Review - Deschutes "The Dissident"

“You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.”
--Vaclav Havel.

Why "the Dissident?" Is Deschutes serving notice that they are now taking up a most unusual career of brewing exotic beers? If so, it is not because they have been cast out--no brewery has boasted more success of late than the boys from Bend--but because they are casting themselves out. The label suggests something of mid-century rebellion, with its spareness, the rising crow. It could be a handbill to a Sartre play. But enemy of society? Not with this beer.

The Dissident is brewed to the style of a Flanders brown, and in the "provision" strength of Goudenband. To a pretty large beer, Deschutes added candi sugar and Montmorency cherries, resulting in a beer of 8.8% alcohol. It starts out with a sour mash (I think), and two varieties of brettanomyces are used (Bruxellensis and lambicus) as well as a lactobacillus culture. (That's a lotta funk.) Finally, 20% is aged in pinot/cab oak barrels. The entire batch has been aged 18 months.

Tasting Notes
As you can see from the picture, it's a bright brown, with reddish highlights. The aroma is not as funky as Liefman's--there's none of that skanky brett, but rather a sweet chocolate and sour cherry-accented nose. As it opened up, the astringency of the sour diminished a little and the cherries muscled their way in.

It is a lovely and approachable beer. I find the three major notes of the beer come together in very nice harmony. The body is creamy and rich, with malt notes contributing a brown sugar/biscuit base. Onto this are balanced the twin flavors of tart/sweet cherries and the sourness of the yeast and cultures. The strength of the beer helps bring the flavors together, and I imagine the age is a huge help, too--though alcohol is not a major flavor note. The result is a beer that is neither heavy nor overly sour. It's inviting enough that you could swill a fair quantity before realizing what a whollop it packs.

It is a triumph of a beer. The brewery clearly put a huge amount of thought into this beer, not to mention time and money. None of that guarantees success, though. Yet I found The Dissident to be the measure of an authentic oud bruin in every way. The style is a very high bar to clear; in fact, I don't know of any American brewery to even try an authentic Liefmans-style old bruin. But Deschutes has cleared it, and the bar didn't even wiggle. A great beer and a very impressive effort. Let's hope this isn't the last batch we see of the Dissident.

Stats
Original Gravity: 1.090
ABV: 8.8%
IBU: 30
Malts: pilsner, acidulated, Munich, caramel, crystal
Hops: "Czech" (presumably Saaz), Tettnang, Hallertau
Adjuncts: dark candi sugar, Montmorency cherries
Yeast: brettanomyces bruxellensis, brettanomyces lambicus, lactobacillus culture
Methods: sour mash, 20% aged in wine casks (pinot/cabernet)
Availability: Extremely limited. As I write this (9/5/08), you can get some at the breweries in Bend and Portland. Don't delay, supplies won't last long.

Update: The good news is that The Dissident is still available at the brewery in Portland. The bad news? There's one fewer case.

Update 2: I forgot to include the sour-o-meter reading for the Dissident. Call it a three.

The Sour Beers of Flanders - Liefmans

In the past few weeks, we've seen the emergence of a wonderful trend in brewing: sour Belgian ales. This is the latest stage in an evolution that has taken us from witbiers to tripels to strong goldens (last year's trendy beer). The sour barrier was breached long ago (the mid-90s saw New Glarus's Belgian Red), but it remained an incredibly obscure tributary in the currents of American brewing. But in the past year, we have seen at least a half dozen acclaimed sour beers brewed or debut in Beervana: Cascade/Raccoon Lodge's line-up of many sour ales, Double Mountain Kriek, Russian River Supplication, Walking Man Blootvoeste Bruin, BridgePortStumptown Tart, and now Deschutes Dissident.

But not all sour Belgians are made the same. Their are of course the spontaneously-fermented lambic family, but also these two beers that are hard to distinguish--browns and reds. It doesn't help that there's no consistent method of naming. You hear "Flanders" or "Flemish" used interchangeably as modifiers, and "brown" and "red" used inconsistently. Generally speaking, browns are referred to as either "oud bruins" or Flanders browns (except Liefmans, the standard, which refers to itself, contra world opinion, as a "Flemish brown"). Reds are generally referred to as Flemish reds.

