While our Craft Beer & Brewing Beers of the Week feature focuses on new and seasonal releases, our staff actively collects and cellars their own individual stashes of hard-to-find beers. But the larger those collections get, the harder it becomes to find the right time to open them. With that in mind (and borrowing a page from Shark Week), we’ve declared this second week in July “Whalez Week,” where we commit to drinking and enjoying the beer we’ve so diligently collected over the past year. We hope you’ll join along at home, take advantage of this signature week to open some of those special beers you’ve been saving, share them with friends, and let us know what you think of them by tagging them with #whalezweek on social media.
August Schell Starkeller Peach
New Ulm, Minnesota
Founded in 1860, August Schell is one of the oldest existing breweries in the United States but a newcomer to the “whalez” game. These masters of German-style lagers are eight releases deep into the Noble Star series of Berliner-style weisse beers (past installments we’ve tried include Black Forest Cherry, Dawn of Aurora, and Cypress Blanc), but out of nowhere the new Starkeller Peach is lighting up the trade boards and finally garnering some cool cred for Schell’s brewers.
A strong peach nose and touch of latex gloves hits first in the nose while the hazy orange color approaches smoothie-levels of juiciness. For a mixed-culture sour beer, it’s pretty low on the funk with only a light tartness that could be mistaken for fruit acidity. But given how this tastes pretty close to force-carbonated peach juice (with just a bit of beery kick), you could skip that mimosa and enjoy a bottle of Starkeller instead. — Steve Koenig
DeGarde Saison Troisieme
Tillamook, Oregon
As far as trends go, fermenting with citrus-forward Brett cultures is one we’re wholeheartedly behind. We’ve loved the fruit-forward Brett notes in beers from Sante Adarius Rustic Ales (Cellarman and Saison Bernice) and Casey Brewing & Blending (Saison and East Bank), but de Garde Brewing takes those gentle orange, grapefruit, and lemon notes and blows the doors off subtlety with a citrus explosion in every sip. Troisieme is gloriously unbalanced in the best of ways because—let’s face it—coming unhinged once and a while is way more fun than constantly playing it safe.
Beer-wise, it’s fresh and light on the nose and teeming with juicy fruit flavor plus a mild tartness, with only a smidgen of bitterness and malt to play against it. But don’t let conventional explanations dissuade you—while everyone under the sun chases the latest fruited Bu variant, we’ll happily keep sipping these dry-hopped mixed-fermentation farmhouse ales. There’s a Quatrieme in our fridge and a Cinquieme on the way. — Haydn Strauss
Fantôme Saison
Soy, Belgium
Like a Let’s Make a Deal contestant trading his or her hard-earned winnings for what’s behind door number three, every bottle of Fantôme Saison we open is a fresh bet with Monty that there’s a rainbow of swirling Skittles flavors in that bottle and not a skunky, rubbery, band-aid-tasting mess. So far, we’ve won more than we’ve lost, and those odds are more than worth enjoying the demented genius of Dany Prignon in every bottle of Fantôme.
This round of Fantôme roulette was a winner, with a bit less fruit flavor than bottles past but assertive dry bitterness and earthy notes of hay, pepper, and bread. Our personal cellars are stocked with ‘tômes we pull out whenever we’re feeling lucky and yours should be too. — Jamie Bogner