Bedlam!, Ale Asylum

Today’s beer is described by its makers in avant garde terms.  “Chaos as art” is apparently its motto.  The brewery’s web page for it is mostly a copied and pasted entry from beeradvocate  where a user waxes poetic over astronautical rhetoric.  I’m imagining a barley and hops Jackson Pollock or Reggie Watts.  That sounds good to me.  Artistic expressions that stretch your mind can be quite pleasing.  But they can also go overboard.  Think of the enjoyable dissonance of Bartok on one hand and phrase words of annoyance reordering a randomly the on the other.  The question is which one this beer will be.  So as your beer blog curator, I present to you Ale Asylum’s Bedlam!.

Nice deep orange color!

The bottle claims the citra hops and belgian yeast create notes of summer fruits.  Even though that’s a common term used by a lot of breweries and reviewers, I’m not quite sure which fruits specifically count as summer fruits.  And what’s the alternative?  Winter fruits?  I'll have to look into it. Anyway, if that term refers to oranges and grapefruits, then it’s right on. Maybe a hint of apricot as well.  The taste doesn’t immediately strike me as being particularly chaotic, but not because its component parts do not clash.  The single minded hops of the IPA side and the nutty curveballs of the Belgian side are diametrically opposed.  But instead of spinning off each other into an ambiguous cloud of cognitive dissonance, they seem to bore directly into one another and cancel each other out.  It’s like the airborne streaks of paint of the aforementioned Pollock just happened to fall into the outline of a Hirst.  You’ve got random streaks of paint, but the big picture is of monochromatic dots.

As far as where Bedlam! falls in the avant garde, my mind likes the task of dissecting all its moving parts but unfortunately my stomach sees it as the annoying reordered words.  Out-there art can be good for the brain.  However, beer ultimately gets processed by a dumb mass of cells limited to chemical reactions and pressure variances as a means of communication.  Physiological forums are not particularly ponderous.

Update! Apparently there are winter fruits. And spring fruits and autumn fruits. Who knew? Aside from millions of people all over the world, that is. Oranges fall into winter and spring but grapefruit and apricot are summer. Two out of three isn't too bad, right?