🍺 Wisconsin Beer Geek

Tank 7 Farmhouse Ale – Boulevard Brewing Company

📅 2012-05-13  

            Tonight's review is of the Tank 7 Farmhouse Ale from Boulevard Brewing Company.  Boulevard Brewing Company is a very well known brewery, yet few people have been lucky enough to have any of their beers and if they have it was likely their excellent Unfiltered Wheat Beer .  The Unfiltered What Beer is definitely an excellent beer, and by far their most popular, it provides the support for their brew master Steven Pauwels, originally from Belgium, to get creative and work outside of the box.  Fortunately for Boulevard when you allow an excellent brew master to be creative you will, more often than not, be impressed.  Attempts to produce interesting sour beers are well accepted and loved by many home brewers yet they have yet to gain popularity with the average craft beer drinker and are even less excepted by the average mass market light lager drinker.  After all, AB and Miller-Coors have spent hundreds of millions convincing Americans that “real beer” should be light in flavor and highly carbonated.  But I digress, on to the review.

On Beeradvocate, Tank 7 has a 91, over at ratebeer it has a 98 overall and a 98 for style

 
They say:

            On the bottle –

            A refreshing American rendition of a classic Belgian style, Tank 7 starts with a surge of alluring aromatics. Lush notes of tropical fruits deftly frame its sweet body of crispy, bready malt.    

            On the Website –
Most breweries have at least one piece of equipment that’s just a bit persnickity. Here at Boulevard we have fermenter number seven, the black sheep of our cellar family. Ironically, when our brewers were experimenting with variations on a traditional Belgian-style farmhouse ale, the perfect combination of elements came together in that very vessel. You could call it fate, but they called it Tank 7, and so it is. Beginning with a big surge of fruity aromatics and grapefruit-hoppy notes, the flavor of this complex, straw-colored ale tapers off to a peppery, dry finish.
Color (EBC)
12
Bitterness (IBUs)
38
Original Gravity (Plato)
17.3
Terminal Gravity (Plato)
2.5
Alcohol (ABV)
8%
Sensory Profile
A straw colored, light to medium bodied beer with an earthy, spicy, grapefruit aroma and flavor, a soft, sweet malt flavor and a prominent hop bitterness.
Aroma
Floral, citrusy hops, Belgian yeast esters
Malt
Soft, light, sweet flavor
Hops
Prominent hop bitterness and citrusy, grapefruit, peppery flavor
Balance
Hops
Body
Light/medium to medium
Malts and Adjuncts - Corn flakes, malted wheat, pale malt, wheat
Hops - Amarillo, Simcoe, Tradition
Pairings - Herb-roasted chicken, pork, Taleggio cheese


I say:

            Tank 7 Farmhouse Ale is a wonderful beer!  It is everything that I was hoping for and more.  It pours a hazy straw (below style guidelines) with a nice thick, long lasting head.  Earthy and grapefruit aromas bound out of the glass backed up by interesting spiciness and light bready notes from the yeast.  The flavor is complex as well, at multiple levels.  There is an immediate floral and grapefruit citrus characteristic from the hops, with a slight bit of pepper from the high Belgian fermentation however the spiciness remains in the background.  There is a slight corn sweetness that I had to go back and look more closely for on my next sip.  A low maltiness persisted, with a pleasantly tart finish.
            This was an exceptionally drinkable beer that I would recommend.  In fact I wish that I would have been lucky enough to find a 750ml bottle, but unfortunately I was only able to locate one of the 12 oz 4-pack bottles.
            That’s all for tonight, check back soon for a write-up on Finch’s Threadless IPA.
Happy Drinking!!!