Review: Halcyon Barrel House Shifting Sands: Peach


Thanks Beau's for sending me out yet another treat! Halcyon Barrel House's Shifting Sands series is a series of foeder aged sour ales that contain a different fruit in each batch. The current batch release is a peach rendition of a beer. Shifting Sands: Peach is brewed with organic peaches (well.. yeah), Brett yeast, barley, wheat and oats and a combination of Strisselspalt and Hersbrucker hops.

Shifting Sands: Peach tops out at 7.0% ABV.

Appearance: Very hazy dark orange body (with an almost peach hue) with a very carbonated, fizzy body to it. Initially, there's a a nice amount of white head on top, but then it quickly diminishes to just a bit of fizzy bubbles just like a carbonated soda.

Aroma: Oh, this is going to be sour! I can smell this two metres away from the beer - it's a heavy, sour beer with notes of peach juice, a bit of barnyard funk from the Brett yeast, vinegar, and a bit of an oaky woodiness at the end.

Taste: This is quite a face-puckering worthy sour.. incredibly sour and delicious! The first thing I get from the tasting is that sour vinegary taste that you see in beers like Duchesse de Bourgogne, followed by a bit of a funkiness from the yeast, sour peach candy, a bit of lemon, a hint of oak, and has a bit of a tarty aftertaste to it. The dry tartness lingers on the palate for quite a while, and you can definitely feel the presence of the flavour throughout the mouth.

Overall Thoughts: When I saw that Brett yeast was one of the ingredients, I was giddy with joy. Brett is weird - I absolutely HATED it only two years ago, but after having so many of them while in Quebec and then not being able to find any at all in Manitoba.. it only gave me a massive craving for beers with the yeast in it.

This is an awesome sour peach beer that has a good amount of sweetness to it, almost like those fuzzy peach candies from childhood. An entire bottle to myself is way too excessive though as I think a 10 ounce pour of this would be much more than enough to satisfy me for the rest of the day. I can't wait to see what else Halcyon Barrel House has up their sleeves in the future!

https://beaus.ca/beer/halcyon-shifting-sands-peach/




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