Peach Porch Lounger

Maybe 6 weeks ago, I was at the local Liquor Locker making a small beer run.  I came across a strange concoction from a brewer that I don't particularly care for, but I had to have it.  I've had beer with a variety of fruits before, but finding something with peach is fairly rare.  I can only think of one other instance where I've had a peach beer.

I bought it, it sat in my cellar for a month, and I finally put it in the fridge the other day.  Last night, after doing some online racing with my friends, I popped the top.  While it was sitting in my snifter, I started to read the label and was somewhat disappointed.  It was made with peach juice, not actual peaches.  Sometimes brewers add real fruit to the beer, sometimes they simply add fruit juice.  More times than not, when they add juice, it imparts an 'artificial' taste to it.

With this newfound information, I wasn't expecting good things from New Belgium Brewing's Peach Porch Lounger.

This beer is from their Lips of Faith series.  I'm not entirely sure what the series means, though I'm guessing it has something to do with a leap of faith in trusting that the brewer knows what they're doing because the beers in that series are all fairly 'unique' and by unique, I mean strange.

Upon further investigation of the label, I learned the beer was made with molasses, lemon peel and something else that escapes me as I type this, probably just the peach juice.  Nothing really jumped out at me.  I continued reading and discovered the beer was made with Brett yeast (the best kind ever) and once I went to BeerAdvocate.com, I learned that it's not classified as a fruit beer, but as a farmhouse ale or saison.  Saison is French for season, and the beers were typically brewed in the winter for consuming in the summer.  It started near the France-Belgium border and because back in the day (a bazillion years ago) cleanliness and contamination weren't in vogue, different kinds of fermentations took place during the brewing process and each farm (thus 'farmhouse ale') had a distinctly different taste.  These beers that took place near the France-Belgium border apparently had the most popular flavors and we're still drinking them today.

So, Peach Porch Lounger is a farmhouse ale with a yeast from the Wallonia section of Belgium, called Brettanomyces, or Brett for short.  It's the bomb.  In addition, the beer contains molasses, lemon peel and peach juice.  At this point, my disappointment is waning and it's getting my attention.

Side note:  You don't drink good beer at freezing cold temps and you damned sure don't use a frozen mug.  There are basically two kinds of beer--lagers, which are usually fermented at colder temperatures and ales, which are typically fermented at warmer temperatures.  When I say warm, I don't mean hot, I mean 45-55 degrees.  When something is really cold, its smells and tastes are somewhat muted due to the cold.  When something is warm, you can pick up subtle scents and flavors.  Bud Lite is a lager and tastes like shit, so it's ok to drink them freezing cold out of a frozen mug so you don't taste the shit you're putting into your body.  But ales are nectar of the gods, and you sip and savor them, enjoying every drop, so you keep them slightly warmer so you can smell and taste what the brewer has presented to you.

Ok, with my Peach Porch Lounger sitting in my snifter slightly warmed now, I took a big whiff.  Saisons with Brett yeast provide a funky, wild smell and flavor, almost tangy-like.  It's like the flavor profile of fruity yogurt.  I couldn't really detect which fruits were there, because with saisons it's like walking into the fruit section of the grocery, all the scents mixing together.  The molasses gave it a cinnamon-like smell.  So, a tangy, fruity, cinnamon smell.  I can work with that.

I took a sip.  Then another, and then another.  Cinnamon and alcohol dominated.  Peach never gives off a particularly aggressive smell or taste and in this case, the peach was very subtle.  After a few sips, the alcohol taste starts to wear off and the molasses starts to shine. 

With that crazy yeast, the funky taste and feel were there.  It was crisp from the peaches and lemon peel (both acids), it was spicy from the molasses, and it was tangy the whole way.  In the finish there was a bit of heat from the alcohol. 

It was full of strangeness, from the name to the ingredients, but it all worked.  It was very high in alcohol content and that helped as well.  It was good stuff and well worth whatever I paid for the bottle.