Jason:

Moving on to our fourth and final in this series in regards to Belgian ales and Trappist ales, we are talking today about Brewery Ardenne and the Beer de Gard, this specifically, aged in bourbon barrels from the, I believe these were from Finger Lakes Distilling.

Craig:

Yes, I believe he gets all of his, not all of his barrels, I can't confirm nor deny that, but a lot of their barrels come from the Finger Lakes Distilling. Flavors of malted oak from its time and Finger Lakes Distilling bourbon barrels.

Jason:

Okay, so Beer de Gard, their Grand Cru Belgian style ale, and this is from Brewery Ardenne, so if you just head down the 90 about two hours, because that's how we measure time here in New York. There you go, how far down. Right, and then they're right just outside of Geneva, and actually if you draw a line due west from Bellhurst Castle, they're right back there in the countryside on this beautiful estate, and they're brewing up a storm there doing some great things.

I can relate to them because they have the same last name as me, different spelling, no relation. They are our brand new 2023 New York Belgian style Brewery of the Year for the New York International Beer Competition, and they are an eight-time medalist. Bronze, silver, gold, you name it, they've won them all.

Craig:

And just humble, easy to talk to, welcoming people, which to me is quintessential of Belgian beer. You know, of all the previous podcasts in regards to Belgian styles and Trappist beers, and we don't have to get too far into that, because it's none of that. It's right here in good old New York, Geneva, New York, but there's this sense of community, sense of welcoming.

Trappist beers, a lot of Belgian beers, are meant to be around the dinner table. Welcoming someone to your home, you would, you know, give them a table beer. You know, there's this essence of community when you talk about Belgian beer, and I actually found Brewery Ardennes, I said earlier, on accident.

I mean, it wasn't on accident. I definitely looked it up, and, you know, it wasn't like I was walking through the woods, and I just ended up with a beer de garde in my hands. Yeah, it was...

How'd this get here? Big Ellis Brewing Company. They're from Long Island, and they had won a bunch of awards and took over, I forget which brewery it was, but they bought a brewery in the Finger Lakes, and it was, they were my destination.

And like most of us, once we're out and about, you know, next thing I do is throw things in the GPS to see what else is around, and this Brewery Ardennes popped up, and an article about them popped up, and we go there, and the first thing you do is you get out in the parking lot, and there's beautiful large grounds, and you just look at this building, you're kind of transported. It's beautiful. It's just, yeah, it's just gorgeous.

It's, I believe, in the 1900s, you know, so we're talking 120 years ago. This was a 15,000 square foot sheep farm, and, you know, it sustained two major fires, I believe, like the 19, mid-1910s, you know, let's call it 1917. You get fact-checked me, I doubt it's 17, but I have 12 on my list.

12? Okay, there you go. But then again, I believe in the 30s, so like 1930, 1932, I'll throw a dart at that number.

30 sticks.

Jason:

30?

Craig:

All right, there you go. Two large fires, you know, and then basically all that's left today is their tap room, which they have fantastic food, but, you know, you walk, you look at this thing, and it's one of those, I gotta take a picture, because it just looks like, you know, a European-style building. It's not, you know, when we go into breweries today, especially in western New York, Buffalo, I love the fact that we are rehabilitating some old factories and storage space, but you basically aren't getting transported other than to, you know, the back room of, you know, the western New York brewery.

Now there are some gorgeous breweries in western New York, but none of them are in 120-year-old sheep farms. So you look at this, you're like, wow, I go through the door, there's, you know, an elder, I won't say elderly gentleman, even though I just did, I'll just say somebody that I could tell was older than me, just so happy to welcome me there, and later I come to find out it's the brewer and owner's father. Like, that's what he does now, the father and mother are the hosts, they greet you, and then, you know, it's a husband and wife couple, both Cornellians, they graduated from Cornell, and, you know, I believe Derek was an aerospace engineer, and said, forget that, let's, you know, let's just make some good beer, and, you know, he spent some time, I believe, in California, he won some national brewing, home brewing awards, some local brewing awards, came back, and, you know, his wife was a graduate of, like, the hotel program of Cornell, and, you know, I just, as somebody that's been in the biz for a while myself, and have opened some places, you could tell passion, you know, attention to detail, and they had everything, they checked every single box, I mean, I didn't go in there and take my first sip of beer and wasn't, you know, I fell in love with the entire package.

