Updated with the sell sheet above. A brewery rep says that the beer will be available in April at the earliest.
(Fort Collins, CO) – New Belgium Brewing quietly put out a new beer in bombers earlier this month apart from its regular lineup:
Lips of Faith Dark Kreik
. Looks like they aren’t stopping with that one either . . .
First things first, the Dark Kreik description off of the New Belgium website:
“For many years we’ve celebrated Valentine’s Day at New Belgium Brewing by creating a special small batch beer for our family and friends. These beers tend to be a little funky, fruitful and straight from the heart. This year we decided to share the love.
New Belgium Brewing’s Dark Kriek is a limited edition Belgian kriek or cherry beer. Much darker than a traditional kriek with a dash of sour cherry up front, our Dark Kriek is actually a blend of two beers. We start with a light, dry, tannic beer aged two years in oak barrels and combine this with a heavier, dark ale and cherries […]”
The folks at Oregon’s Belmont Station beer store liken the beer to the sweet, fruity Lindeman lambics and recommend cellaring this one for a bit to see how it develops.
If NBB’s website is any indication, this isn’t the last beer from the Lips of Faith series that they will release. The website displays Dunkelweiss 30 Degrees in a bottle. That beer debuted on tap last month and may see time in 22 oz format as well.
Biere de Mars just got label approval and will apparently be next though. My guess would be that Biere de Mars would come out late March given the timing of the approval (and Mars translates to March). New Belgium fans will remember that the brewery previously released a Biere de Mars as part of its regular line but the beer has been unavailable since 2006. Will this be a new recipe?
Says Bill Brand, “About Lips of Faith: Jennifer [Gilardi, New Belgium’s Bay Area rep] says its a program […] that gives employees, not necessarily brewers, free rein to design their own beer.” The program started late last spring.
I’m looking forward to both of these beers. I must admit, the new labels for these beers are a bit odd and a departure from their regular labels. I guess Lips of Faith is a bit of a departure in of itself. So I suppose it fits the bill.
thanks you..
I just returned from having a glass of Biere de Mars from the Flying Saucer – Austin. We’ve seen some of the other “Lips of Faith”, but not the Kriek.
I have to say, I remember liking it a lot more years ago. Remember more funk and tart, and less sweetness. Besides the change from orange peel to lemon peel, anyone have any more info on the changes since 3 years ago? I’ve heard they had problems with the yeast(s), so I assume they’ve modified the beer in that department, but not sure how.
That being said, I will certainly be trying it again on draft – this is a very interesting and unique brew – but I really look forward to trying the bottle version, and aging to allow the Brett to intensify and the lemon verbena to subside. Surprisingly, it tastes a lot more similar than I thought it would to the homebrew extract version I made a while back, which I thought had too much lemon verbena (2oz for 5gal batch). I’ll be trying that again at some point, but with half the lemon verbena and trying to funk it up a bit this time with some sort of Brett and a pinch of wood.