The Background

When you get right down to it, the job of a critic is to tell you whether something is good or bad.

Most of the time, I’m able to convey that information in prose. I don’t often use numeric ratings because that has always struck me as inutile. Unless you’re going to catalogue everything, that universality of context is not necessarily helpful. Whether it’s out of five points or a hundred points, unless you can create justification in context against everything else, a single point of data doesn’t really matter.

Besides: It’s essentially thumbs up or thumbs down. The variable is the size of the thumb.

Sometimes I can’t even manage that.

The way the media tasting at the LCBO works is this: On a given day at a given time, most of the people who write about beer in Toronto show up during a two hour window and try a small sample of most of the things that are going to be in the release. Sometimes they don’t have everything. The cast of attendees rotates somewhat, but it’s full of familiar faces. Sometimes there are a lot of beers and it takes a very long time. In some release lineups there’s no good point of entry.

If you’re tasting beers you usually want to work your way from least hoppy and/or assertive to most hoppy and/or assertive. It reduces palate fatigue and prevents burnout from bitterness or sourness or tartness. It’s one of the first things you learn.

Sometimes though, you get a weird one at about beer eight and it’s so different from everything else that everyone in the room sort of looks at each other to see whether there’s a consensus to be reached. Is the beer incredibly clever and our palates are shot? Is the beer terribly, freakishly weird? Beyond the objective scope, can you even figure out whether you like it?

That’s what happened with Wild Beer’s Ninkasi. In a tasting with not a few Saisons, it was something of an anomaly. I promised myself I would revisit it if only for my own edification.

The Beer

The Wild Beer Company is based in Somerset and they’ve used a number of ingredients in this beer. It’s something of a kitchen sink. They’ve used locally sourced apple juice (and I wish they had listed the varieties), wild yeast (probably both from the apple skins and directly inoculated), New Zealand Hops and a Champagne style refermentation. The beer is 9% alcohol and is suggested as a “Celebration Beer,” probably in the style of Deus or Charlevoix Brut.

It pours a golden colour with a big white fluffy head that recedes fairly quickly in my snifter, leaving trickles of carbonation but no significant lacing.

The aroma is complex. At first there’s the vanilla and mild clove that you might expect from a Saison yeast. Lemon and an indefinable tropical fruit note dance around the apple core. The apple aroma is that combination of slightly musty apple skin and the malic explosion of the first rending of the torus of an unripe windfall. There’s something earthy on the sip and at the LCBO tasting I recall comparing it to the nitrogen rich potting soil character of an altbier. Call it dead leaves and the dirty ground. The apple character does not carry through on to the palate in the way you might expect and much of the character is spent in the aroma. The scrubbing carbonation and acid rather than refreshing, actually seems to deaden the tongue. The alcohol is massively warming and the heat in the throat and dryness of the beer are practically arid. The retronasal sting continues that autumnal aroma of a copse of leaves turning and dying. The staying power of the finish is massive and (what I’m guessing is) the wild yeast character that plays around the finish reminds me of the agglomeration of leaves and stems that would sit at the bottom of the bushel of Empire Apples in the wine cellar of my childhood home; that apple not meant to be overwintered which nonetheless hangs on until February and continues to make appearances in the lunchbox.

Thus equipped, I am now ready to speak for this beer both in the objective and subjective cases.

Is It Any Good?

It’s Brilliant. It manages to evoke the entire autumnal life of an apple from the orchard itself to the wrinkled old maiden in the bottom of March’s storeroom. I don’t think it’s a summer beer, so you should probably hang on to it until the first cold night of fall.

Do I Like It?

No. Sometimes I don’t want to have to work that hard to enjoy a beer. For me, it doesn’t meet the criteria I want in a “celebration beer.” While this is life affirming in its way, it’s not exactly Kool and the Gang, you dig?