The beer was great, we tried some world-class beers on these podcasts, and, you know, these guys are close with some of them, but, you know, it's the full package. You walk in there, they have an extremely talented chef that provides traditional Belgian fare, you have all of these Belgian-inspired ales, their avant-garde collection is basically when they start doing some IPAs, or fruited sours, but even then, there's still this essence of Belgium and some funky kind of yeasty flavors with it. So, that is my love poem to Brewery Ardennes.

Derek has been great to me, we've done two different collaborations now. I also pour for their, at the Tap and Craft Festival, which will be coming up October 21st, I'll be pouring Brewery Ardennes beers exclusively at my little portion of the festival. I just love them, they embody the Belgian beer as well as the Belgian culture.

So, on to the actual beer. All of that for a beer de garde. We did, two years ago, we brewed a beer de garde.

If you know anything about Magic Beer here, I try to get the name beer into any of our beers, but it's actually a French style. It falls within the Belgian farmhouse ales, but beer de garde is originally from northeast France, which is the border to Belgium, and I see Jason with one of his beer fact cards ready to chime in or test my knowledge here.

Jason:

You're hitting it, there's nothing I'm going to have to add to this yet.

Craig:

Oh, all right, so fact checking me. Okay, so let's talk about the name beer de garde. You know, I took French, so I always try to over-pronounce.

I've said in other podcasts, you know, I'm Italian and go to any Italian while they're talking, let them, you know, bring up the words, or something like, you know, it goes from western New York nasal a accent to, oh, you're from Italy now. And whenever I speak French, it's actually to a fault. You know, I've done a lot of traveling abroad.

My wife would always kind of elbow me. She's like, you don't have an accent. Stop speaking with an accent.

It's insulting to the people. I was like, what do you mean to the people? That was kind of my retort.

I was like, you're referring to them as the people. I'm trying to be amongst them. So beer de garde, or beer de garde, it's a beer that has been kept.

So if you think about the farmhouse ale category, we were talking about Orville, and we kind of, you know, it's hard, like I said, with all Belgian styles to really put them in categories. The styles are more for us as consumers, and if you're judging a beer, than they are to the brewer who's just trying to make an artisanal product. So you have beer de garde, which is a subset of farmhouse ales.

So what does that mean? Farmhouse kind of just means, hey, we are brewing this to have a thirst-quenching sustenance and something to provide to our farmhands. Now this was the French equivalent because saisons, meaning season, it was brewed in one season for another.

Beer de garde was meant to be kept so that you had it on hand for your people. Differences between saisons and beer de garde. Now saison can be, typically, it's lighter, a more pale ale, and it could get some notes of a little bit more amber.

There are actually three distinct subsets of the beer de garde style. You have your blonde, which is pale, and then you have your ambré or your amber, and then you have your brun or your brown. So it's basically, you know, of those three different veins that you would be brewing.

The other interesting thing about beer de garde, since it's kept, it is accepted to brew it with either an ale or lager yeast. So a lot of times lager yeasts are used because you also kind of follow, kind of do one of two things with beer de garde. These are kind of like the hybrid beers of Germany, like Kolsch and Altbeers, where they use one type of yeast strain but then use a procedure that is not typical of that yeast strain.

So if you use a lager strain, and then lagers like lower temperatures, if you use a lager strain you should treat it a little bit more like an ale so that you get some more of those yeast flavors. Because really lager is meant to have less yeast flavors and as we've discussed in previous podcasts, those are the phenolics or spicy characteristics and esters, which are the slight fruity characteristics that come from yeast. So with a lager you don't really want much of those.

