Undressed

Keg @ BBB. Pours hazy reddish brown with a small frothy reddish khaki head that leaves some sparse spotty trace on the glass while dissipating. Smell is malty and tiny fruity with dark rye bread, crispbread, lemon juice, sour raspberries, wood, moist soil, leather and lemon zest. Taste is very tiny sweet, sour, slightly malty and tiny fruity. Mouthfeel is dry, tart, tiny mouth-puckering and light to medium bodied. Finish is sour and malty with bread, lemon juice and leather. Perhaps a bit too sour but I like the malt base. Fairly clean and refreshing.

Draught@Stadin Panimobaari, Helsinki. Deep ambery brown colour, small beige head. Aroma is tart fruits, floral, some grass and mild wood. Flavour is mellow fruits, some sourness/tartness as well as some mild wooden and berryish notes.
Earlier Rating: 5/17/2015 Total Score: 3.5
Bottled@Tuulensuu (old backlog). Reddish brown colour with a small off-white head. Aroma is sour wood, some caramel, mild fruits, yeast, a bit spices as well as some slight berries as well. Flavour is sour and tart wood, with some mild malty sweetness as well as some yeast, cherries and mild spiced notes to it. Wellbalanced, and quite mouthdrying palate.

Tap@ Stadin panimobaari. Poured mahogany color with a thick off white head. Tart berries, but caramel as well. Sour, vinegary flavor, tartness and with some red berries showing up in the dry, woody finish.

(Keg at Stadin Panimobaari, 20160706) The beer poured deep brown and clear. Its head was medium sized and lightly brown. Aroma had sourness, caramel and berries. Palate was medium bodied and dry with medium carbonation. Flavours were berries, tartness, malts, mint chocolate and bitterness. Aftertaste was tart, sweet and bitter. A nice tart brew.

Draught at En Öl- och Whiskeymässa 2016 cons 2016-04-22 Göteborg AR: cherry, caramel, chocolate AP: dark brown, wee caramel colored thin head F: sour, wee coffey, floral, dry

How: Draught.
Where: Treskillingen, Stockholm.
Appearance: Hazy amber/red colour with a minimal head.
Aroma: Sour, fruit, berries.
Body: Medium body, low carbonation.
Flavour: Sour, fruit, acidic, berries.

Bottle, 500 ml from Pivoteka. Shared with JFK10000 and Miro. Pours murky brown, no head. Dried fruit, caramel, some wooden notes. Vinegar. Very sour. Can’t say I’m thrilled with this one.

One of the many sour ales by Alvinne brewed with their own Morpheus yeast, which was apparently ’plucked’ from the air in France and involves wild Saccharomyces cerevisiae (no Brett) and lactic bacteria; since it is also ’Undressed’, I assume it contains next to no hops. Sounds interesting. Some loose, pale yellowish beige bubbles upon pouring, but vanishing in seconds to virtually no head at all; hazy deep brown robe with burgundy (red wine) hue, some visible fizz on the edges but quietly so and disappearing after a while. Aroma of blackberries, blueberries, subdued but still sweet caramel, oak wood (as in: old furniture), vanilla tannins, red wine, raspberry vinegar, old dry madera, mouldy hazelnuts, sour cream, blue plum. Estery onset, lots of sour fruit (unripe plum, redcurrant, blackberry in abundance) with only a very restrained apple-like sweetishness in the background; mouthfeel is thinnish with oily and somewhat vinous qualities, smooth with near to no carbonation. Lactic acidity, as in really sour yoghurt or sour milk, shows up quickly and dries the palate till deep down into the throat; there is even a certain sherry vinegar-like quality to it, playing with much subdued sweetishness like a cat plays with a mouse he caught. Fairly vinous finish, almost red wine-like but thinner, with underlying caramelly and nutty malts, the ongoing dry lactic tartness and sour berries and equally drying wood, releasing some ’old’ tannins retronasally along with the sour red berries and something subtly earthy - perhaps a very faint echo of whichever minute amount of hops that have been used? In any case, do not look for hops in this one: if present, they have been reduced to an absolute minimum (probably because they still needed to be able to sell this as ’beer’ legally). In a classic ’oud bruin’ (Flemish red ale) and other traditional sour beer types, hops are only used for mere structural purposes, as a preservative, the way they were originally used centuries ago; here, the oud bruin style is taken to its logical extreme, hence ’undressed’. I can appreciate experiments in beer and Alvinne has done many, but they did not always turn out well; this one, however, I can appreciate, though I hasten to add that I do miss some carbonation... Think of it as something wine-like (remember the moniker ’burgundies of Belgium’) or even as a means to draw wine people into beer, drink it from a wine glass at cellar temperature and ponder over how this ancient beer style is still very much alive these days, thanks to the craft beer revolution.

At Maakun’s. Bottle shared by Maakun. Clear dark brown. Balsamico, wet old wood, grape pits, woodglue. Strong sour. Medium body, very light carb. Nice but a bit overwhelming sourness, woodiness & little else.