Until just about 15 minutes ago I thought that Prairie Artisan Ales was out of St. Louis. There I was, typing away and thinking about how it was a place we didn't visit on our St. Louis trip back in 2017. I discovered that, in fact, it's an Oklahoma brewery and that I had cornfused them with Perennial Artisan Ales which is, in fact, in The Gateway City. Do any other Sooner State breweries distribute here in Wisconsin
I hope that I can be forgiven because Oklahoma is one of the more nondescript states in the Union. At least it is from my vantage sitting here in the Upper Midwest. When I think of Oklahoma, beer does not come to mind. It's almost as if beer actively avoids associating itself with the Sooner State. Instead, I know it for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that bears its name and the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995. Fairly or not, I believe that Texas has a lock on the popular imagination when it comes to the likes of cowboys, oil, and steak. Sure, parts of Oklahoma belong to the Great Plains but, really, that's Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. It exists in this liminal state between the Plains and Texas. Like I said, nondescript.
During my exhaustive interweb searches about Prairie Artisan Ales' home, I discovered that Sooners love their fried onion burgers. From what I can tell, the Oklahoma fried onion burger is no mere hamburger with fried onions on top but rather its unique terroir comes from frying up a bed of onions and then flattening a ball of ground beef on top of it so that the marriage of the caramelized onion essence and the beefy goodness is consummated with all due haste. And that's a good thing, if you ask me. However, I was not able to find out which onion one should use. Yellow? White? Red? Vidalia?
Now, you may recall my previous pickle beer review in which I postulated that some craft brewer somewhere would move beyond the brine/sour/spicy paradigm which prevails in the pickle beer world today. Well, Perennial Prairie Artisan Ales has done just that with their Spicy Pickle Monster.
I do not see the words "natural flavors" anywhere on the label. Instead it's a "sour ale with spicy dill pickles..." - familiar territory so far - "...orange, lemon, and lime". Citrus! They've added citrus! Not totally out of left field, I suppose, with lime cucumber being a not unheard of combination. (Beware lime cucumber Gatorade!) Let's try out this novel take on the venerable(?!) pickle beer.
Cerveza de los muertos!
However it may have tasted, I was impressed with how Spicy Pickle Monster looked. A big white head snapped and popped as it churned its way down to the bright yellow liquid that had just a tinge of haze. A fair number of bubbles were rushing up to meet the foam. Taking a sniff, I found that dill came first followed by something sweet that I finally decided was akin to orange juice. Then I noticed a briney salinity which paired well with the lime I also smelled. To top things off, there was a bit of the floral in there too. Except for the floral element, all the scents were rather pungent which made for some fine sniffin'.
Unsurprisingly, I tasted a beer with a light body. Fizziness was a little on the light side. A very healthy Gose level of salinity and a big dash of tartness stood out immediately. As I savored my sips, I tasted a wealth of flavors: some dill, a citrus medley that would make 7UP green with envy, and a modicum of grainy sweetness. Cutting through it all was a low-level dose of spicy heat from habanero, it seems, that gradually gained in strength with each sip.
That spiciness and all those citrus flavors prevailed on the finish. A little tartness came through, but not much and the dill popped up too, if only briefly. I will note also that, while the heat built with successive sips, it eventually plateaued at a decidedly non-lethal point.
The big surprise here for me was that the dill (i.e. - pickle flavor) seemed happy out of the spotlight and content to be part of the gustatory ensemble. I would like to have had a tad more of the dill flavor but, when Spicy Pickle Monster breaches the 50 degree mark, you can taste all of the flavors mingling with one another with no one taste overpowering the rest. A bit like a good album mix where each instrument and voice is up in the mix but they all have room to breathe and be heard. Same here. The flavors are all discernible and more or less stand on equal footing yet they blend together for a greater whole.
A fine take on the pickle beer that deftly orchestrates a symphony of flavors. No doubt it would be a good companion to an Oklahoma fried onion burger.
Junk food pairing: If you really want to go for excess, then grab a bag of Old Dutch Spicy Dill Pickle Chips. Personally, I prefer leaning into the fried onion burger motif and instead have plenty of Old Dutch Onion & Garlic chips on hand when I savor a Spicy Pickle Monster.
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