Ithaca Excelsior! Brute

Aroma: 8 | Appearance: 8 | Mouthfeel: 9 | Flavor: 8 | Overall: 8

Dry and somewhat aggressively sour and stinky. Love the feel, champagne like and showing no alcohol. Funkier towards the bottom. Stinky cheese, green olives and honeysuckle. Odd combo, totally works.

Aroma: 8 | Appearance: 8 | Mouthfeel: 8 | Flavor: 9 | Overall: 9

Sampled on 12/6/2009. Thanks to the anonymous beer lover at the Bruery tasting room that shared this gem with everyone. This sour ale pours a very opaque straw gold color from the bottle. Large sized white foamy head, with nice retention and good lacing. The aroma was tart, funky, musty and fruity. A medium to full bodied sour ale. The malts are fruity and orange with tons of tartness and lots of funk. This beer is near La Foille in its acidity, but there is more malt sweetness to help balance it out. Lively carbonation. Excellent balance. Very good sour. Mouthfeel is full and round. Finish is clean and dry. Aftertaste is tart and funky.

Aroma: 8 | Appearance: 8 | Mouthfeel: 10 | Flavor: 9 | Overall: 9

One of if not the most assertive and aggressive sour ales I’ve had the pleasure of enjoying. This was the last beer of an impromptu Friday evening tasting and good thing, because it seemed to cleanse the palate as well as destroy it for any possible beverages that would have followed. Rich, funky tart aroma of sour citrus and wheat along with a faint bouquet of fresh flowers. The aroma attacked the air above the glass in nice fashion. Cloudy golden yellow body with a medium to large sized head and plenty of spotty lacing. Medium bodied, slightly fizzy and very tart. Quenching and mouth puckering. Flavor mimes the aroma only it’s more assertive and delves deeper into the fruitiness. The bottle was shared amongst three of us and I was satisfied.

Aroma: 8 | Appearance: 9 | Mouthfeel: 10 | Flavor: 8 | Overall: 8

Batch#: E!010; Sampled September 2008
This beer easily produces a three-finger thick, pale, cream colored head in my 25cl tulip. The beer is a murky, pale amber color that shows an almost completely opaque, yellow, straw color when held up to the light. The aroma is pleasingly tart but with a slightly sweet, fruity, white wine grape like aroma. There is an interesting note that is sort of a cross between musk melon, honeydew and the sweat from someone who drank too much wine the night before. Fruit aromas of Muscat grapes, a musky tropical fruit, some tart / sweet apple and a touch of star fruit are all found in the aroma too. I like how the funkiness has taken a turn that I have never quite experienced in a beer before, the Brett is much more sweaty, but in a clean non-barnyard way, than usual.

Wow, much more dry and tart than I was expecting; with all of the fruit notes in the aroma I expected there to be a fair amount of sweetness left in this beer, but there is none at all. While bone dry this still has a nice, creamy body to it that is also note hindered by the fizzy carbonation that causes the beer to foam up as it rolls across the tongue. The texture of this beer is quite exquisite. The oak character here is quite soft and subtle; actually it is most noticed by it effect on the texture of this beer. There is a touch of oak-spiciness towards the finish as well as a slight woody oak note.

My second pour of this has me noticing a spicy oak component in the aroma that I did not pull out the first time around. Flavors of Lactic acid define the sourness in this brew, which, along with the oak really makes this seem like a dry, tart, oaked white wine. While in many ways this is much like a Lambic, it has a much softer feel to it somehow. Certainly the acidity is not approaching the levels of a hard Lambic and the funkiness is actually quite subtle (apart from the sourness). This does have a touch of the sweatiness that was noticeable in the aroma, as well as a touch of mustiness to it. As the beer warms up it picks up just a hint of sweetness, which does a good job of accentuating a nice white wine grape fruitiness.

A tasty beer, though it could use a boost in complexity (more funk would certainly suit me right). The aroma definitely is quite a bit more complex than the flavor, it promises ample funk and a substantial fruitiness that the flavor just doesn't quite deliver upon. Still this is quite enjoyable and it is quite easy for me to finish off this 750ml bottle.