THE LOST ABBEY’S LOST AND FOUND ALE – SMOOTH AS GLASS

After LOST ABBEY mania descended upon San Francisco late last year (you can read a dispatch from the front here), and several bottles washed up into town during the craze, I seized the initiative and spent whatever it took to procure a few of them for myself. The first, a big bottle of AVANT GARDE that I uncorked in January, was delicious and yet still somewhat anticlimactic at the same time. No such issue with this one, the LOST AND FOUND ALE. This superb Belgian-style dubbel comes out of the gate like a brown ale, and looks the part as well. Yet once you start doing all those annoying things that ludicrous beer dorks do – you know, smelling the glass, swishing the beer inside yr mouth like a goddamn wine drinker, well – you realize that this thing goes far beyond the quote-unquote ordinary. It is ripe with the aroma of figs, dates, and other sweet brown things, but has a really, really balanced blend of malts that doesn’t bite or challenge too hard. It is extremely smooth. It also doesn’t taste like an ordinary brown ale – I followed it up with the very solid Lost Coast Downtown Brown, so it made for a nice comparison – as it has some really subtle quirks that scream “Belgian-style”. Really a fantastic beer. 8.5/10.