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While the concept of a "Grand Cru" is formally defined for wine, there's little to distinguish it from a marketing tactic in beer. Nothing particularly wrong with that, it's just good to know that beery Grand Crus are not quite as reliable. But most brewers do try to make their Grand Cru special in one way or another, and when a brewer of the stature of Almanac introduces a series of beers with the designation, it's enough to pay attention.

So far, there have been two released, one of which we have here. Farmer's Reserve Grand Cru is an imperial version of their sour blonde ale (and base for a whole series of fruited sours that we very much enjoy here) with California-grown Muscat Blanc grapes added and then aged in white wine French oak barrels for over a year. Finally, it's packaged in a gorgeous looking bottle. There's been this persistent myth that beer and wine people don't get along, but California brewers seem to be continually turning that notion on its ear, frequently collaborating with their neighbors in many ways. This sort of beer/wine hybrid isn't on every shelf, but it's not particularly uncommon either, and it's always fun to see what happens when boozy buddies take inspiration from one another. "As the old saying goes, in vino veritas, in cervesio felicitas - in wine there is truth, in beer there is happiness." With this, I think they've hit both nails on the head:

Almanac Farmer's Reserve Grand Cru - Pours a light, hazy golden yellow color with a finger of white fluffy head that sticks around for a bit. Smells wonderful, lemon zest, vinous fruit, white wine, oak, very nice. Taste is more reserved than the nose might lead you to believe, but it's got tons of that vinous fruit, white wine barrel, some tart acidity lingering in the finish. Mouthfeel is moderately carbonated, medium bodied, light to medium acidity, a bit of boozy heat, and just a bit of stickiness in the finish. Despite the booze, this does not drink like a 10.2% sour, it's pretty light on its feet. Overall, this is really fantastic stuff, certainly worth seeking out. A-

Beer Nerd Details: 10.2% ABV bottled (750 ml). Drank out of a flute glass on 1/23/16. Bottled: Autumn 2015.

The other release is Dogpatch Grand Cru, basically an imperialized version of their Dogpatch Sour made with a variety of red wine grapes (instead of the typical cherries), which I plan to share with a few friends soon. As usual, Almanac is a reliable source of excellent sours that are readily available in Philly these days (which is certainly a boon).

On the first Friday of every month, there's a beer blog roundup called The Session. Someone picks a topic, and everyone blogs about it. This time around, I'm hosting a discussion on Double Features:

So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to drink two beers, compare and contrast. No need for slavish tasting notes, but if you want to, that's fine too. The important part is to highlight how the two beers interact with one another during your session (pun intended!) For extra credit, pair your beers with two films to make your own Double Feature. Now, I'm a big tent kinda guy, so feel free to stretch this premise to its breaking point. The possibilities are endless!

First up, a double feature of convenience. Longtime readers know I'm a big fan of San Francisco's Almanac Beer Co. and while I've been able to snag a bottle here or there through means, they've just recently started distributing to the Philadelphia area in earnest. As such, every time I go to the store, I find myself drawn to purchase another of their delicious beers I've not had before. A hearty welcome to Pennsylvania from all of us (i.e. me) here at Kaedrin:

Anywho, here are two beers I cracked open this weekend whilst viewing a bunch of horror movies in honor of Halloween (notably Trick 'r Treat and Ghostbusters, neither of which are particularly well suited to the beers I'm drinking except that, well, they're all quite good!) First up is Citra Sour, the first of a new series of single hopped sour beers (up next is Simcoe Sour), an interesting fusion of styles that has never quite caught on, but which might if efforts like this keep things going. Truth be told, I think I prefer the straight up fruited sours moreso than hopped sours, but variety is a good thing, and this is pretty tasty.

Almanac Citra Sour - Pours a cloudy straw yellow with a finger of white head that sticks around for a while. Smells... interesting, that Citra hop character is prominent, floral citrus notes, but an underlying sour twang is there as well. Taste is a good deal more vinous than the nose would suggest, clearly those wine barrels kicking in, and the oak features prominently as well. The Citra hops do kick in about halfway through and persist through the sour finish. Quite puckering, actually, I think the hops only serve to intensify the sourness. Mouthfeel is well carbonated, light, bright, and quite acidic. Overall, I'm still not convinced that high amounts of hops are a great match with sour, but this is still rather nice. B+

Beer Nerd Details: 7% ABV bottled (375 ml). Drank out of a flute glass on 10/30/15. Bottled July 2015.

