Just a bog-standard, cheap, everyday saison for this post. You won't see any paeans to it on the beer geek fora, nor find it on sale at massively inflated prices in dusty beer antique emporia, but Lefebvre's Saison 1900 is perfectly OK.My bottle was a few months past the best before and had settled to an almost-clear gold. After a few sips I dropped in the lees, restoring the firm shaving-foam head and giving it more of an opaque amber tint.
There's none of your farmyard funk here, nor any fruit esters, nor any of the other bass and treble notes found in Belgian beer. It's soft yet crisp with an insistent fizz; dry for the most part, decorated tastefully in shades of honeydew and pineapple. A solid 5.4% ABV ensures plenty of wiggle room for the subtle flavours and avoids any danger of wateriness that could so easily be left in the wake of the voracious saison yeast strain.
I can see this working well as a cold and casual refresher, a breezy conversation beer which keeps the voicebox lubricated and moist without interrupting or quite disappearing into the background. No fireworks here, but an entertaining caberet nonetheless.
Unless we have a very different standard, "cheap" is not a good description of the beer as purchased in Oregon, USA. Given the other domestic and Belgian interpretations that are roughly the same price and preferable in terms of interestingness, I've had just one bottle of the 1900.
ReplyDeleteHad it a while ago and it was a grand beer. Pretty much what you thought TBN except I gave mine to my wife. Being American she likes her beer cold and this was the only beer I had that was cold. I regretted my decision soon after.
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