Dogfish Head Saison du Buff:
Hello once again fellow beer drinkers and welcome to another beer review and this time, we’re taking out three breweries with one beer.  As anyone who has regularly followed this little adventure over the year knows, I love Dogfish Head Brewery.  In my mind they are virtually infallible in their beers (though they do have one that I’m not a fan of and I’ll try to get to it this year to show you that I’m not corrupted by their delicious, adventurous, frickin’ awesome beers) and when they combine their powers of beer making with Stone and Victory Breweries they form Captain Planet!  Well, that and Saison du Buff, a beer brewed with parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme and despite my previous encounter with a rosemary beer, this one is actually good.  The beer pours a hazy golden color with a bleach white head that dissipates to a film and leaves lacing on the glass and a nose of mint notes combined with an earthy rose smell.  Yeah, that’s the best way I can describe it and I’m sure everyone would call it something different.  The beers initial taste is very fizzy with carbonation that allows the flavors of sage and parsley to come through first and a mid tongue of hops, malts, and I guess sage (does anyone really know what sage tastes like by itself??) and the back end taste is where the rosemary shines.  Why does it shine?  Well as we discovered in the honey rosemary beer, rosemary isn’t necessarily the best ingredient to have in a beer but here it is in a nice mellow amount that is just strong enough to be enjoyable.  A good beer but not for everyone due to it’s flavoring choices which are just far enough into left field to alienate most people.  If you can sample this before trying, by all means do that because it’s worth a try but, if I remember right, this isn’t a cheap bottle to buy on a straight up guess.