After letting the palate cool off for a bit, I cracked open Farmer's Reserve Citrus, which I believe is the same base Sour Blond Ale aged in wine barrels, but instead of hops, we've got a melange of citrus fruits, including Buddha's Hand Citron, Blood Orange, and Yuzu. The Farmer's Reserve stuff have been my favorite offerings from Almanac, and this one did not disappoint:

Almanac Farmer's Reserve Citrus - Pours a mostly clear golden yellow color with a finger of short lived white head. Smells more funky, some citrus and sour twang, but some earthy Brett character pitching in here too. Taste again hits with that earthy, musty funk, lots of tart citrus fruit, a little wine barrel, oak and vanilla, and finishing with a nice sour bite. Mouthfeel is slightly less carbonated, still light and bright, the acidity feeling a bit less intense too. Overall, this is not quite as intense, but it is much more balanced than the Citra Sour. A-

Beer Nerd Details: 7% ABV bottled (375 ml). Drank out of a flute glass on 10/30/15. Bottled June 2015.

So there you have it. Next up in the Double Feature realm will be a much more harmonious beer and filmic pairing centered around Wes Craven. Stay tuned! And if you've got a blog, feel free to play along. More details on The Session and how to participate can be read here!

Every year, Almanac attempts to put their spin on the Pumpkin beer. This is my first, but they've done an Heirloom Pumpkin Barleywine and a Dark Pumpkin Sour, which both sound interesting, but they change it up every year. Perhaps someday, they'll land on the perfect iteration, but for now, I'm enjoying their attempts. This is a spiced brown ale blend of beer aged in wine and Woodford Reserve bourbon barrels with hand-roasted California heirloom pumpkins and their house souring bugs. Not too shabby:

Almanac Pumpkin Sour - Pours a dark brown, almost black color with just a cap of fizzy, tan head that is not long for this world. Smells a little like a sour stout, some dark malts, some spices, and a slight sour twang. Taste starts off very sweet, some dark malts and spice, just a little in the way of oak, maybe a hint of bourbon, vinous fruit, and a nice puckering sourness towards the finish. Mouthfeel is a little light on the carbonation, but there's plenty to keep it going, medium bodied, moderate acidity, hints of booze. Overall, this is an interesting beer, quite complex, though I'm not sure how much the pumpkin character sines through. The spices are there, but I'm not sure I'd identify this as pumpkin spice alone. Of course, this has no real bearing on anything, as the beer is pretty darn good. B+

Beer Nerd Details: 8.5% ABV bottled (375 ml). Drank out of a flute glass on 9/26/15. Bottled: 072315.

As always, an interesting beer from Almanac, if not quite their best. I look forward to their next iteration on Pumpkin though. I'm sure I'll managed another Farm to Barrel beer in the near future though, so stay tuned.

We're big fans of Almanac Brewing's Farm to Barrel series of beers here at Kaedrin, but they also have a flagship line of fresh beers that are regularly available, like this dry-hopped, multi-grain saison named after landmarks (Dolores Park?) in the Mission District of San Francisco (not, as originally thought, that episode of Seinfeld where Jerry can't remember his girlfriend's name. Mental note: I should brew a beer called "Saison Mulva" sometime.)

The dry-hopped saison field is pretty crowded though, with stuff like Firestone Walker Opal, Off Color Apex Predator, and even the staid, old-school Belgian brewers getting into the game with Saison Dupont Cuvée Dry Hopping, all widely available (and all fantastic). That's before getting to micro-distroed (is that a thing? Is now!) wonders like Hill Farmstead Dorothy or Tired Hands Shambolic. This is some stiff competition, so let's shuffle on down Dolores Street to see how this one compares:

Almanac Saison Dolores - Pours a cloudy golden yellow color with a few fingers of fluffy white head. Smell has a very nice grassy hop aroma mixed with some musty Belgian yeast spice and esters... Taste has a light spicy note, some fruity esters, and then those grassy hops kick in towards the finish. As it warms, it evolves into a more spicy, peppery character, rather tasty. Mouthfeel is well carbonated, crisp, and effervescent, quite dry, a great match for food. Overall, it's a rock solid, standard saison that will stand up to most in that particular arena. B+

Beer Nerd Details: 6.8% ABV bottled (22 ounce bomber). Drank out of a flute glass on 8/29/15.

Many thanks to Jay of of the right excellent Beer Samizdat for sending this to me (and if I recall, introducing me to Almanac in the first place, way back when). It's certainly on the same field as its competition and if these fellas were local, I could see cracking one of these every so often (just like I order up a glass of Shambolic every so often at Tired Hands), even if I find the Farm to Barrel series more eye-popping. Speaking of which, two of those in the pipeline, so keep an eye out (or, you know, protect them from the eye-popping awesomeness of those beers).

