What if We Called Them “Farmhouse IPA?”
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A few weeks back, Justin Leigh sent me a batch of beer. The majority came in Dwinell’s new brightly-colored cans with geometric shapes and they contained vibrantly fruity, expressive ales. For a country that has fallen in thrall to beer with day-glo flavors of the tropics, these beers should attract a substantial, devoted following. They share many of the same flavor elements. Alas, the wrong word is on the can: “saison.” Unlike the word everyone is looking for (IPA), that one functions like a warning label. “Beware: this beer is acidic and challenging and while you might admire its complexity, you will have to be in a very particular mood to enjoy it.”
After the Dwinell arrived, I waited until I was in the mood for something fancy and cracked open a can of Ashfall, expecting an artistic workout of intense and funky flavors. Instead, the experience was very much like drinking a favorite IPA. Intensity, sure, but as with an IPA, it was all saturated pleasure, fruit, gentle sweetness, and funkiness in a wholly approachable package. The flavors were of course different, but in terms of mood, I realized Justin’s beers fit into that category I reserved for intense but pleasurable beers like IPA, not the category I reserved for gueuze and roodbruin. For a variety or reasons, we think of American barrel-aged saisons as the equivalent of moody arthouse movies, high in fiber but sometimes difficult. But in so many ways that’s just wrong. They can be just as much fun as a summer blockbuster.
I’d shared some of the beers with Patrick, and he agreed. After a podcast in which we’d tasted a Dwinell, we chatted about Justin’s beer and lamented that so few people would ever put them in their mouths. We joked he should call them “IPA” just to lure people in. Okay, farmhouse IPA. But you know what: maybe it’s not so crazy.
IPAs are objectively quite a ride. Whether we’re talking about hazies or West Coast IPAs, any beer a drinker can smell from two feet away are built for oomph. Yet after exploring the boundaries of the style, most of the beers labeled IPA now fall back in a readily-approachable middle space. The extreme bitterness is gone, as are the cakey sweet caramel malt bodies of old. Hazies went through their own battles with excess, and have come back off the sickly-sweet, milk-thick ledge. Now the best IPAs are perfumy in their aromatics, but feature enough balance that the fruit flavors are all soft and winsome. They’re little powerballs of flavor, but they don’t actually ask much of the drinker. They’re like the latest Avengers movie—easy to swallow and a lot of fun.
Many modern American saisons are, too. Like IPAs, they went through their own battles with excess. The earliest arrivals, before breweries barrel-aged them, were overly yeasty. There was no “too much” in terms of yeast character—the gnarlier the phenolics, the funkier the ester profile, the better. Early barrel-aged versions weren’t just kissed with wild yeasts and bacteria, they were flooded with them. Aggressively sour or dry, they were the same kind of challenging tipples of the 100-BU IPA era that came before them.
Gorgeous beer—off-putting name? (Source: Dwinell Country Ales)
But brewers have figured them out. I was so impressed with Justin’s beers because they contained all the little pleasant touches that make IPAs enjoyable. “An everyday saison—what does that look like?” he asked himself when developing the canned products. He began composing familiar flavors drinkers like, keying in on those fruity flavors that come from yeast and hops (and often, fruit itself). Acidity is an asset in making those flavors pop—that’s how it works in actual fruit—but he understood that these should be accents. He achieves this by adding un-aged beer, working with younger barrel-aged beer, and blending to taste. “The main thing is blending down acidity,” he said.
He also works with light dry-hopping with American varieties to add another layer of fruitiness and aroma. It happens to add familiarity as well, not just acting as a doorway into unfamiliar beer, but actually bridging the familiar to other flavors that might, on their own, give drinkers pause. He can-conditions his beer, which creates a final layer of fruitiness.
Dwinell specializes in these kinds of beers, and Justin is making more of them than most breweries. That gives him an advantage. Yet he’s not on his own. Many American breweries experiment with these beers. They’re fun to make, and when they work, they are absolutely amazing little masterpieces. They have never sold very well, but brewers make them because they display all aspects of the brewing art. Brewers have a hard time resisting their layered, often subtle complexity.
The one thing we know for certain, without even a hint of ambiguity, is that the word “saison” does not attract drinkers. A few breweries and a few beers have achieved success, but it’s despite, not because of the word. Justin regularly modifies his “saison” with equally dangerous adjectives like “Brett” or “table.”—other words that scare off drinkers. It’s too bad because I am convinced beers like Ashfall and Bumper Crop and Slow Motion have broad appeal. The word IPA no longer has much connection to style. And if “saison” reads like a warning to drinkers, IPA is a reassurance, a way of saying, “You’ll like this beer.”
So consider this proposal: try calling them farmhouse IPAs. People will ignore the “farmhouse” bit until they try them, but before they realize they aren’t really IPAs, they won’t care.