First Impressions of Boulevard Harvest Dance Wheat Wine

Tonight I went to the third installment of Barley's Beer School series in Overland Park, Kansas. The event featured Jean-Marie Rock, the head brewer at Orval, and Steven Pauwels of Boulevard. The purpose of the event was to shed a little light on the collaboration beer that Rock and Pauwels are working on, but that's another post entirely... Toward the end of the evening the servers brought around bottles of Boulevard's newest Smokestack Series beer, Harvest Dance. I'd first heard of this beer a month or so back and it sounded really interesting. The beer is being called a wheat wine, which sounds a bit like a barley wine so be prepared for everyone to draw a line between this beer and a barley wine. After sampling the beer I don't think it's a fair comparison. Barley wines usually have a lot of toffee, dark fruit and rich syrup flavors. There isn't much of that in the Harvest Dance, it's really much lighter than a barley wine. Now, when I say lighter it's important to keep in mind that this is a +9% beer... so it's definitely a sipper.

The Harvest Dance has an effervescence to it that I've never had in a barley wine before and that gives this beer a bit of levity. The texture of the Harvest Dance is very creamy on the palate, which may seem like a contradiction considering the carbonation but it works well. After taking my first sip of the Harvest Dance I could really taste the sweet fruit in this beer. At first I thought it was similar to a sweeter Chardonnay but as I drank my way through the glass it ended up tasting more like a Sauvignon Blanc. I thought this beer was excellent. It was quite sweet in a way that is a bit hard to describe. While barley wines have a rich dark fruit sweetness, the Harvest Dance was lighter but not citrusy. I didn't pick up any tartness, this beer struck me as being very well balanced and easy to drink considering its high ABV.

I'm really looking forward to the Harvest Dance's November release date so I can pick up a full 750 of this Wheat Wine and put it through the paces.