There's this Portlandia skit where two diners ask pedantic questions about the origins of the chicken they're about to eat. It's a neat skewering of Farm to Table fanatics. Even after presented with an information sheet on the exact chicken they'll be consuming (his name was "Colin"!), they feel the need to further investigate, making their way to the actual farm itself, interviewing the workers, and so on. This is obviously a ludicrous exaggeration, which is the point, but sometimes it's nice to see where your food comes from. Take this beer, part of Almanac's Farm to Barrel series (naturally), a sour beer fermented with their house yeast, then aged in old wine barrels atop uber-fresh local fruit. But where does this fruit come from? In this case, we've got strawberries grown at Dirty Girl Farms in California's Santa Cruz Mountains. Some of you might be thinking how nice it would be to meet the eponymous girls in question, and you people are probably pretty dirty in yourselves. Get your minds out of the gutter, is what I'm saying. Let's get our mind off this lurid subject with some beer:

Almanac Farmer's Reserve Strawberry - Pours a slightly hazy golden orange color with a finger off white head (it's not even pink, who are they fooling?) Smells strongly of tart fruit, strawberries, kiwi, and the like, with some oak and vanilla kicking in for fun. Taste starts sweet, quickly moving into sour fruits leavened by some oak before sharply ramping up the sourness in the finish. Mouthfeel is crisp and light bodied, quite acidic but still pleasant enough. Overall, yes, it's another Farmer's Reserve winner from Almanac, moar sour than usual, but that seems to be the way of the strawberry. Who am I to question that? A-

Beer Nerd Details: 7% ABV bottled (375 ml). Drank out of a flute glass on 7/17/15. Batch 10:1 031215 FRSTRAW.

Always on the lookout for more Almanac, they've never really let me down and have pretty steadily gotten better as time goes on. I'm sure we'll be seeing more of their offerings sooner rather than later...

Due to the capricious whims of Mother Nature, we had to push beer club back a ways, very nearly missing the month of January. But thanks to a no-show on yesterday's storm, conditions were fine (if a little cold) tonight, where we hit up a new BYOB BBQ place, shared some beer, did some "Adult" Mad Libs ("I need a noun." "Assless Chaps."), and generally just had fun. For dinner, I ordered something called "Loose Meat", and drove everyone crazy attempting to make double entendres about it. In case you were wondering, this is what loose meat looks like:

(Click to Embiggen)

It has a nice phallic arrangement, but the feng shui could be a little better if the brisket and pulled pork were a little far back, don't you think? Also of note, the parsley merkin. Anyways, it was good stuff, and we had some decent beer to go with it:

(Click to Embiggen)

For the sake of posterity, thoughts on each are below. Standard beer nerd disclaimers apply. I'm sorry, but the BBQ place did not have a hermetically sealed environment suitable for proper note taking. Also, I didn't really take notes. I'm the worst. In order of drinking (not necessarily the order in the pic):

• Kaedrôme Saison - Hey, remember that saison I dosed with Brett, like, a year ago? It's doing reasonably well right now. It's carbed up to a drinkable state, though still not as effervescent as I'd like. But the flavor is there, and it's doing reasonably well. B
• New Belgium/Three Floyds Lips Of Faith - Grätzer - My first Grätzer, and um, it's a weird style. Light smokiness, very thin, with a weird tartness in the finish. A perfect beer for this situation, as I'm happy to try something like this, but I'm not sure I'd go out of my way for more. C+
• Left Hand St. Vrain Tripel - A pretty standard American take on a tripel, a little too sticky, but a nice palate cleanser after the Grätzer. B
• Wicked Weed Terra Locale Series - Appalachia - I've heard great things about Wicked Weed, so I was really looking forward to this, and a Brett saison made with sweet potatoes and grits sounds like it could work, but I found it a bit on the bland side. Nothing wrong with it, per say, but there's not a lot of funk, and it just felt a little on the dry side. It's certainly cromulent and I could probably drink plenty of it, and maybe it was just that this is not ideal for a tasting like this, but I was disappointed. B
• Chimay Red - Yep, it's Chimay all right. I've never been a huge fan of this particular expression though. B
• Cigar City Maduro Oatmeal Brown Ale - Rock solid take on a brown ale. Not going to knock your socks off, but it's a tasty alternative to macro slop. B+
• Almanac Devil's Advocate - Another fantastic little sour from Almanac, very tasty, vinous, sour, oaky, delicious. I don't normally think of "hoppy" and "sour" going together very well, but these folks are doing it right. Probably my favorite beer of the night. A-
• SoChesCo Valentine's Day Chocolate Milk Stout - A friend's homebrewed milk stout, asolid take on the style, very tasty. B
• SoChesCo Pennsyltucky Chocolate Milk Stout - The same stout as above, conditioned on bourbon soaked oak, which wound up as a light character. You could definitely taste the difference drinking them side by side, but I don't think I'd have pegged this as a bourbon oaked beer if I drank it blind (my own Bourbon Oaked Bomb & Grapnel fared little better on that account). B
• Bière De L'Amitié (Green Flash & Brasserie St. Feuillien) - A very interesting and different beer. Standard Belgian yeast spice and fruit, but also some citrus hoppiness, and something that really felt like they dosed it with white grape juice (I don't think they did, but that's what kept coming to mind). B
• Ken's Homebrewed Creme Brulee Stout Clone - Holy vanilla, Batman! Like the Southern Tier inspiration, this is incredibly sweet and it's got a great nose that I could just sniff all night long. I think there might be more vanilla here, but I love me some vanilla. B
• Stone Bourbon Barrel-Aged Arrogant Bastard Ale - Another beer that I was looking forward to, but which didn't quite live up to expectations. It was a fine beer, one of the better of the night actually, but I didn't get a tone of Bourbon barrel character out of this. It felt like the barrels muted the aromatic aspects of the hops while leaving the bitterness. Fortunately, the Bourbon sweetens it up a little, so it's still reasonably well balanced (er, for Arrogant Bastard), but it's not something you really need to drop everything and try (like, for example, Stone's Fyodor's Classic). B+

