Fat Lips

In the beginning of our love affair with suds, the known universe was limited to whatever our shoulder tapping foraging produced. Back then most of our decision making was determined by whatever 12 packs were stacked high with $8.99 price tags front and center.
Fat Tire, the flagship beer from New Belgian Brewing Co., was a common buy and a welcome bargain bin find. When our elder friends finally scored fakies, trips to more specialized beer destinations produced Trappist ales and fancy accompanying goblets. A drunken realization of New Belgian’s bottle-cap design led to the great epiphany of drinking the Fort Collins micro brews in glasses branded by Chimay and Unibroue; $8.99 never tasted so good.
As our taste in beer grew, we grew away from New Belgian. Occasional six packs were bought, but the special release bombers and cork-tops that our eyes were trained to find never appeared from Fort Collins. We just assumed they didn’t exist…
As is the case on the rarest of occasions: we were wrong. New Belgium not only makes a grip of ales we’ve never seen in California, but they have been making sour beers for years — apparently even before the Great American Beer Festival recognized the style as a category in their annual ale orgy.
La Folie is a both a sign of the times, and a sign of all time. Aged in French oak for one to three years, blended and bottle conditioned just like its Flemish forefathers, this red ale bleeds…red. Tart and plucky in all its woody tannic glory, little carbonation produces a whole lot of lightness. A weird lightness; the kind that betrays the mind into guzzling something far from the yellow end of the color-wheel in 90-degree heat. The yeasts and age make for cherry and rhubarb overtones that digress into a malty whiskey mash, the perfect alcoholic accompaniment to the dog days of summer.
Awesome disclosure: New Belgian’s brew master’s is a former Rodenbach heavyweight, giving an even further validity to La Folie. Don’t call it a clone: this beer manages to bridge the gap between Rodenbach and Duchess de Bourgogne, while maintaining a very accessible drinkability that begs for better distribution (please). The ‘Lips of Faith’ series is a glimpse of what has been going on in the cellars of one of the fastest growing Micro breweries of the past 20 years. Hopefully we’ll see some more of these bottles in L.A.
The crusade against Corona has a new free-lance: keep limes at a distance. Under the influence of La Folie, the green might make you see red.
Dairy Pairy: Brebirousse D’argental; runny washed rind sheep’s milk cheese that tastes like a barn.
Soundtrack: Dinosaur Jr.’s Feel the Pain