(In a separate post, I will review Dissident, but it's useful to situate it in a style. Deschutes has brewed a beer very much in the classic brown style, something of a cross between Liefmans' Goudenband and Kriek--reviewed below).

Things become a little clearer when you start looking at the world standards which define the style. In the case of browns, Liefmans pretty much has the the field to themselves. Reds comprise a broader field, but they are dominated by Rodenbach. Although both styles have many similarities (color, a balance of sweet and sour, strength and age), when you compare Rodenbach and Liefmans, you see some obvious differences.

• Reds - the sourness here is acidic and tart. It is a clarion sour that cuts through other flavors. While these beers aren't without sweetness, it is the sweetness of wine--subservient to the balancing acid. Rodenbach, in fact, used to advertise itself with the phrase "It's wine." The body is thinner than browns, befitting a beer known as the "burgundy of Belgium."
• Browns - The sour here is balanced by a heartier, maltier sweetness. Brown ales are thicker and sweeter, more like desert than a wine. They have a creaminess that is accentuated by flavors like caramel, dark fruit, nuts, chocolate. While the sour note may be aggressive, the sweeter, heavier body makes the beer more approachable than red ales, which are a leaner, more spare beverage.
  

Now that I've possibly added some clarity to the distinction, let me muddy the water: the yeast strain used in Liefmans came originally from ... Rodenbach. It has changed in the ways I describe above, but the final point is this--these old beers, from neighboring provinces in a small country, have long parallel histories that informed one another. So, to the reviews--

Liefmans
The brewery at Liefmans has been around since 1679. The Liefmans family operated it from 1770 to 1905. Through most of the century, it labored on as a small, antiquated brewery, but was acquired by Riva in the 1990s. It was bankrupt by 2007, and the world was close to losing a world classic--fortunately, the independent company Moortgat (brewer of Duvel) bought it earlier this year, and apparently, all is a go.

Goudenband (strong brown)
This is a beer for laying down and comes corked. Although effervescent, the cork comes out gently. It pours somewhat thickly and with a nice latte head. The color, as I mentioned earlier, isn't exactly brown. Hold it up to the light and you see a cranberry red at narrow parts of the glass, especially if you've decanted into a Rodenbach tulip glass, as I did. So here we enter the murky waters of what distinguishes brown from red...

The aroma is among the most distinct in the world--man, is it complex. You pick up a lot of the astringent brett notes in the chilled version. They are funky to the point you wonder if it's off, but as the beer warms, sweet chocolate and raisins. The funkiness becomes vinegar. Of all the sour beers, Leifmans alone has an aroma of age--Jackson calls it sherry, but it seems more like tawny port to me. Age and sweetness, yes, like port wine.

The flavor is simultaneously aggressively sour (I'm going to have to change the sour-o-meter--I hadn't recalled it being this sour) and comfortingly sweet. It is a thick beer, and meaty, not just in density but flavor, with a juicy, savory (salty?--yes, see below) quality. Alcohol is present, accentuating the port quality, and there are nuts and chocolate in the finish. Also, a distinct cherry note, but where does this come from? They make a kriek, but Goudenband Jackson mentions that the water used to brew Liefmans is high in sodium bicarbonate, lending a fluffy body. The body is near froth at all times, but even more, the bicarbonate may contribute a drying (and salty) quality in what is otherwise a very chocolately, long finish.

Kriek
The Flemish word for cherries confuses the beer world--a kriek lambic is substantially different from Liefmans, made with the brown ale base. Liefmans Kriek pours orange/red, like an autumn maple leaf. The head is pinkish-white, and the nose is cherry with a cellar astringency.

An approachable beer, with the cherries out front. They create a major sweet note. The sour is less pronounced, perhaps because unlike the provision Goudenband (8%), this is a smaller 6%. The sour is on the tart side--not so much of the funkier brett you find in Goudenband. Underneath the cherries are a resonant rooty (barklike) bitterness. The effect it produces is a cherry-chocolate creaminess.

