Dominus Vobiscum Blanche

I suppose it is no secret by now that I like wheat beers almost as much as I like Pilsener beers (and as much as I like IPA, stout, porter, Lambic, Alt, Kolsch, pretty much all lagers, as well as most other of all remaining beer styles). Today's beer is the Blanche of the Dominus Vobiscum line of products by la Microbrasserie Charlevoix, about whose La Vache Folle I have previously posted. May the Lord be with you indeed! Seldom do you see such a truly white coloured beer combined with such a majestic foam cap as this beer poured. You can see inside the glass a spike of cloudy yeast spreading into the beer.

Now I may have said this before and at the risk of being repetitive, I'll have to say again that the Belgian wheat beer style just cannot reach the same lofty heights of sumptuous deliciousness as can Bavarian wheat beers. There just is no comparison, as this beer demonstrates in some respects, and despite the fact that it is a Quebecois interpretation of the Belgian style. When you wrap your teeth around a German wheat beer, it is like a full meal, including a rich appetizer, a well balanced and nutritious main course, to be followed by a deliciously subtle yet tantalizing dessert to finish things off. This beer is a fine beer - let's make no mistake about it - but its palate immediate becomes dominated by one aroma: Cloves. And then there were some more cloves. And before I knew it, my tongue had been nailed to the top of my palate with cloves (if you understand French, perhaps you can also understand why this might be the case).

And for all the clove, I almost forgot to mention some of the banana flavours that seep through, and the slightly sour yeast character that you can taste intensely at the front and which continue more subtly throughout the palate. Now I do appreciate this acidity especially at the end of the palate because it provides for a clean and dry finish. But what is missing for me is a more ripe fruit character and some more rich bready malt flavour in the middle. The Belgian style, and this beer is no exception, favours the yeast flavours so much over the malts (and never mind the hops) that the beer even looses some of its middle palate thirst extinguishing characteristics.

The label description indicates that this is a spiced beer, so flavouring agents were added to the wort to spike the natural yeast tastes. I am just no fan of foreign objects in my beer. You can say what you want against the Reinheitsgebot, there is nevertheless something to be appreciated about what one can do uniquely with those four basic ingredients in beer, which can be combined in unimaginably many different ways limited only by the brewmaster's imagination. Brewing is after all, not just science, but also art.

And so, after coming home from work on my bicycle on a wonderfully warm fall day, I took the Dominus Vobiscum Blanche outside into the eerie late afternoon light, with the fall mood still in full parade. And as already mentioned, the head I was able to build was fabulous- a white snow capped mountain peak that reached far beyond the rim of my mug. Take a peek!

 

I leave you with the dark and ominous clouds over the red sky of Charlevoix, which provides another fine sample of the fascinating beer labels in Quebec and, together with this entire post, nicely exemplifies something about which I had talked with a colleague earlier today. if you are wondering about the grainy picture, well that is so because the label on the bottle was faded, and what you get on this blog is only the unadulterated evidence.