Allagash Avancé
Allagash Avancé is an American Wild Ale, 9.7% ABV, bottled on 07/14/16, opened on 1/22/17. From the Allagash website: The beer is brewed with multiple sugars including molasses, date sugar, white cane sugar, and dark rock candi. It’s then fermented with three different yeast strains and aged in oak bourbon barrels for a year with Lactobacillus and Pediococcus. After transferring the beer to stainless we add one pound per gallon of fresh, locally picked strawberries and age it for another six months.
The beer pours with a murky deep orange color that has a nice amount of dark strawberry red as well. Not much head to speak of at all, maybe a inch of fizzy foam that fades quickly. The aroma is dominated by a tremendous amount of fresh strawberry. There is a tartness to those strawberries, and a slight hit of the bourbon barrel also comes out on the nose. Yowza, this is certainly a sour beer! Sweet strawberry jam leads off the taste but is quickly bombarded with an enjoyable potent sourness. I do get more of the bourbon barrel in the taste than I do on the nose, it compliments the fruit quite well but is still a more subtle element of the beer overall. A fantastic amount of natural strawberry flavor is ever present in the taste, wonderfully done.
Big thanks to Josiah for setting up Raymond with a bottle of this, and to Raymond for sharing this with me. This is one of those beers that I’m still thinking about days later.