You Say Flemish, I Flanders...

Folks, the arrival of Dissident creates a great opportunity to discuss the sour ales of Flanders, those not-really-brown oud bruins and the not-totally-red sour reds. In comments to the thread below, Anónimo raises some interesting questions and points out the growing number of American breweries tinkering with these old styles: Walking Man, Cascade, Russian River (not to mention Double Mountain and New Belgium). So, I will have reviews of the Dissident along with Liefmans, which is the classic of the style, as well as a general primer on what distinguishes these beers.

But briefly, per Jackson:

• Flanders Brown (Liefmans) - "The classic style, with an interplay of caramel-like malty sweetness and a sourness gained in several months of maturation (usually in metal tanks), is sometimes identified as Oud Bruin. The most complex examples have a secondary fermentation in the bottle. The most famous producing town is Oudenaarde (also known for Gothic architecture and Gobelin tapestries), not far from Ghent, in East Flanders. Oudenaarde's water, low in calcium and high in sodium carbonate, gives a particularly textured character to the beers."
• Flemish Red (Rodenbach) - "They are more sharply acidic, leaner, more reddish, half-brothers to the Brown Beers of East Flanders, with the additional difference that they are often filtered and pasteurised. Their sharpness makes them perhaps the most quenching beers in the world, and their acidity renders them very food-friendly. The sharp acidity, and some of the colour, derives from aging in large, fixed, wooden tuns."
  

In the mean time, don't miss the chance to try Dissident--on tap or bottled--for I fear the chance is fleeting.

The Dissident Takes to the Streets

A few weeks (months?) back, I mentioned Deschutes' newest foray into Belgian-style brewing: the Dissident. The press release just came out (though Bitter Truth readers already knew of it), and the release is scheduled for"the end of August." There's a strange kind of convergence about this news--last week we were debating the evolution of beer styles, with attention placed on Deschutes and Belgian styles, and then yesterday I mentioned Russian River Supplication, and now we have the Dissident, which the brewery describes thus:

Fermented for more than 18 months in isolation from the rest of the beers, The Dissident is a distinctive Oud Bruin, Flanders-style brown ale, with a fruity aroma and flavor, and the first wild yeast beer made by the award-winning Deschutes Brewery.

To give The Dissident its characteristic sour taste, the brewery used a wild yeast strain called Brettanomyces (also known as Brett) during fermentation. Known throughout the wine world for creating earthy undertones found in many European wines, Brett is used in the beer fermentation process to create strong flavors typically associated with Belgian beers. [I actually thought brett was a bane to wine and always welcomed in the manner of a hop farmer encountering powdery mildew, but hey, who cares about wine?--editor] Unlike English varieties that use traditional inoculated yeasts in the fermentation process, beers made with Brett take much longer to ferment and require additional barrel finishing time to balance the sour flavoring. In The Dissident’s case, this meant aging a portion of it in Pinot noir and Cabernet barrels for more than three months. Another key flavor component comes from the Central Washington cherries that were added 12 months ago.

Appropos of our discussion about the evolution of beer, I would like to draw your attention to what is almost a throwaway line in the press release:

Due to the wild yeast, The Dissident required special treatment and was held in isolation under lock and key apart from the rest of the brewery’s beers to avoid any cross-contamination. A secondary bottling line was also brought in from an outside contractor to facilitate The Dissident’s bottling and ensure the beer and wild yeast never touched the brewery’s machinery.

This is the kind of commitment to evolution that should make a beer drinker's heart sing. It means that the brewery didn't just casually decide to whip up a crazy Belgian style for kicks. It's intentional, it's experimental, and it's risky as hell. Whatever the beer ends up tasting like (and I hope it's great), this alone is worthy of praise. So: kudos to you, Deschutes.

Speaking of kudos, I'm really lovin' this label. I don't have a satori award for new labels, but we'd have quite a battle this year between Hop Czar and the Dissident if there was.