Cascade Brewing Blueberry Northwest Style Sour Ale

My one great beer discovery in Belgium was sour beers.  Gueuze, lambics, flanders reds and oud bruins….it doesn’t matter, I love all things sour.  Leaving there I wasn’t sure if I would be able to ever find anything comparable to some of the great stuff I drank in Brussels.  Fortunately for me there has been a blossoming of love for sours in the states and fortunately for them I enjoy (some of) the beers they are putting out.  One of the breweries that has garnered some attention lately is Cascade Brewing out of Portland, Oregon.  Weeks after arriving in Washington I heard about these guys and I snatched up a bottle of their Blueberry ale.  I liked it so well that I bought a second bottle to keep until Cloe was here because I wanted her to try it and she also loved it.  This beer is tart, crisp, perfectly sour and has a nice funk to it.  When poured it forms a layer of tiny pink bubbles that dies quickly into the red/purple brew in the glass.  When I drank this the second time I let it warm on the counter as I sipped my glass.  the longer it sat the more I was able to notice the oak (dank and musty almost) and blueberry aromas.  The carbonation tingles your mouth but isn’t overly effervescent.  I found this to be a very light and refreshing beer with a great balance of the barnyard/horse blanket funk that I expect from a great sour beer.  I highly recommend this beer to anyone who loves a great sour beer or even for those looking to get their feet wet.  I am heading to Portland next weekend for the Wizard World Comic Con and hopefully I can stop in to their barrel room.  I can’t talk about Cascade without having to mention something about the recent release of their Vlad The Impaler.  They have priced their 750 ml bottles of Vlad $30 a piece.  Many people on beeradvocate.com and elsewhere have deemed this their “jumping the shark” moment and I have to agree.  I think that charging this kind of price for beer is ridiculous and borders on extortion.  An analogy I gave to users on beeradvocate.com was this:  The comic book market did the same thing in the 1990’s.  There was a huge ballooning effect in the market and comic companies were charging extra for foil editions, variant covers and a heap of other gimmicks to try and get you to purchase their comics.  Breweries these days have taken to doing the same thing.  They know they can purposely make less of a beer, create buzz and sell it for a higher price.  This gives them the incentive to not make as much beer on purpose.  Why would they want to spend more money making more beer  only to get the same return they do by using this tactic?  I don’t blame them but in my opinion this hurts the market.  Remember when everyone went ape shit over the death of Superman?  Yeah…look up how much those comics are worth nowadays.  The only difference I see is that they (comics) still retain more value than my beer after I have pissed it out.  I am not bashing the brewery and I am merely speculating based on how I see things.  I will still continue to enjoy the beers produced by Cascade Brewing but probably not as often as either I or they would prefer me to.

Dark Horse Tres Blueberry Stout

While I was home and still in my Michigan beerphoria I picked this one up at the famous Sicilianos Market solely on name alone.  I needed to fill a spot in my six pack and it caught my eye. Tres Blue is brewed by Dark Horse Brewery in Marshall, Michigan and it is one of their holiday beers released in December, just before I purchased my bottle.  The moment I popped the cap on this beer I  could instantly smell the blueberries which, honestly, worried me a little bit.  Of course I realize that a blueberry beer should in fact taste like blueberries but the smell gave me the impression that it might be overly flavored.  As you can see in the photo it poured with a thick foam and it never faded and eventually settled to a nice creamy head that added to the overall creaminess of the beer.  The head reminded me of pancake batter cooking on a skillet.

The smell was just awesome!  Tart blueberries and roasty malt that gives it a lovely muffin or waffle aroma.  I even got a whiff of weed from this beer. Yes, weed.  It is now known as the weed beer in my house.  The taste was of unsweetened or bitter chocolate, moderate maltiness and a slight flavor of coffee; just as an American stout should be.  I really enjoyed the blueberry flavor in this beer.  Its like they brewed this beer with Eggo blueberry waffles.  Great as this is I can’t imagine drinking more than two of these in a sitting.  I do recommend this beer to anyone who likes stouts and likes to experiment with new flavors.  The uniqueness and balance of this brew would give me the confidence needed to pick up some of the other varieties they have to offer.