GABF Day 0 - Trinity Brewing Co.

Matt and I arrived in Denver early Wednesday afternoon after a delayed flight. We picked up our rental car and headed immediately for Colorado Springs. Last year, Trinity Brewing out of Colorado Springs was by far the most stand-out brewery that we encountered. Their "The Flavor" cherry sour ale was unlike anything we had tasted before and was both of our festival favorites. This year, we knew that we had to add Trinity to our list of GABF festivities.

We arrived at Trinity right around 5, so it was still fairly slow. We grabbed a table near the bar and quickly dove into their GABF tap list. In addition to around 10 taps of their own house beers, around 25 additional taps hosted beers from Colorado and around the country. While the guest taps were enticing, we were here for Trinity. Trinity specializes in wild fermentation, but that doesn't necessarily mean all of their beers are sour.

I started out with a Peche Noir, a September seasonal that boasts both a dark body and light peach notes. This is, however, certainly not a stout. The Peche Noir was very light in the aroma department, only carrying hints of peach. The flavor was much lighter and refreshing than the 7% ABV would imply. The darker body was represented through coffee, roasted malt and toasted bread flavor. Peaches were very present, but the beer was not something you would describe as sweet. A great beer that represented the transition of Summer to Fall.

My second beer was the Farmhouse du Base, which was lighter in the alcohol department. The Farmhouse du Base seemed to be in the saison style, but again, a lighter summer beer with only mild tart notes. The beer quickly greeted me with the aroma of fresh green apple skins, a saison funk and a slight sensation of hay. The body was very creamy and carried a dominate granny smith apple flavor with lemon, pepper, wheat, banana and clove in the background. Not as heavy as a wheat, not as spicy as a saison, but somewhere in between.

Matt has a reputation for being very strict on his acceptance of cask conditioning practices. Flo was the current cask conditioned offering, which was an IPA. Matt launched in to an inquisition on our server before determining that the beer would be worth his time and money. And it most certainly was. I believe Matt's quote was "this is awesome." Flo was a really great, balanced India pale ale that collected a great amount of texture and complexity from the cask conditioning process executed correctly.

We met Eric and Isaac from Focus on the Beer as we were getting ready to leave, thanks to Isaac's Dark Lord shirt. They provided us a wealth of knowledge about many of the Colorado breweries that we were not familiar with and loaded up our checklist for GABF. Check out their blog at http://www.focusonthebeer.com/