Going straight?

Last week, I reported on Irish wild beer specialist Wide Street producing a couple of tamer offerings. Today it's more of the same, except the brewery is Denver's Crooked Stave.

Again, we begin with a hazy pale lager, although rather than "Kellerbier", the brewery has called it their Italian Pils. This is a light 4.9% ABV and smells ripely fruity, of soft peach and mango. The flavour is calmer, and rather more pils-typical, with a crisp pale malt base, adorned by citric hops which add a modest amount of bitterness but lots of lemon and grapefruit flavour. The unfiltered fuzz adds a softness of texture, meaning it's both crisp and smooth; thirst-quenching and filling, in a way I associate most with Bavarian Helles. Some may argue that the hopping makes it too American to be classed with any kind of European pilsner, but I think that's par for the course when the "Italian" card is played: "Italian pils" should never be confused with "pils from Italy". This is a highly enjoyable lager, and debates on whether it gets filed with new-world or old-world examples are entirely immaterial.

Next it's an amber lager called Road Trippin', and I trust Crooked Stave to deliver what I want from one of these (hops). It doesn't look the best, pouring a dirty brownish ochre, and there was no hop brightness from the aroma, only a bittersweet liquorice effect. The flavour turned out to be almost as dirty as the beer looked; a mélange of strawberry and raspberry mush, blowtorched with dry roast and infused with dreggy grit. There's a poke of hop bitterness too, but it's quite old-world, suggesting earthy English varieties to me, though that could just be Cascade showing its Fuggle ancestry. It is not what I wanted. The best American amber ales have a precision about them, displaying citric hops and caramel malt separately, but in a complementary way. In this one, everything is rough and indistinct. Of course, leaving a beer unfiltered can prevent any beneficial flavours from being stripped out, but there's no point going this way if all that's left behind is dregs. This is a beer in serious need of polish and focus.

A sour beer finishes this set, hopefully with a flourish. This is Hibiscus Dream, made with both hibiscus and blueberry, and is a beautifully bright cherry red in the glass. The aroma is extremely promising, suggesting a mix of sourness and fruit of the sort one gets with grape or berry geuze. Like a geuze, it's busily fizzy and light-bodied: to be expected for 4.5% ABV and fully fermented out. Not a trace of sugary fruit (or flower) additive remains. Where the geuze analogy ends is its lack of barrel-ageing, meaning no oak spicing or wine notes. So it's simpler, but still very good. The cherry and raspberry flavours are bright, clean and distinct, and while there's little by way of aftertaste, it finishes with a mildly farmy wild-yeast funk: a tasty square of stinky and runny cheese next to the fruit compote. In a world of non-sour sour fruit beers, here's one that shows how it ought to be done. Shove yer lactose.

It seems that the wild and sour end is where Crooked Stave excels, and I'm not at all surprised. I'm sure it's good for the brewers to try their hand at other things, and nobody wants a monoculture, but there's only one type of beer for which I can recommend this brewery to you.