You want malt flavor and bitterness from the hops to balance it. That's about it. So with this being a farmhouse Belgian French style beer, you're going to want some of those yeast flavors.

So if you use a lager strain, put it a little bit higher temperature, give it a little bit more of the ale treatment so that it gets a little bit more of those flavors. However, if you use the ale yeast, flip that, reverse it, treat it a little bit more like a lager. Let it store for a little bit longer, brew it at a slighter temperature so you're not getting an over-pronounced yeast characteristic.

So like we've been repeating over and over, the key is balance. Now we have a nice balanced beer, then we do something like put it in a bourbon barrel. And it's very American of us because bourbon is an American product.

There's distinguishing factors to make something a bourbon, but we won't go into those. But the one I will touch on is to be a bourbon, you are in new charred oak barrels. So the key word is new.

So you cannot make bourbon from a previously used bourbon barrel. So now you have a surplus of bourbon barrels and all these different bourbon barrels either need a home, either you start planting plants in them. But then the beer industry was just like, hey man, there's a lot of these bourbon barrels, why don't we throw some beer in there and take some of the nuances.

So bourbon barrel aging kind of does two things. One, it allows you to age the beer. So this beer that has been kept has then been kept even longer, which develops some of the characters.

And anytime you age a beer, just think of fruit when it ages. So if you have a plum, it's not gonna be more like a prune. If you have a grape, it's more like a raisin.

If you have a cherry, it's more like a craisin or cranberry, more like a craisin. And the cherry is like a dried cherry and so forth and so on. You also with bourbon barrels, you get some of the previous content.

So you're gonna get bourbon, and with bourbon comes your oaky, slightly smoky, and then kind of vanilla flavors that come from the barrel. So you're gonna get some caramel, some vanilla, and whatever bourbon you're using, you should get some nuances of that bourbon in the beer. So this beer, DeGarde, the style got a little bit more popular later in the 90s, I think around like 1970.

And this is the hardest thing to pronounce. I don't know if it's duck or doik, I think it's D-U-I-C-K. They had a beer called, excuse me, Genlin, J-E-N-L-E-I-N.

So this Genlin really popularized it. And then what they started doing was corked and caged bottles, which this was from Brewer Dem. It's a very ornate, you know, champagne style bottle with the cork and the cage over the top of it.

And it started to kind of appeal to, you know, college students and other people that, because the college regions in France and Belgium at that time, these were more affluent people. Now, we talk about people in college, we're talking Broke and Bush Light. Back then, if you're going to college, you were doing very well for yourself or your family was, so they were looking for something a little bit more pinkies up type of deal.

So when they saw these bottles, and were enjoying them, they, you know, kind of caught on. And then other breweries started brewing Beard of Guards, and some would specialize in the blonde version, some would be more into their brune. By the looks of this Beard of Guard, this is more of the brune.

I'm sitting, I actually had popped this bottle and had asked Jason if he heard gunshot because enough carbonation in this beer where you always want to be careful with these corked and caged. The reason the cages are on there is because this is a very highly carbonated beer and that cork flew out and I am glad, you know, I didn't have my, it wasn't a Red Ryder BB gun and I shot my eye out. So it did end up across the room and you can immediately just start smelling some of the beautiful aromas.

So as I swirl my glass and give Jason a cheers, we're going to talk about those aromas. Cheers.

Jason:

Cheers.

Craig:

So I'm not going to go and talk about pink elephants so that you immediately think of a pink elephant. You tell me what you're smelling and then I will tell you what I'm smelling and there's no right or wrong answers.

Jason:

Well, I mean, instantly I'm getting, I get the bourbon barrel.

Craig:

So I get some oaky... Now that's why I like here because a lot of times, especially in wine, people go immediately like red currant, black currant, you know, gooseberry, very broad. You started very broad.

