Fleur de Lehigh

If you remember, I got a sample bottle of the new batch of Fleur de Lehigh back on my Pliny Day. Well...I took a ride today, and decided after I got back that a nice springy day like this was perfect to taste-test it.

To quote PBC rep Tony Madjor (from last year), "Fleur is an unfiltered Golden Ale brewed with ginger, lemongrass, rhubarb root, cardamom seed, and rose hips. Alcohol is 4.75%...amber color."

Fleur is indeed amber, and it is unfiltered: it's a uniformly hazy amber. But it is not uniform in taste, it's like no other beer I know, almost gruit-like in its spicy, herbal, vegetative intensity. It's like running through a hot meadow full of the blooming variety of summer, kicking up the warmed aromas released as you flash through the fields. It is perhaps my very favorite spiced beer, moreso than all the spiced winter beers and witbiers. Fleur is a beauty, an unabashed blast of flavors that meld into a beautifully intense experience. I intend to grab all of it I can get.