The first brew of the latest sixxer is the Jenlain "French Farm-Country Ale", as I picked up some cheap goat's milk cheese, sliced up a Fuji apple and busted out the Keebler Elf's finest Club crackers, and somehow the most fitting beer seemed to me to be the Jenlain. I've never heard of this beer before, but that's not surprising at all, as I am still "awakening" to a whole world, literally and figuratively, of beers that one doesn't find in the import section of the Piggly Wiggly.
The first thing that strikes me about this brew is its extreme clarity. Maybe it was just the Fuji apple that made me think of this, but I swear this ale looked like a glass of Martinelli's sparkling apple juice in the glass.
I can't exactly nail down the hops here, but they're present in both the aroma and the flavor, thankfully. They're not Saaz. They smell German in origin, and since I've been using Hallertauers myself lately that's what I first thought of, but the more I concentrated on the nose of this beer I caught hints of Norther Brewer too. This isn't to say that this is a "hoppy" beer in the American sense, as SNPA would be considered much bolder, but compared to the Gaffel Kölsch I tried way back in my recent beer "travels", this is much hoppier. Every time I get a nice whiff from the pint glass I'm rewarded with a wonderful nose full of hops that's so lacking in about all the mass produced beer in the USA. I say this because I think this is a beer that doesn't challenge the drinker to enjoy at all, and I think I could hand a bottle of this to a Heineken drinker and they'd really enjoy this, probably much more than their green-bottled stuff. Of course at 7.5% ABV, that Heineken drinker isn't going to be putting away too many of these without falling off their barstool before long.
This is a relatively dry beer. I smell the malt more than I taste it, and I really don't get a sense of the alcohol content while I sip on this. Unlike the Troublette, which got "hot" flavors as it warmed, this beer's bread and malt character sat up a bit more than while it was cold, right from the fridge. There's no hint of anything exotic or spiced, just a clean beer. Perhaps it's just a bit too clean.
I was spot on with the pairing of the snacks and beer here. This goat cheese is soft and creamy, but with a more pungent punch than your basic Philly cream cheese, and it goes fine with the basic bolder apple flavor of the Fujis. Just as there's plenty of different cheeses and crackers out there, and I could run the gamut from Saltines and aerosol cheese in a can, to some fine Bleu and home made baguette topped with perfectly ripe pears, but as my snack selection fits somewhere midstream, so does my opinion of this beer. I put the farm and country adjectives in quotes in the first paragraph because I don't think this is a rustic beer at all. There's no hint of bottle conditioning, and I'm positive its been finely filtered prior to being carbed with gas at bottling. It's a fine beer, but I still get the feeling I'm drinking a mass marketed brew. I could serve this to the Williams Sonoma type crowd proudly, if you get my drift.
