This burgundy-colored Gose presents a fruity, tangy attack that loses itself in a slightly resinous finish, with citrus and lemony notes of boreal herbs, and a lightly iodized, salty touch of our beloved Côte-Nord.
If we’d made a traditional Gose, it would automatically have been considered as part of our classic series. Traditional Gose, with its slightly salty and somewhat lemony sweetness, is a traditional German style named after the river that flows through Goslar in the Harz mountains. What is not at all traditional but rather contemporary is the addition of fruit. This automatically opens the door for us to present our second Collines de Bonne…! So we’ve brewed a Collines de Bonne Gose with raspberries and haskap for you.
The Collines de Bonne series is an ode to the wildlife of the Collines-de-l’Outaouais. In this case, we’re talking about a tall and wide winged giant: the Sandhill Crane. And you won’t have to crane your neck to drink it. The purplish lines on the can’s visual announce the beer’s color, which stems from the massive additions of raspberries and haskap berries that were added to the beer.
Gose is all about summer, and so are berries. The two together are festive and all about limpidity and texture. Originally, Gose was a low-alcohol beer, containing a good dose of wheat, fermented with airborne lactic ferments after the original fermentation. Nowadays, many breweries inoculate the mash or wort with lactic acid ferment before the classic alcoholic fermentation, as they would with a Berliner Weisse. This is the technique we used here with the Chaudron Sur blend from Labo Solution Brassicole in La Pocatière. It’s a blend of Lactobacilium Brevis and Lactobacillium Plantarium. Although mash tun surging was originally carried out by taking advantage of the lactic acid bacteria already colonizing the malt grain, the mixed bacterial population of the cereal brings a risk of fermentation drift. A short pasteurization of the wort, followed by a specific inoculation, ensures a controlled result.
The grain pour for this Fruit Gose is a blend of Pilsner Moderne from Innomalt in Sherbrooke with Cara Unic 20 wheat and raw durum from Maltbroue in the Lower St. Lawrence. The resulting wort is lightly hopped with Magnum de Houblonnière Lupuline, to which a touch of Triple Pearl de Houblonnière Lupuline has been added for aromatics, along with a hint of Saaz from Houblons des Jarrets Noir.
When the idea of making a Gose came up, the first question was: Do we produce salt in Quebec? Fortunately, the answer was yes, otherwise the project would have been abandoned immediately. Remember, we only brew with 100% Quebec ingredients. Quebec producer Sel Saint-Laurent draws its salt from water at a depth of 200 metres in the Bergeronnes region of the Upper North Shore. Whew! The project was saved! Second little production challenge: in Quebec, we don’t produce the coriander seeds that go into the usual composition of Gose. So we went looking for the right flavours, using a clever blend of white and black spruce buds and a little white cedar leaf from Nos Forêts Épicés in the Beauce region, which gives our product a singularity and a unique signature. For the fruit, the Atelier de transformation des Basques (ATAB) in Trois-Pistoles supplied us with an astronomical quantity of fruit purée, prepared with products from small-scale producers who are members of the Bas-Saint-Laurent food processing cooperative. And finally, a top-fermenting beer yeast from Labo Solution Brassicole worked its magic to give our creation a perfect, refreshing balance.
