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October 1997 Home
Reflections Upon the Summer Past
The 5th Annual Kentucky Bourbon Festival
Kitchen Table Tasting Goes to the Home of Booker Noe
Click on any of the book covers below to get ordering information.
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Stephen Beaumont's Brewpub Cookbook |
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A Taste For Beer |
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Great Canadian Beer Guide |
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A World of Beer |
Taste of the Month
September began with a trip to Montréal to take in what to my experience is the best beer festival in Canada, the Festibière de Chambly. It was there that the Taste of the Month was found.Despite is relatively wide availability in the United States, I had not sampled the Samuel Smith India Ale prior to my Festibière visit, and so was delighted to see it being poured by importer Peter Lopaty at his Bières du Monde/Beers of the World booth. I was even more pleased by how it tasted.
In the style of British IPAs, the Sam Smith India is not a hoppy monster like so many American versions, but a more subtly bitter and complicated brew. The typical Samuel Smith fruity maltiness is there, as is the faint sulphury character that I have never been sure whether to attribute to the Yorkshire Square fermenters the brewery still uses or the clear glass bottles they stubbornly insist upon. But that is not nearly where this beer ends.
It seems to me that the extra hop addition that qualifies this beer as an India Ale also gives it a most intriguing mix of flavours. Fruitiness jostles with a very light nuttiness, leafy-woody bitterness contrasts with the relative sweetness of the aroma and a good measure of quaffability brings it all together. All told, it makes for a very nice taster at a historic fort on a beautiful fall day, and I would imagine, an even better pint in the pub on an early winter's afternoon.
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