You said bourbon barrel, but what does that smell like? So within bourbon barrel, dissect it a little bit more for me. What, what are you getting from the bourbon?

What subsidiary smells, aromas do you get when you say bourbon? Because to me, it's kind of like saying this beer smells like beer.

Jason:

Because if you said bourbon smells like bourbon, but it just smells like the bourbon barrel. So I get the oaky, but I do get cherry, dark cherry.

Craig:

All right. Definitely picking up on cherry. And like I said, start broad and start narrowing down.

So even if you didn't get cherry, you know, there's dark fruits. We talked about that with our Belgian quadruple, dark fruits, meaning could be plums, cherries, figs, just, you know, dark fruits as opposed to your lighter fruits and then get down into it. Is it, is it more of a cherry or is it more of a plum, you know, or is it more of a raisin?

So to me, bourbon, because a lot of barrels that are used are either rum barrels or bourbon barrels. Every now and then you'll see some gin barrels. But what I usually get from rum or sorry, bourbon barrels is I get this kind of vanilla, almost slightly butterscotch caramel smell to it.

And that, that very well just could be how I perceive it. But, you know, I get those, I definitely get those fruity cherry notes. But oak to me, oak, you know, obviously smells like wood, like a good barbecue has those like kind of smoky flavors, but a lot of oak there's, it's actually I think vanillin.

So not vanilla, but vanillins are a property that gives you the vanilla flavor. There's a lot of that in oak and a lot of that in the bourbon barrel. So that's why a lot of bourbon has like a secondary note of vanilla.

So I'm getting a lot of the vanilla, butterscotch kind of, not so much butterscotch as caramel, that kind of mixed with a nice fruity kind of, kind of like I talked about with the quadruple where it had that fruitcake kind of very, you know, barley, dark cereal kind of smell. And then, you know, with the hint of red, dark fruits, but then drizzled with vanilla and caramel.

Jason:

After I huffed it about 10 times, I finally took a sip and the first thing I get is vanilla on the flavor. So the bourbon barrel on the nose, the oak on the nose, very vanilla on the taste.

Craig:

You taste that carbonation.

Jason:

I want to say toffee, but it's not sweet like toffee, which may be picking up the caramel.

Craig:

There you go. Not too boozy. One thing I usually don't like unless it's very, you know, again, Belgian beer is being all about balance.

Barrel aged, especially like bourbon and rum, you have, because you could just do an oak barrel. Sure. It doesn't have to be something with previous contents in it.

As a matter of fact, before the steel keg, it was all barrel aged. That's what beer came in. It came in barrels.

That's why they're still referred to as a half barrel and so on and so forth. The balance is there. I get the bourbon, but it's not, you know, some of these bourbon barrel aged beers is just like, it's an uppercut.

It's just, hey man, you like bourbon? And, you know, hopefully the answer is yes. Because if not, it kind of overshadows the base beer and the balance in Belgian beers and this style of beer should also, you know, that's why I think Ardenne does a nice job because there's a very good balance here.

Jason:

Yes.

Craig:

It's not overly bourbon-y, boozy or too much barrel. The barrel complements the beer de garde and the beer de garde complements the barrel. And that's what you should have.

I, you know, as expected with the pop of this cork, I mean, you taste this almost prickly, prickly on your, that's called the carbonic bite. Okay. There's a lot of CO2 in here, which this is bottle condition, which just basically means they allow the yeast to continue working in the bottle, which would then, because, you know, we talked about Orville and earlier episode about how the ABV changes and stuff.

Well, when something's bottle conditioning, you know how much alcohol is in there when you put it in. But then when the yeast continues to do its job and create more CO2 and more alcohol, you then need to understand that there's going to be a little bit higher ABV. Now, you know, Trappist breweries and people have been around for a while.

There's a lot of math that goes into brewing. It's a science, of course. So the handmaiden of science is math.

