Our review of the Bruery Trade Winds Tripel:
Not bad for a cellphone shot, huh? Not pictured – hamburger named for Dracula.
Our Summer seasonal, Trade Winds Tripel is a Belgian-style Golden Ale with a Southeast Asian twist. Instead of using candi sugar (typical for such a beer), we use rice in the mash to lighten the body and increase the gravity, and spice with Thai Basil. The result is an aromatic, digestible and complex beer made for a lazy summer evening.
The Bruery’s Trade Winds Tripel
Belgian-style Golden Ale, 8% ABV
Sayeth the Guys:
Karl: Basil! Rice! Belgian-ness! It’s weird! All these things, on its face, should make the Trade Winds an easy win for me. So is it?
I decided to kill some time last Friday evening with a short trip to the Bad Apple, a bar that deserves a little more attention for their beer choices and will hopefully receive more than a little coverage here on GDB. A solid burger and a few craft brews is a fine way to enter a summer weekend, and despite my earlier just-average feelings about the last Bruery offering we checked out I decided to give another Bruery brew a whirl. This one, thankfully, worked out better.
First things first: I have developed a pretty good radar when it comes to waitstaff BS. When someone says “that’s my favorite thing on the menu!” I can usually nail down if they’re just trying to get me ready for the upsell, or if they’re genuinely excited about my purchasing of the item because they believe I will enjoy it.
(For other reasons, I also enjoy when waitstaff ask me if I really do know what I’m doing when I order a sour beer. “Do you know what that’s like?” they ask, and then I say yes, and they give me an odd look. I can’t imagine how much wasted beer they’ve gotten rid of from people ordering what they think will be a little tart and get a full on mouth-puckering sour ale, who then send it back.)
All this is a very long way to say that when the obviously-beer-informed bartender says to me that the Trade Winds is her favorite beer they offer, out of all the many excellent beers they have, I feel pretty good for making the selection. And even better – she was pretty spot on. Despite my random rememberances of their Saison Rue, this is a Bruery offering I could see myself going for right now.
Okay, so, to the actual beer: The first thing I think any beer type is going to think as soon as they see the word “rice” in the description is of course going to be Budweiser. Understandable, since they’ve spent a ridiculous amount of money to let you know that through commercials and branding and market research and all that jazz. Don’t worry about thinking about Budweiser. It’s normal. And you’ll forget about it immediately.
It is definitely a light-bodied beer, with a nice thick head that dissipates very slowly. Golden-copper in color, the smell is super-sweet and tastes exactly like cream soda. With a basil leaf in it. It’s a bit of a contrast, but the full flavor is about 99% cream soda, and then right at the end…just a touch of herbs.
It’s really there moreso in spirit than in actual practice. Bruery probably could have saved the basil here – it’s not necessary when the rest of the profile is as distinctly different. The rest of the beer stands on its own. Would I have tried it if I didn’t see that it had basil in it? On the whole – no. So maybe it’s best if you don’t overpromise here. It’s cream soda. With alcohol in it. How can you go wrong? Remember when we had the Rye-on-Rye that tasted like Coca-Cola? Is this a trend? Soda beers? You heard it here first.
Now, this is not one of the best beers you’ll ever have. I know it seems like I might be heralding it to the skies, and it is a good beer. If you like cream soda, you’ll like it. It’s sweet, and the basil is interesting, but other than that I did find it to be a pretty simple beer. Nothing too complex, but it was very refreshing and worth tracking down again, especially if you can find it on draft.