I purchased this beer in a 1pt 9oz (500ml) long body slender shoulder crimpcap bottle. I can see allot of sediment at the bottom, but some of the best beers do, just be ready for floaters. The label art features a simple, almost midevel design featuring the breweries hop sword symbol. It states on the bottle "Draai Laag brewing co Relic Ale" and their tagline "Wild by design". The epitaph on the bottle states "Long story short - we came into possession of a French Monastery cabinet dated from the 17th century and, naturally, set to work attempting to extract a yeast strain from the initial layers of wax used to preserve it. Hops were added sparingly, allowing the uniquely earthy, musty and citrusy flavors of the ancient strain to shine". 6.3% abv. I'll be using a tulip glass for this one, incidentally also from Crafted (although I've had it for years). Lets pop the top and see that head.
It makes a fantastic hiss, wisps pour out the top as well. Nose from the bottom is both bready and sour, kind of like a Flanders sour scent. Maybe a little lactic, defiantly musty. Pours an opaque yellow-orange color (about a 7 on the SRM) with a quickly dissipating head, although agitation is fantastic. It is very much a "living" beer. Nose from the glass is still an acidic sour but more citrusy and less musty. On first sip, certainly sour and citrusy. I would say those are the two overriding characteristics, it's similar to either a blood orange or a pomelo. It has a bready characteristic that shows up towards the end, disappears, and then reappears in the aftertaste. Finishes dry and tart with a grapefruit rind taste and a lingering citric acid and bread. A bit of a mustiness comes through as you drink it, but it's not as pronounced as I anticipated. Medium body and fairly acidic, although not quite as much as you would expect from the flavor. A little astringent, kind of enzymatic as well.
Listening to an Israeli Jazz-Rock band called Marbin. Got the vinyl in the mail a week or two ago, but I only recently got my turntable set back up so this is my first time hearing it. Great background music for reviewing beer. My brother wanted to try this beer, we'll see what he thinks... He likes it, he thinks it tastes like the "Red 5 standing by" Flanders red had a love child with a Lambic. I disagree with him on the Lambic portion, but I see where he would get that.
So let's talk about one of the most influential event's you may have never heard of, Starfish Prime. So back in '62, four years after James Van Allen confirmed that the Earth had a series of giant radioactive belts that protected us from waves the of particles flying around outer space, the United States wanted to understand what would happen if you set a nuke off in them because of course we did. This was coming on the tail of the Soviet Union ending their moratorium on testing nuclear weapons in space and we thought it was a fantastic opportunity to redo the (poorly executed) high altitude nuclear tests that we had done in '58 (immediately after finding out about the aforementioned radioactive belts), but without the political ramifications. So we started Operation Fishbowl, and with five W49 thermonuclear warheads atop PGM-17 Thor missiles we set out to do some science. Our first launch, Bluegill, we thought was going off it's flight path so we had it self destruct. Latter we determined that it was doing just fine and we had destroyed a 6.25 million ($51,296,978.48 in today's money) missile for absolutely nothing. The second launch, Starfish, flew for 59 seconds before the missile stopped and just started to break apart (there is a reason we had stopped making Thor missiles two years prior) so we had it self destruct as well. The third one however, Starfish Prime, successfully detonated at 250 miles up from it's launch pad on Johnston Island. We launched 27 rockets with instruments to gather data from the test, and boy did they get some data. The EMP that Starfish Prime created was so large we were not capable of measuring it at the time and caused significant damage to Hawaii's electrical infrastructure 900 miles away. You could actually see the flash from Honolulu. The Beta particles released by the detonation created new, temporary radiation belts within the existing ones which crippled 1/3rd of all low Earth orbit satellites at the time. After that, we knew we had a better way to use the bomb and it's characterized how it's been employed ever since.
Although we still haven't done a great deal to shield ourselves from EMP attack.
Final thoughts. Great beer, really tasty, fantastic to sip. I'd like to try some of this brewers other stuff, they've got me interested. I give this beer my blurry seal of approval.
http://www.strangerootsbeer.com/our-story/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fishbowl
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