Skunked Saison Dupont?
 

While shopping at the local health food store (Earth Fare) I noticed they had Saison Dupont and Hennepin. Since I've never tried the saison style before, I decided to pick up both. While cooking dinner, I popped the Dupont. My first impression was that it was a very tasty beer and stood up to the taste descriptions I've read about the style. After a few more sips I started registering a skunk-ish taste/smell. I thought, maybe its supposed to be like that. Since this beer is so highly acclaimed, I drank 2 glasses.

To make sure I wasn't crazy, I opened the Hennepin. No detection of skunkiness here. Crisp, dry and spicy.

Has anyone come across a skunked Saison Dupont? It comes in a green bottle, which is the reason I'm suspecting UV damage. This is nowhere near as bad as the Old Speckled Hen I had a few months ago(clear bottle:( ).

The only one I ever had wasn't skunked at all. I'm guessing you got a bad bottle. Whenever I'm buying beer in green bottles, I always reach to the back/bottom of the display.

The other question I'd have is that if it tasted fine when you started drinking it, were you anywhere near sunlight? Putting your beer in direct sun can skunk beer in less than a minute. I'm assuming you just got a bad bottle, but the potential to have your beer skunk in the glass is there too.

I was drinking it around 5:00 inside, so the sun was on the other side of the house. No chance of glass skunking. I did grab from the front of the display. Probably a bad idea. It was sitting in your usual chilled grocery store beer display. I am always afraid of buying from the same retailer when I get a bad bottle.

In other good news, I just saw Old Speckled Hen in one of those nitro widget cans at my grocery store. No chance of skunking there!!!

I ceases to amaze me that breweries still bottle in green or clear bottles when they KNOW light damages beer.

Lots of belgians bottle in green glass and luckily I've never had a skunked Dupont. That siad, if you have one skunked bottle from a place, there's a chance they have poor beer handling practices and you should definitely be wary of the rest of their beer.

I am sad for you though. It is such a good beer.

I'm probably going to try one more from them (from the back of the case). If its not good, I'll have to stick with the Hennepin. As far as I can tell, Hennepin tastes very much like the Dupont I had without the skunk.

Sorry for thread necromancing, but I just got a bottle of this and the first thing I noticed was that it smelled like Heineken :(

I've never had the style before, so I was pretty disappointed; especially at $4.25 a bottle.

Very common IME.

Grab from the back of the shelf or seek out the (new in my area) 33 cl brown bottles in a 4 pack. If you are friendly with your beer purveyor, try to buy them right out of the case box (you may need to wait for the next case to come in).

New to my area too. I think this is the best way to solve the problem that I can come up with. A mighty fine beer when its not skunked.

I believe that skunkiness is a part of the Dupont Saison. I'm pretty sure I read that in Farmhouse Ales recently and it struck a memory chord with me. I haven't had one in a while (4-5 months) so I might be mistaken but I don't think so.

PTN