour beer drinkers be warned – but it would pair really nicely with a farmhouse cheese and it is a great non-traditional brew to help open people’s eyes to the potential of beer. People who like Flemish sours such as a Rodenbach should take notice and seek this one out.

Always pushing the limits of Belgian inspired American beers, Portland, Maine’s Allagash brewery have developed their very own Koelschip for creating spontaneously fermented beers similar to the lambic style. While sour beers utilizing wild yeasts such as Brettanomyces have been popping up all over, all of the American versions of these are brewed using cultivated yeast strains. That is, until now.

The new Koelschip – aka a very large open air room with a steel tank and wooden ceiling (see photo above) – will change all that. For a few months out of the year, the weather by the Allagash brewery will be just right for cultivating “good” wild bacteria which accumulate on the ceiling and then fall into the beer tank. The beer is then pumped back indoors for fermenting and later aged in barrels.

Check out the awesome video below and keep an eye out for the first batch (no release date announced). In the interim, grab a glass of Allagash’s amazing Interlude which is a sour Belgian that was “accidentally” infected with local yeast and started this whole adventure. More photo’s here.


UPDATE: Beernews.org reports that this beer will make its wordwide debut tomorrow, December 16th in Philadelphia:

So when does the beer make its U.S. debut? Tomorrow night according to Felicia D’Ambrosio of the Philadelphia City Paper: “Rob Tod, owner of Allagash Brewing in Portland, Maine, will visit Philadelphia to make the U.S. debut of the first-ever American spontaneously fermented lambic in a Tria Fermentation School class on Thursday, Dec. 17. Hyped lambic-heads have already sold the class out, a testament to Philadelphia’s devotion to the rarest and weirdest of all artisanal beer styles.”