So when you start doing your calculations, knowing how much viable yeast and time you expect there to be, you can kind of estimate what the final ABV will be after a little while. But for the most part, there is a little bit of, you know, guessing game in there. You'll definitely be off a 0.1 to 2% ABV on these.

Jason:

Well, this comes in at a nice healthy 6.2, which is right in the middle of the road where it should be. And like you said, it's not, it doesn't pick up a lot of the boozy textures or flavors from the bourbon. You do get a little of the dry oakiness.

It definitely has a dry finish to me.

Craig:

Oh yeah. I mean, you take a sip of this and it's almost like you didn't sip anything. A lot of that is just the carbonation as well.

When you have that prickly kind of high carbonated beer hit your palate, it almost just bounces off, you know. I think of it almost like that hot skillet. When you throw a couple of, and the water just beads up on it and you just throw a little water in there and it starts to dance off, you know.

It's just, that's kind of what I think of the high carbonation in a very crisp beer. When you think of astringent, it's almost to the point where you can't stick to your tongue because it's just bouncing off. It's, you know, it's just that few drops of water kind of dancing around in a hot cast iron or stainless steel skillet.

Jason:

I like that.

Craig:

That's a good reference. You know, I get a little bit of nuttiness, a little, you know, it kind of has this like chestnut over, I don't know, maybe it's the Italian in me, that roasted chestnut flavor. Okay.

Now that's just coming from those darker malts, but it's one of those, you don't get too much of like a green hot bitterness. There's like a bitter finish to it that helps balance some of the sweetness that comes from this malt. However, you know, again, it's just got an overall balance to it.

And then you kind of finish with those barrel notes. So it's nice because the aromas to me were immediately barrel, you know, with the vanilla and slight caramel notes, a little bit of some fruit in there. So you get that on the nose and you'd be like, oh yeah, this was aged in a bourbon barrel.

But then you take a sip and it's not this overwhelmingly bourbon flavor. You get the base beer, but then what's nice is it finishes with a little bit of that bourbon essence. Not so much like someone went and poured a shot of bourbon in my beer, but you know, they just waved the bottle of bourbon over the top.

Jason:

Flavor and it lingers on the back of my tongue, especially.

Craig:

Yeah. Very, it's a dry finish. Yeah.

These are good dinner beers. My one buddy always makes fun of me because he, you know, used to ask me like, what's a good beer for dinner? I'm going to dinner.

I should bring it by dinner. And I would, I always say beer to guard. And he's like, why do you pick beers that I'll never be able to find at the grocery store?

He's like, I got to go to like two different places. Like when I go to Magic Bar, I got beer to guards, but. That's a good selling point.

Come on now. It's a way to get you in the door, but it's, it's one of those beers that a, the high carbonation, the malt characteristic. Now this just goes for beer to guards, not necessarily the bourbon barrel age.

Bourbon barrel age, I always say is more like have the, you know, it's like your cognac with your cigar. It's more of an after dinner with your smoking jacket by the fire. But the beer to guard, it has this malty base.

Even the lighter versions of it are more malt focused than they are hop focused. So to me, maltier beers go better with dinner. Because if you think about dinner, it's usually, you know, I'm talking more your traditional protein based dinners where there's some sort of seared or roasted meat, whether it's barbecued, smoked, pan seared, or dry roasted or braised.

These flavors kind of have the similar aspect of the malty notes, you know, kind of just like bread. I mean, beer and bread very similar, but this is a darker, you know, bread crust. This is kind of like your pumpernickel spicy bread.

So like those need something with a little bit more flavor, a little bit more character than, you know, something that you would be starting as an appetizer. So to me, Thanksgiving dinner, you talk about rich gravies, and you've got mashed potatoes and this, that, the other. This goes very well with that.

