brew dog blog

I am posting this from neck-deep in a fermentation obsession. My house is full of the books, talk, fruits, and stink of it. I have 4 vessels currently in some transformative state, including my first homebrew (more on this later), a crock of sour garlic dill pickles, a crock of lactic beets, and my first successful sourdough starter. It is the starter that comes into play in this post, as I used it to make my ever-evolving pizza dough last week which has been aging in my fridge ever since. I threw together a pie for dinner tonight with some preserved red peppers, olives, red onion, and sliced brandywine tomatoes, and though my cellar is stocked with northern Italian reds that would have complimented it nicely, I plucked this puzzler of a brew to see how these “eye-talians” are crafting their outer limits brews these days.

Actually I suppose it’s not fair to call this an outer limits brew, considering the sour red ale has been brewed in the Flanders region of Belgium for hundreds of years. But sour beer from Italy? And aged in Cognac barrels from Bordeaux?! The Panil Brewery is in the Parma region of Italy, home of the best artisinal foodstuffs on the planet, incidentally. If you consult a map, you’ll see that Parma, Bordeax, and West Flanders form a (near) perfect equilateral triangle. Interesting? Yes. Irrelevant? Most likely.

Panil’s Barriquée actually comes in three versions, and this one is the most intense of the three and only available here in the US. It is made rather traditionally like a Flanders Red, with some specialty malts for color and flavor, as well as a deliberate dosing with lactobacillus bacteria to give it that pucker, and a nice rest in some oak barrels. It poured a deep reddish-brown with a fine but fast to fade beige head and had that familiar acetic sourness on the nose along with a pronounced funk from the brettanomyces most likely introduced by the pourus oak during the second fermentation. There are three fermentations including bottle refermentation for those keeping score.

The first sip lets you know that this beer is not playing around. It’s sour for sure, but there is a world of other flavors swirling around that vying for your attention. There’s a bready sweetness most likely from the specialty malts as well as a toasted flavor from the oak which both help to counter the acetic sourness, and there is a milder lactic bite that keeps the acidity from becoming overly sharp. There is also a bevy of tart fruit flavors, from apples to apricots and green grapes. I enjoyed every sip and it got even more complex as it warmed, adding a bit more toasted oak and a farmhouse funk that actually came through as preserved pork, a bit of a Parmesan joke, perhaps?

The beer paired perfectly with the pizza, with the sourness offsetting the saltiness of the cheeses and the brininess of the olives perfectly. The bready and toasty backdrop highlighted the crisp crust and combined with the influence of the lactobacillus and the brettanomyces really helped the cultured flavor of the dough to come through. A lot of the sour beers I’ve been drinking lately, and they are plentiful, are difficult to pair with food. This one is a breeze, however, and a great treat on its own as well. There are an increasing number of great craft beers coming out of Italy and people are starting to take notice, if only you could get this one at Grimaldi’s instead of that godawful Peroni. Actually, I think I’ll just grab a cold one of these and head over to Di Fara, who’s with me?