Soon, very soon, I will have gone through my backlog of beers that have been sent to me by the brewers or their reps in order to get me to write about them. It’s a tough job, but I’m up to the challenge. Then I can start on my backlog of local beers I’ve been keeping in the fridge for reviewing.
Urban Chestnut Brewing Co. has one of those backstories that we craft beer geeks love to hear. It was started in 2010 by two former Anheuser-Busch employees, Florian Kuplent and David Wolfe. I like to think they took their golden parachute when InBev bought the corporation out and cashiered as many executives as they could, but the truth is probably a little less dramatic than that. But in the past six years, the St. Louis area brewer has expanded to three brewhouses, and has a distribution footprint extending across Missouri and here to Chicago. Although they do their share of wild and crazy beers as much as the next brewer, they have been producing a series beers in traditional European styles, which they call the “Reverence” series.
The beer in this series that I have received is called Pierre’s Wit. It’s a Belgian witbier, the “wit” part of which refers both to the unmalted wheat that’s part of the grain bill, and the fact that beers in this style sometimes appear nearly white in the glass. Wits are a farmhouse style, low on bitterness and brewed sometimes with spices. Think Fat Tire or even Blue Moon. This beer has coriander and orange peel in its mix. The name is a tribute to Pierre Celis (1925-2011), the Belgian dairyman who took up beermaking in the 1960’s and revived the witbier style as Hoegaarden. After a fire forced him to sell of his holdings to InBev, he came to the U.S. and produced Celis Wit, first in Texas, and then with the late Michigan Brewing Co.
One would think it takes a lot of crust to name your beer after a craft beer pioneer who brought a style back from history, but then Pierre inspired a lot of Americans to try, and then try to recreate, obscure Belgian styles before they became easy to find. I was sent two bottles of this; I took a picture of one “By the Grill,” wrote it up, and shortly thereafter lost my notes. Luckily this one stayed in the fridge, so I’ve brought it out after making a stir-fry with that ham I mention in my write-up on Lagunitas Aunt Sally.
Luckily, this one has stayed in my fridge since I got it. And since we assume Belgian styles in general can hold up to a little aging, we just may in the clear to finally get to it now.
Of course, no matter how carefully I pour this, I get a big fluffy head that looks, from a certain angle, like the meringue on a pie. Nice cloudy yellow malt beneath is right in style with an unfiltered wheat beer. The taste of a beer like this always seems to start out with a note of lemon, but then some of the light malt follows afterward. Like a Hoegaarden, this has a complex mix of spices. Coriander may start it, but there is a spiciness that also comes from wheat malt, a distinct Belgian yeast strain, and perhaps a warm ferment like a farmhouse ale. As with the German hefeweizen, this is a lighter beer for summer activities like mowing the lawn, which, hey, I just did this morning.
