Saturday, July 28, 2012

Beer Review: Sierra Nevada/Russian River collaboration - Brux Domesticated Wild Ale

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Style: Belgian-influenced American Wild Ale
ABV: 8.3%

Fun Fact About the Breweries: 

This is the 2nd annual collaboration between Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. and Russian River Brewing Co., two of the best and brightest in the world of craft beer. Sierra Nevada is distributed literally everywhere, which mean most folks take their brews for granted. In addition to making really solid standard stuff like their pale ale and various IPAs, they do a handful of specialty releases every year, like this one here. 

Russian River, of course, is like the hottest shit on the block for beer nerds. They're like the Ryan Gosling of the craft beer world. Everybody wants them some of dat.

Thoughts: 

I opened one of these bad boys up to share with Cassie's dad and step mom on their recent visit to our place. This is a very limited brew, only made once. I actually purchased 2 bottles, one to enjoy now and one to age a year or so. Wild ales are pretty interesting because they all age differently depending on the various yeasts that are used. This one in particular uses Brettanomyces bruxellensis (hence the name, good one nerds!), which tends to get more sour and funky as it ages. The yeast itself basically causes food spoilage on its own, but when mixed with other yeasts in beers, they basically do battle at a molecular level and just have all kinds of crazy effects on how the beer tastes depending on how long you let them duke it out before drinking it.
Seeing as this beer was probably less than a month old when I opened it, it hadn't gotten very sour or funky yet. It was actually very smooth, refreshing and nicely carbonated. It had lots of fruit flavors going on, pear being the strongest, and just a bit of spice. Very well rounded. If I see any more hanging around the shops, I'd be tempted to get one more. Should be interesting to see how my other bottle of Brux tastes in a year or so, depending on how patient I am. 

Rating: 4.25/5

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