In San Francisco, they grow dogs right out of the ground like those orcs from Lord of the Rings. This beer is named after these "Dogpatches", which are really only present in one specific neighborhood because ewwww, Doggie Orcs. I... don't know where the hell I'm taking this, so I'll just note that no dogs were grown or harmed in the brewing of this beer. To my knowledge. California Rainier cherries, on the other hand, were slaughtered by the bushel. Cherries come in bushels, right? Jeeze, what is wrong with me tonight? I'm the worst.

Seriously though, this is one of Almanac's standard Farm to Barrel offerings where they incorporate uber-fresh locally sourced fruits into their beers which are then aged in old (presumably also somewhat local) wine barrels with their, yes, Dogpatch yeast. The Dogpatch is actually a real neighborhood in San Francisco, and I'm pretty sure they don't grow dogs there, orc-style. However, there is no definitive explanation for name, so let's not rule it out just yet. Instead, let's just drink some of this mighty fine beer:

Almanac Dogpatch Sour - Pours a beautiful, clear golden orange color with a finger of white head. Smells very funky, lots of musty barnyard and a little in the way of cherries and tart fruit. Taste starts of sweet, with some oak kicking in towards the middle, as well as the fruit, sour cherries and tart fruit, with a more intense, puckering sourness picking up in the finish. Mouthfeel is medium bodied, well carbonated, relatively dry but also quite acidic. Overall, a rather nice sour beer, complex but approachable. A-

Beer Nerd Details: 7.5% ABV bottled (375 ml capped). Drank out of a flute glass on 1/9/15. Batch No. 2. Bottled March 2014.

Almanac is one of those quietly awesome breweries that probably deserves more acclaim than they get. Seek these out, I know I will continue to do so. I already have something Called Devil's Advocate, billed as a hoppy sour ale... which has actually never been something that completely worked for me, but if anyone can do it, I'm thinking these folks can...

If you've been following along, and you should be, you'd know that the tiny San Francisco brewery Almanac has been doing this local Farm to Barrel thing for quite some time now, incorporating uber-fresh locally sourced fruits and produce into their barrel aged sours. They've steadily been picking up steam and many an admirer - including me, even though I'm about 3000 miles away.

This one is made with Pluots, that unholy crossbreed of plums and apricots. Chuck several varieties of that mutant fruit (each of which has a fantastic, evocative name: Dapple Dandy, Honey Punch, Flavor Queen, Black Kat & Dapple Jack) into some old wine barrels along with Almanac's house "Dogpatch" sour culture (a mix of American and Belgian yeasts, along with some other critters, like a San Francisco sourdough starter). The result is quite a fine sour ale, if I may say so:

Almanac Farmer's Reserve Pluot - Pours a cloudy but bright, luminous straw yellow color with a finger of white head and good retention. The smell is very funky, some oak, lots of fruit, and something I can't quite place. The taste is beautiful, lots of tart fruit character, peaches, plums and the like. Some oak in the middle, finishing up with a fruit juice spritz. The sourness is there, especially in the finish, but it's far from overpowering. Mouthfeel is highly carbonated, juicy, light and crisp, with a small acidic note from the sourness. Overall, this is a fantastic little sour beer. A-

Beer Nerd Details: 7% ABV bottled (375 ml capped). Drank out of a flute on 6/14/14. Batch FR-P. Bottled 031414.

This is my favorite Almanac beer yet, not that I've managed to wrangle that many of them. I am, however, fortunate enough to have another waiting in the wings, so you'll be hearing more about Almanac soon enough. Indeed, I've been on something of a sour jag of late, a consequence more of availability than anything else, but I ain't complaining.