I put this under spice and herbal because well it is. It is also sour like a lambic. Best description is probably a cross between a unfruited lambic and a gruit ale.
It is unhopped and you can tell brett is in this.
I would recommend picking one up if you can find it.
Also, it's a colaberation between Sam Calagione of Dogfishhead and Nørrebro Bryghus(brewery) out of Copenhagen.
From the US importer's website:
Quote:
The Beer
Old Odense Ale is a 7.5 ABV beer that defies any known beer style or category. On the label we describe it as “Ale brewed with maple syrup and herbs”. But this says precious little about this bright and copper coloured beer with a very sparse and fragile head. The aroma is extremely complex and spicy, with notes of anis, tobacco, brettanomyces, leather and dried fruits. The body is rich and with a delicate sweetness that balances the sour tartness, making it far more accessible than a Belgian lambic, which would be the only well known style to which one could possibly compare Old Odense Ale.
The Creation
Following an initial contact between Sam Calagione and us at Nørrebro Bryghus, we agreed that Sam would visit Nørrebro Bryghus and do a guest brew in June 2007, and when we started discussing which beer to brew, Sam was quite adamant that it be an old, traditional Danish beer style. We therefore unearthed the obscure ‘Odense Old Style Ale’ web page with a translation of a 15th century pre-hop era gruit ale recipe from the town of Odense, and the process of converting this into something that might be brewed on a modern brewing system commenced. Not an easy task, which this list of ingredients might illustrate: Pale and dark barley malt, oats, fine syrup (in our translation: maple syrup form Sam’s dad’s farm in Massachusetts), smoked dark syrup, fir branches and fir bark, wood sage, hyssop, blackthorn berries, woodruff and star spice.
The actual brewing of this beer was as fun as it was crazy and nerve-racking – stuff for an entire article (that actually has been written, but is yet to be published). Suffice to say here, that the amazing souring of the beer, that happened within 48 hours of fermentation, must be due to the potent ‘herbal juice’ hand squeezed by our honoured guest brewer from the herbs in the 7 huge gauze bags, and added to the wort kettle during the boil.
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Old Odense
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