Hey did you hear about the lottery that the LCBO did for the 70 bottles of Sam Adams Utopias? Winning meant you were allowed to buy a $115 bottle of beer (thanks for that price, Josh!). Anyways, I didn’t win, and neither did most of you. The good news is, for all us sad saps, the LCBO also brought in a large quantity (relatively speaking) of another big Sam Adams beer, Infinium. It’s marginally cheaper, at just $14.95/750ml (compared to $115/710ml), and comes in a bottle at least 2/5 as cool as the Utopias.
And it’s got a very cool story too! Not ageing since before Napoleon was exiled, but still, exciting. It was a collaboration brew with Weihenstephaner, the epic German brewer. If your geekery is up to date, you’ll know Weihenstephaner is the oldest continuously operated brewery in the world, in operation since 1052. Kinda makes any of your accomplishments pale. So they got together about 3 years ago to bang off a “Completely new style” of beer. A Champagne Beer. Made with beer ingredients, and Champagne yeast. Ignore, for a moment, the numerous brews, both homebrew and commercially available, that are also made in roughly the same manner, with roughly the same ingredients. This is an exciting prospect indeed. So out comes this completely(ish) new style, just in time for new year’s (this is in the states, mind you, we just got it). Perfect, as it comes in a proper Champagne bottle, which you could pop at 12:00:01 instead of your Moet or Baby Duck. Well, you can imagine what happened: Bud drinkers generally ignored it, as it was *way* too expensive and likely would taste gross, and beer geeks generally dismissed it as some weird combination of sell-outism marketing and self-importance (hard to reconcile, I know). Yes, it did garner some good reviews, but a check of the two main repositories of public beer geekery opinion clearly shows that this beer is not well loved by the craftbeer army.
Lucky for you, I’m a totally unbiased and even-keeled reveiwer, so what follows is a totally objective analysis based on tens of months of experience and a general air of self-importance (I figure everybody else got a high-horse, why not me too?)
Infinium - Sam Adams & Weihenstephaner
From a 750ml champagne bottle (cork, cage, foil and all) with a freshness date on the neck hanger, the beer pours a cloudy honey gold with a big fluffy head that just keep floating, due in part to Sam’s etching on the bottom of the glass, and also the heaps of carbonation in the brew. Aroma is wheat beer-esque: banana, spices (hints of clove and pepper), and yeast; also berries, tropical fruit and cane sugar. Taste is quite tart, and, well, like champagne. I don’t know if this is a placebo effect from the back-story, or the bottle (or both), or if this is the case. It’s not as dry as your average French Champagne, lots of tart and sweet berry notes. Also a good dose of yeast, not too spicy though, just sort of like the scent of proofing yeast for baking. A lot of the wheat characteristics are being masked by the tartness, but they are there in the background if you look for them. The linger is a sweet, slightly tart and strangely creamy finish, once the carbonation is out of your mouth. Speaking of which, this is one bubbly beer, like, much more carbonation than in a Champagne, or most other beers. Definitely really small silky Champagne bubbles, though. Perhaps Molson stole some of their notes when they attacked the M project. It strikes me that I could probably drink a lot of this, but slowly. But it’s definitely a sharing bottle. Despite the neck hanger suggesting that you serve it between 40-42*F (4-6*C), as I’m letting it warm up, a lot more banana is coming through the taste, with the grains it gives it a banana-bread quality. The tartness is less berry-like and there is a nice musty yeast flavour that juxtaposes the fruitiness well. More nuances are coming out as well, mild apples and pears and starfruit and hints of honey. For sure, this is a pretty complicated beer.
So what do I think? I think it’s a cool beer, at least to try out once. I probably wouldn’t seek out another, but also wouldn’t object if somebody offered it. It hits somewhere in between Champagne, Belgian ale, and hefeweisse styles, in a complicated thought-provoking way. The nature of two pretty-big small breweries producing a beer in “a whole new style”, despite it’s clear resemblances to an existing style, bottling it in a sexy way and promoting it to the hilt, is immediate resistance and prejudice in the beer geekery. I would be interested to see it snuck into a blind flight for some of it’s detractors. Perhaps, without the hoopla, they could actually taste this for what it is, an interesting brew. Is it going to revolutionise the beer market or change the world? No. Is it worth giving a try? For sure.
