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Odonata Rorie's Ale

Goddamn, I drank far too much last weekend.  I mean, I had one of those weekends where, looking back now, I’m embarrassed.  I was a complete lazy drunken ass all fucking weekend long.

See, we went up to wine country.  Healdsburg, to be exact, and we stayed in a really nice house overlooking a lake.  ‘We’ being almost all the reviewers here on this obnoxious blog, we split the time evenly and divided our trip up into two kinds of days: beer days and wine days.  We had a lot of work to do there, so tasting typically began before breakfast.  Seeing that all of us see spitting wine (or beer) as alcohol abuse, I don’t think a single one of us made it past 9:00 on any given night.

Whenever I find myself in Healdsburg, the term Pig in Shit comes to the forefront of the minds of those around me (there’s probably not much other than beer and wine on the forefront of my mind when I’m there).  This is not only pinot noir and chardonnay Mecca, it’s also the epicenter of some of the best microbrewed  beers in the world: Russian River Brewing and Bear Republic.  But what’s ironic here is that a little-known beer I brought from home sort of shined for me on this trip, but it was the setup that made it shine.

See, I’m one of those fuckin’ guys who travels with booze.  I keep a bottle of tequila and a snifter in the storage compartments of my truck’s carpet kit (you never know when you’re gonna have to camp out someplace or have some other sort of emergency– tequila has lots of uses).  And when I’m going for a couple of days, I usually bring some beer and wine.  So, for this trip, I grabbed a few bottles of my homegrown… er… I mean homebrewed hooch, some of my homemade wine and a bottle of Odonata Ale that a friend gave me.

The Odonata is a Belgian Quad made with sour cherries and barrel aged for 1 year in oak.  It’s a true quad that weighs in at a significant 10.2 ABV.  It’s made by the brother of an upstart Santa Cruz winemaker, and is released under the same brand name, as sort of a bonus to their oenophile fans.  This is the first release of a very small-production outlet.  In fact, I’m not even sure how to buy this stuff yet.

It pours a deep brown color, and peels off aromas of malt and cherry or apple pie, with burnt sugar & toasty oak aroma undertones.  It’s lightly hopped, with little carbonation, which lets the flavors of caramel and oak show prominently through the almost nonexistent alcohol bite.  There’s not a lot of cherry showing through the malt wall this thing sets up — this is not a flavored beer — so the cherries, if anything, show up underneath as a slightly sour back-of-the-tongue accent.  Though sour cherries are used, this is not a brettanomyces-laden sour beer like Russian River’s Supplication.  In fact, it drinks more like a fine late harvest zin than it does a typical 10% beer.  Smooth and easy, a great complement to triple-cream brie.

Thing is, I set myself up to love this beer:  I’d been drinking IIPAs and sour beers all day long at Russian River.  See, we’d bunkered in at RR Brewing in Santa Rosa for a good 2 hours earlier in the day.  After quaffing… nay… gurgling down 4 or so pints of Blind Pig, Pliny the Elder, Damnation, and Temptation, we then rolled back to la casa with a growler of ‘Pig in tow and proceeded to tear into that.  About 3 hours later an in-flight hangover was taking hold, and it was still only mid-afternoon.  My lupulin threshold had shifted far beyond the point of no return, and I was hopped-out but needed to imbibe more alcohol in order to delay the inevitable mind-bending green-beer hangover and subsequent falling-apart until sleepy-time.

At this stage of a bender, it is a terrible idea to change horses in the middle of the pee stream.  I really wanted to switch to wine (bad idea), so I desperately needed a beer that would cradle my failing liver and about-to-be-throbbing upper head (as opposed to my usually-throbbing lower head) and gently lead me to that ever-so-fleeting state of perfect intoxication… without mangling my already ass-fucked tastebuds.

The Odonata did the trick.  It cradled my tastebuds like a soothing mother cooing to her 9-year-old-still-breastfeeding baby.  The absence of hops and the abundance of alcohol pulled me gently into a warm, sleepy place where I lolled around drooling in utter bliss until I woke up enough to start acting like an asshole again.  All in all, in this particular setting, a perfect combo.

So, given the way I led my horse to water, I’m giving the Odonata a cool hundred points.  I think, however, the setup may be vital:  my recommendation is to drink a shitload of over-hopped IPAs and ‘Tions and then hit this one like you hit dessert after a 5 course meal cooked by an Italian granny:  with gusto and care mixed with a back-of-the-mind knowing that you’re most definitely crossing a line in the sand, beyond which there is little-to-no return.

(4 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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