Epic Brewing, Salt Lake City, Utah
Epic Straight up Saison
- * Skip It
- ** Good Craft Beer
- *** Well Above Average
- **** Exceptional
- ***** Top 1%
Epic started brewing in 2008 when Utah finally relented and allowed “high point” beers – those over 4% abv—to be brewed in bottles. They’ve never brewed a “low point” (4%) beer in all that time in this repressive republic. The Epic Brewery and Tap Room in Denver is a different experience—plenty of “high point” draft beers there; of course it’s easier to get high in Denver in all sorts of ways.
——In Salt Lake City, you can go sample their beer in their “tapless” tap room as long as you buy food to go with it. Otherwise the bottles you find around town might be a bit fresher, but they’re the same beer experience you’ll have if you pick up a bottle at the Wine Warehouse in Charlottesville, which is where we found this Beer of the Day.
——We featured a post about saisons early in this web adventure- you can find it in the blog archive. They’re very difficult beers to do well and plenty of breweries miss the mark. It’s been a coule of years since we had it, but we thought Epic really hit the target with its Straight Up. Very very echt (German for authentic; we use the term everywhere). Fruity hops along with echoes of lemon and stone fruit. Yeast is tangy and slightly metallic. It’s dangerous to think of a 7.1% beer as more-ish, but… “Waiter—one more astonishingly legal 3/4th liter bottle, please.”
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