Jester King Le Petit Prince
Top Tastings 2012
ABV: 2.9%
Origin: Austin, Texas, USA
Website: jesterkingbrewery.com
It seems US craft beer drinkers, probably with some relief, are starting to realise there’s life below 5.5%. Session beer is one of the current buzz terms across the Atlantic, as brewers start to take up the challenge their British counterparts have long wrestled with – packing plenty of flavour and interest into the sort of gravity that won’t leave you with a headache.
Jester King, founded by brothers Jeff Stuffings and Michael Steffing in Texas hill country just outside Austin in 2010, is a noteworthy advocate for easy going beers inspired by traditional European models. It promotes itself as a farmhouse brewery, inspired by styles like Belgian saison and the bières de garde of French Flanders. But it’s rare among new craft breweries in also taking note of that often overlooked family of low gravity styles, the table beers.
Look on the edges of the beer section of any Belgian supermarket and you’ll find a small selection of low gravity (1.5%-3%) tafelbieren or bières de table, usually in 750ml screw cap bottles – Piedboeuf, from AB InBev’s Jupiler brewery, is the most common but several family owned independents are also active in the sector. Many of these beers are now bland and additive-laden, but they’re still an intriguing reminder of the days when beer was drunk throughout the day, and still thought suitable for serving to children.
Jester King’s Le Petit Prince, launched in 2011, is considerably better than a modern industrial table beer but shares something of the same aspiration to share a dining table with a simple lunch, and also offers, in the brewery’s words, “a clear, simple expression of the delightful interplay between noble hops and farmhouse yeast.”
Named after cult 1943 children’s book Le petit prince (The Little Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and perhaps in recollection of the family friendliness of table beer, the Texan example is brewed from organic Pilsner, two row pale and Caramunich barley malts, wheat malt and Czech Žatec and East Kent Goldings hops, perhaps with other varieties according to availability.
My sample was a cloudy blond with a good white head. A creamy, yeasty, slighty wheaty aroma had tempting notes of vanilla and spice. The attractively light and easy going palate was well balanced with a good cereal body and classic hop flavours. Though noticeably thin it was still fine enough. Light fruit from the hops came through on a chewy finish that yielded a distinct grassy noble hop hum.
I tasted the beer poured from a 750ml bottle at the Borefts Bierfestival at De Molen brewery in Bodegraven, the Netherlands, in September 2012, where it held its own impressively against a range of weird and wonderful brews at the sort of strengths you definitely wouldn’t want to serve to children.
This one has a sister brew, “La Petite Princesse” produced by the Jester King guys together with Daniel Thiriez at Brasserie Thiriez in Esquelbecq.
By the way, and please excuse my nitpickicng a little bit, I don’t think either it is a table beer proper (though I am quite fond of the latter all the same).
It IMHO pretty clearly is inspired by the historical fact that saisons were lower-gravity beers until not that long ago, as – according for example to Yvan de Baets, a bit of an authority in those matters – the hike of saisons’ gravities to the current 5 to 6.5% ABV levels apparently only happened in the 1950s.