New Belgium La Terroir

During my side trip to Savannah a couple of weeks ago, I convinced Ma a sub-side trip to a beer store in Savannah was in order. While Georgia isn’t exactly a playground for great craft beer, her part of Florida is far less so. Naturally, a few interesting beers are distributed here that likely will never grace the shelves of New York City, so I picked them up for use that weekend.

You have hopefully enjoyed the related Tuppers’ post here, so I now present another find, beer from another favorite brewery, one that I’ve written about before. Fort Collins, Colorado’s New Belgium, who — surprise! — specialize in Belgian beer styles, often with an American twist, were always fond of Belgian-style sour beers, often using several yeast strains to create their classic takes on classic spontaneously-fermented Belgian beers.

La Folie is their classic, yearly Flemish brown sour ale, and while that beer has been toned down in recent years, it’s still usually a great beer. But there are many newcomers to the New Belgium sour lineup, and they make up a large part of the brewery’s sub-labeled “Lips of Faith” series.

Though I picked up a La Folie as well on that trip, today I’m writing about La Terroir, another sour seasonal which uses American hops to finish a classic gueuzelike sour ale. Everybody writes about La Folie since it’s kinda the grand-dad of the American take on Belgian sour beer. La Terroir is conceived as a “dry-hopped sour ale”, dry-hopped with Amarillo hops, which they say gives a peach-mango flavor and aroma. I agree, but if used too liberally, Amarillos take on more of an aspirin character. As any good sour ale is aged, New Belgium uses wooden barrels for La Terroir, letting it sit there and develop as it ferments, letting the house yeast work with natural yeasts found in the wood (likely also cultured to some extent, to remove the nasty beasts that might infect the beer negatively).

With La Terroir, then, I’m looking for a reasonably tart, quenching, and somewhat bitter beer with perhaps a little tropical fruit thrown in for good measure. Not too tall an order, right?

La Terroir pours a hazy, golden peach, throwing off a reasonable cream-colored, bubbly head. The nose is, true to New Belgium’s word, rather a sour peach (though I really didn’t get mango), with a little funkiness present, even a little bit of a pear aroma. So far so good — there’s nothing vegetal or infected-smelling in there, always a concern when you don’t quite know what your Lactobacillus or Acetobacter is up to during the fermentation.

Lots more pear greets me on the first sip, mixing with a bracing sourness that packs a little citric-grapefruitiness as well, with a bit of peach sweetness to round it out in my mouth. This. Is. Good. Heavy carbonation boosts the tartness perception significantly, and the taste sort of swings into a musty cherry territory, faintly, before returning to the sweet-citrusy flavor of a ruby red grapefruit. Just a phenomenally complex and tasty beer.

The finish is that same pithy, juicy sourness, and I can’t — won’t — stop drinking it. More and more, it tastes like fruit cocktail, in a good way, and yes, that includes the heavy syrup. I can feel the acid burn down to my stomach, and it’s quite pleasant, though I can see how drinking too much of this beer could lead to an unhappy night. In the meantime, though, yum. Just a beautifully-done beer.

As I mentioned, this beer is not available in New York State. Of course, it is available in a lot of other states, and if you’re out West, it’s everywhere when it’s in season. Around these parts, you may be able to find sour offerings from Captain Lawrence, such as the Cuvee de Castleton, Flaming Fury, or another occasional release. Russian River Brewing makes a whole lineup of sour barrel-aged beers as well, though the closest they come to New York would be Philadelphia. You’re probably best-off sticking to the Belgian classics, such as Cantillon’s lineup (like the Iris), Drie Fonteinen, or Girardin, to start. They’re all quite pricey, though, given the amount of time and care that goes into each batch. While I paid a mere $7.99 for this 22-ounce bomber bottle in Georgia, smaller producers will charge more.

I do hope that if you’re not familiar with sour beers, you give them a try — they’re the perfect foil to a person who says “I don’t like the taste of beer.” Even if they dislike such a beer even more than the bad beer they normally dislike, you’ve opened their eyes, right? And if you do enjoy sours, well, I encourage you to seek out New Belgium on your travels away from New York, or find the new ones arriving regularly in our market!