Robin Shepard
In the search to offer something different, craft brewers sometimes turn to older forgotten styles. The Lone Girl Brewing Company recently teamed up with Working Draft Beer Company to recreate a grisette, a type of farmhouse ale that dates back to the late 1700s or early 1800s.
What is it? Samesies from The Lone Girl Brewing Company of Waunakee and Working Draft Beer Company of Madison.
Style: The grisette is a light- to medium-bodied beer with mild and very clean flavor. The style emerged in southern Belgium. As with the saison, which originated as a beer made for farmhands, the grisette was seen as a beer intended to quench the thirst of miners. Grisettes are made with a combination of wheat and barley and are often fermented with saison yeast. They are low alcohol beers of around 4 percent ABV.
Background: Working Draft’s Clint Lohman gives The Lone Girl’s John Russell most of the credit for coming up with the recipe, but both brewers liked the challenge of making such an obscure style. “It’s cool to make [styles] that aren’t often done while using both of our knowledge and experience,” says Lohman.
Samesies is made with pilsner malt, along with wheat and flaked oats that give it some body in what would otherwise be a very light beer. It’s hopped with Magnum for bittering and Hüll Melon that lend light sweet tropical notes of melon and strawberry. The beer is fermented with a saison yeast that offers hints of peppery spiciness, yet everything is kept light and subtle. Samesies finishes at 4.1 percent ABV and 25 IBUs. You can find it on tap at both The Lone Girl and Working Draft for $5.50/glass.
Tasting notes:
- Aroma: A light grainy nose.
- Appearance: Light yellow-golden color with a slight haziness. A medium, soft, bubbly white head.
- Texture: Light-bodied, bubbly, with some initial softness that becomes dry and crisp later in the flavor profile.
- Taste: Initially a mild grainy sweetness. Hints of Hüll Melon hops lend a subtle tropical fruitiness to the background layers of flavor.
- Finish/Aftertaste: Crisp, spicy and dry.
Glassware: I prefer the Willi Becher because of its inward lip that will focus delicate aromas.
Pairs well with: seafood. This grisette has light aromas and flavors that can be easily overwhelmed. If you’re at The Lone Girl Brewing Company on a Friday, the perch or walleye can be excellent companions to the grisette’s fruitiness from the Hüll Melon hops that mingles with its mild spicy yeastiness.
The Verdict: The grisette is very similar to a saison. Good grisettes are intended to be light with subtle character; so to appreciate them means you’ll need to accept a toned-down farmhouse ale. Samesies fits that description well. What I like about it most is that it is light-bodied, clean, with an exceedingly dry finish. That dryness also helps call attention to spicy pepper notes from the yeast. All those qualities make it very sessionable and a great beer for warm weather drinking. If you’re curious about historical beer recreations, Samesies delivers on that score too.