If you have a dinner that, you know, where meat's the star, you know, because to me, this is going to overpower a salad. If you're having, you know, a light salad for dinner, or if you're doing something of light preparation, like a poached salmon or anything like that, even your lighter pastas, like, you know, pasta aioli or something that is like a butter garlic sauce, this might be a little bit more overpowering. But you talk about a nice red sauce, you know, those things that call for like red wines.

This is something that, you know, would stand up to, you know, it matches the malty flavor that you get in the pasta itself, but then it has a little bit more of those bold flavors that you get in a red wine that match well with the more acidic and robust sauces. And then, you know, anything that is going to have a nice crust on it, you know, if we're talking about a leg of lamb, or you're, you know, even just taking that pulled pork that has a nice bark on it, and you're having that, you know, something like this is just going to really, really taste well with it. And then that carbonation really comes through and cleans your palate out.

And then, you know, you add any sort of potato, malt and potato. That's why you have malt vinegar on a lot of french fries. You just, you know, your meat and potatoes go well with a darker, maltier beer.

And when I think of something that's well balanced, you know, this is kind of like, you know, the Martins or the Oktoberfest little, like I said, you can use a lager yeast in here, which makes it a little bit more, you know, a little more thin on the palate, a little bit more crisp, but it really just drinks perfectly with any sort of meat dish.

Jason:

It's a good pairing. And like you said, from the pasta standpoint, even like a, you know, like a Malbec or a Syrah or something like that, it really matches, take the bourbon, take the bourbon barreling effect out of this and just through the beer to guard itself. It's really good for a pasta dish, beer and pasta.

And people don't usually think of that, but it, you're right. It does drink a little bit like a wine, especially with the dry finish on the end, like a Syrah, like a Malbec. So it would be, it's very comparable to those wines.

Craig:

And then, you know, if you think cheeses, if it was just a straight beer to guard, you know, this to me is more like an aged cheddar. It's something like a more dry, you know, something like the Dubliner style cheddar would be great with this. Even, even something like a smoked Gouda or anything smoked, just because it has a little bit darker flavor.

Yeah. But then when you add the bourbon, you know, one of the key principles of pairing is just to match intensity. So the bourbon adds a, you know, an intense, more intense flavor.

And that would then for me be that you can kick up the cheese. So I know we were joking earlier about Rochefort versus Roquefort cheese, big stinky blue Stilton or something like that. But, you know, anytime I think of bourbon barrel aged beers, another, you know, bourbon barrel aged style is barley wines are often aged in barrels and those are powerful enough and enough going on that they stand up to some of your heavier blue cheeses.

So where I think the base beer would do well with kind of your middle of the road, medium sharp cheeses, like a sharp goat cheese would be great with this. Once we had this bourbon note to me, those caramel notes, like if you think about, you know, the most decadent charcuterie boards you can imagine, you've got caramelized pecans drizzled over the top of, you know, whether it's a brie or a stinky, delicious blue cheese. I know a stinky and delicious don't usually go together, but, you know, that funk, you know, I talk about those barnyard, those, those funky, rustic blue cheese flavors.

They're powerful. They need somebody to put them in their place. And this is one of those beers.

Yeah. It's a beer of the God. It's going to, this guy, you know, it's, it's in the bourbon barrel.

So it's ready to stand up to that challenge of a very powerful cheese or a very robust meal. And, you know, Brewery Ardenne just coming through with a very nuanced, well-balanced beer. Nothing surprising coming from Derek and his, his brother, the cellarman of the operation.

So they, they do a fine job and just a very tasty beer.

Jason:

So just to give them a little FaceTime, because they're so local, 570 Snow Road, they're out in Geneva. You would be remiss if you didn't take the time to go out there and enjoy that campus. I, the first time I ever visited them, it was after dark.

So it, the ambiance outside is even incredible. And then you go in Stacey and Derek, very inviting. They invite the open European concept where it's not such the, so much the, the stuffy bar condensed on top of each other.

Look, they really like that open, almost a family.