Bottle Share: Dinner Party turns into Rare Bottle Night !

Dinner Party turns into Rare Bottle Night !

So after spending a relaxing Sunday evening with some friends over in the east end, we decided it was time to have a little dinner party to kick off the summer season this weekend, which unofficially starts on Memorial Day, at least thats when the tourist start piling into town !

Things slowly escalated over the course of the week when I decided mac n' cheese and a fresh spring green salad would be on the menu and out came a list of bottles to be shared as well as the addition of a pie for dessert. I won't bore fellow foragers with pics of the meal but here is what shook out for bottles

on this tasty evening !

My thoughts on the evenings selections: 

Allagash Little Sal

(Lots of murky swamp juice on the nose, actually quite unappealing to me based on the nose alone, but the flavors are more complex and a lot more appealing with nice touches of lacto tartness, sweet blueberry fruit, earthy fruit stems and wet funky wood notes as well.)

Upland Blackberry

(Definitely one of the better Upland sours I have sipped, some just being acetic vinegar bombs but this being a fresh bottle from the fall it had plenty of ripe blackberry flavors and layers of old funky barrel character to balance out the focused acidity.)  

Hill Farmstead Mimosa

 (Needless to say I was super stoked to dive into this bottle for the first time, one of the few HFS bottles I had yet to try ! Overall its was a tasty beer, lots of vinous barrel complexity, great citrus character was surprisingly still apparent as I believe this bottle was released a couple years ago. It had a definite booze character that I wasn't expecting, similar to Peche n Brett from Logsdon, but then I noticed it was 10% and everything made sense. Was it mind blowing, not really but maybe when the next batch is released Ill get a chance to try this fresh, but either way if you see this bottle being opened at a tasting, grab a sip it certainly become quite the whale to find these days !)

Cantillon Fou Foune

     (This is by far my most coveted of all current Cantillon bottles in production. The balance of juicy apricot flavor and the sour dusty funk that Cantillon is well known for just work harmoniously in this beer. I've never been disappointed with a bottle of this and its probably one of the few Cantillons I could polish a bottle off of by myself. Not that Im selfish enough to do that with so many fellow foragers to share tasty bottles like this with !)

Side Project Brett Project Batch #1

 (Another super limited beer from Cory King, batch one was a saison base fermented with a single brettanomyces strain that was isolated from Cantillon by BKYeast and aged in wine barrels. It was definitely soft and light handed, I am assuming it was aged in chardonnay barrels as there was a definite creamy, toasted vanilla character that rounded out the very horseblanket forward palate with complexity of lemon peel and foggy minerality.)

Jolly Pumpkin Lupulo de Hielo

 (Another limited beer that was a special release for a Prostate Cancer fundraiser back in 2011. Very unique interesting beer with a tart golden sour base, lots of sour lemon, herbal grass, musky oak and a  round creamy mouthfeel.)

Oxbow E'toile de Maine

(This was certainly the biggest disappointment of the night. There lies a good amount of potential but as it stands on this night it was completely flat and uncarbonated with traces of buttery diacetyl apparent in the nose. The butter did fade off a touch and the underlying framework is there for the beer to condition up and become something quite tasty, but I was not to happy that I dumped $15 down the drain on something that probably shouldn't have been released into the public just yet. If you have bottles of this, keep them out of the fridge and let them sit in a part of your house that is around 70 degrees for a week or two and hopefully you will have better luck with it than we did !)