herbs

On the eighth day of Beermas I went and got for me
Eight spice rack maidens
A taste of one of seven seas
Six alarms a-ringing
A high-powered ring of fire
Four silent moths
Three frisky parrots
A bottle but not two cans
And more than half a liter of perry

The maids a-milking are also a little hard to come up with, although there’s always the cop-out of the milk stout. In this case, we can focus on the maid, the woman who works in an outdoor setting, more or less, engaged in food production. So this is the fruit of a different animal’s labor, with a little addition from the field or garden, but you still need people to collect and process it. The honeycomb makes Rosemary sound like a mead more than a beer, but it is a petite saison. Well, there is some honey in there…maybe the “True History of Beer” guy would see this as evidence that mead and beer get lumped in together. Let’s see what Dúa is going to do for us.

Very light straw color, pleasant amount of head, vaguely saline-honey aroma. The flavor has a much deeper sense of honey and flowers, and in fact rosemary. There’s the subtle perfume that you might get with a saison, but the taste is very heavy on the herbal and meadowy. It has a “natural” candy quality, some kind of sugared flower that you might get in an old timey candy store or pastry shop. It takes on a little more vinaigrette character, with just a touch of sourness coming up, once you get about halfway through the can. The flowers wilt away a bit, but the honey stays front and center. It feels like a springtime or early summer beer, something you’d have on a picnic, enjoying the first day you don’t need a jacket or something. Eighth day down!