Bearded Brewing’s Northwoods Ale
February 18th, 2008Brewery: Bearded Brewing
Style: ESB/Pale Ale (loosely) 
Serving: 12oz Bottle
Northwoods Ale is the second ale sent to me by Eric over at Bearded Brewing. This one intrigues me as its both organic and sounds truly unique.
This beer is brewed with maple syrup and wild rice. The rice gives it an interesting taste. Its a fairly light ale, but I don’t really have a category for it. I kind of based the recipe off a British Bitter, but it turned out much lighter and I also use a fairly standard American yeast
Let’s see what this light, British, earthy ale is all about!
Appearance - Eric warned me about the possibility of a ton of head pouring with this one, but my results left a healthy finger’s worth of white head. The color is a light gold and fairly translucent. A healthy amount of bubbles are apparent as well.
Smell - Somewhat yeasty, yet also sweet. This is probably due to the maple syrup. For some reason I’m also smelling a little citrus coming through, although I don’t know if that was intended or not.
Taste - This took me a sec, but I think I’ve got it. At first it tastes like a fairly carbonated light ale, but then the brown rice reveals itself as one is left with a slightly earthy taste as it dissipates off the palate. This sensation is probably most similar to Rogue’s Morimoto Soba Ale if that helps at all. The maple syrup is only apparent as the very last 1% of it finishes going down the hatch.
All in all this is a very tasty brew and I think Eric is onto something, but I think he could experiment by adding even more brown rice to see how far he can take the earthy hue without it being overpowering. This is not to say that this brew can’t stand on its own as it is very refreshing and I can easily see this stuff disappearing in an instant at a bbq/party/etc. Yet another excellent brew from the Bearded Brewing Company.
As a huge thanks to Eric for attempting to send me three of his brews (one broke in transportation), tomorrow I’ll be sending him a package with the following:
-Bison Organic Belgian (22oz)
-Deschutes Organic Green Lakes Amber Ale (22oz)
-Roots Organic Island Red Ale (22oz)
Overall I’d say this experiment was a huge success. We’ll definitely have to do it again some time.
