Top Tastings 2008. A shorter version was first published on facebook January 2009.
ABV: 6.8%
Origin: Piozzo, Piemonte, Italia
Website: www.baladin.it
Baladin Nora Birra Egizia
The restlessly creative Teo Musso is one of the pioneers of the new wave of Italian craft brewers: his brewpub Baladin dates back to 1996 and originally showed a strong Belgian influence attributed to the Flemish background of Teo’s Lille-born wife Nora. But since then he’s really pushed the envelope with unusual grains, flavourings and techniques, the last including playing music to maturing casks. Eccentricities aside, he seems incapable of producing a beer less than interesting.
This ‘Egyptian beer’ named after Nora is an organic wheat beer made partly from the ancient Egyptian kamut variety of wheat, and following other fragments of what we now about the brewing practices of the civilisation that built the pyramids, is flavoured with ginger and myrrh.
It’s a cloudy orange with a thick slightly orange-tinted head and an unusual very grassy and chaffy aroma with notes of aniseed, lemon, camomile and liquorice. The palate is smooth and lightly citric with date-like fruit and distinctive herbal notes, finishing mild but refreshingly grainy with summer grass and a dash of hops, very easy drinking for its ABV. Bought at the Great British Beer Festival.
Read more about this beer at ratebeer.com: http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/baladin-nora/14552/
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