Last time we took a side trip to Funkytown in relation to our ever expanding wines, beers & cocktails list, I went on & on about our new Corsican wine, the Bianco Gentile from biodynamic wine guru, Antoine Arena. This time, let's start the funkification with our latest beer from Corsica, the Pietra, made with the addition of chestnuts to the amber ale. Thanks to the cheesemongers at St. James for turning me onto this beer when I had lunch there recently. I really enjoyed this, and the tale behind it was worth supporting this relatively new beer.

Basically, before this brewery started up in Corsica, the island did not have any indigenous beer makers. As with many French drinkers, beer was relegated to summertime drinking or some other occasional time. After all, Corsica shares attitudes to a large degree with Sardinia and by extension to more of southern Italy where beer traditions are more feeble the farther a culture gets from the Alps, from the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from German brewers and their monks and statues of pissing boys, etc. etc. I do like a few Italian beers, particularly the Moretti dark beer is highly underrated in my opinion, and I recently read an article about the exploding new microbrewing ideas that are pollinating across northern Italy. Now French beers are another story. Perhaps I haven't come across the right French brews, but as my Mom told me, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all," and I'd bet that when in Alsace or elsewhere on the northern fringes of France, there's quaffable, local beer.

So there was no tradition of beer native to Corsica. The brewers looked around and thought how could they make a distinctive beer that reflected Corsican culture? They hit upon the excellent idea of using chestnuts, which are an iconic foodstuff on the island. (I am trying to score some Corsican chestnut liqueur, too, thus we'll see if that works anytime soon) So, they set about to figure out the process, eventually settling on using chestnut flour in the making of the beer to a ratio of 20%. I'm a little sketchy on the other details of the grains used, but it comes out like a pleasant amber ale, far different than our Abita Amber, but still recognizable in comparison, and very pleasant to drink here as Fall tries to stick around here, and finally push summertime into semi-retirement, in New Orleans. Of course, the chestnut-enhanced Pietra will be a good partner for our new chestnut flour tagliatelle with smoked magret duck, wild mushrooms & caraway-braised Napa cabbage all cooked in duck fat with a little bit of 5 yr. Dutch gouda and a splash of cream to hang it all together. That new pasta will debut on the dinner menu this weekend...

Speaking of just north of France, the real showstopper brew we have begun to feature at The Green Goddess is a Red Flemish Ale from the part of Belgium that represents Flanders and surroundings, where the citizens are defiantly neither French nor Dutch but Flemish. The beer is The Duchesse de Bourgogne. Let's deal with the beer first, although the backstory of the woman behind the name is fascinating, too.

Beer Advocate is always a useful website for checking out how people respond to tasting new beers. I tend not to like to tell people how something tastes, mainly because my job is to put food and drinks on the table for folks to discover how they taste these things. There are some good links when you check out the Beer Advocate website reviews of The Duchesse, but my own taste encounter with The Duchesse was quite a revelation. I am probably more of a beer drinker than anything else, but I had never enjoyed a beer quite like The Duchesse before, despite my long, so-called career of beer explorations. The only thing that compares are some of the fermented Kriek types of lambic beers, but The Duchesse manages to achieve a more robust sweet/sour flavor without adding any fruit to the brew, no cherries no other red fruit of any kind.

Apparently, the beer is "trained" by its long 18 month rest in traditional barrels, which in repetitive use over time build up all the microbial flora, yeasts, and good bacteria to give the beer a deeper fermentation. The Duchesse represents a traditional sour Flemish red ale, and my friend and beer guru, Dan Stein, says there might be one other Flemish red that could be even better than The Duchesse. The Duchesse rocks, and it's concentration of sweet cherry and tart balsamic seems balanced, with a little petillance that belies the power of the brew. A few Beer Advocate drinkers thought their bottle was too acetic and vinegary, but I found it to be a tad sweeter than it is sour. It would drink beautifully with stinky cheese, like an Epoisses, and it's tart piquancy and depth of flavor would be a rich companion to braised fare, to anything with a savory umami taste like mushrooms, truffles or beets; moreover, I suspect The Duchesse could serve as a final brew in a complex beer dinner... because it's such a rewarding taste that another beer might seem pallid after it. Really only extreme beers like barleywines would have enough oomph to carry things onward, but that is not to say that The Duchesse is some sort of weird beer to keep under suspicion.

I actually feel cheated that 30+ years of my beer drinking career has been spent without ever knowing such a unique beer existed. It's flat out delicious! I wonder if different batches come out differently, depending on how much flora has been kept in the barrels, seasonal temperatures, and how old are the barrels when they age and train the new casks of The Duchesse? Even people on Beer Advocate who thought their Duchesse was too sour were struck by the tradition and majestic flavor of this medieval brew.

Now on the bottle is a painting of The Duchesse de Bourgogne, with a little falcon by her side. The duchesse was a real historic person, a young woman from a noble Flemish family who married well into French royalty. She is regarded as a staunch supporter of Flemish rights, living in the 1500s, as I recall. Unfortunately for her, she had an accidental fall from her horse while enjoying her falconry and broke her neck, dying too young at age 25. She was buried in Bruges, which is a very well-preserved, Medieval town to this day; the Catholic church where the little duchesse was buried also has the distinction of being one of the very few places outside of Italy where Michelangelo sent one of his statues, and it's still there, along with a plaque for The Duchesse. One gets the feeling that The Duchesse was a kind of Princess Diana in her age, and her myth is still working after practically 500 years of history -- thanks to beer!

Sadly for the archrivals of New Orleans Saints, those "Dirty Bird" Atlanta Falcons, the moral of The Duchesse story is quite simple: playing with falcons is unreliable and leads to disappointment, or even death! I mean look at the NFL Falcons: never had back-to-back winning seasons, and now we can see the history of falcon misery winds far back into history... apparently there are worse things than having Bobby Petrino attempt to coach in the NFL where he fled the Falcons before his first year was even finished.

Clearly, nobody in Atlanta will be naming anything good after Coach Petrino, and I'm not too grateful to him because the way Petrino led that year's Falcons edition to implode like a black hole of disastrous so-called football resulted in a high draft pick for promising QB Matt Ryan.

I think both the Pietra chestnut beer from Corsica and The Duchesse both qualify for funky traditions here in our modern world, funky people, and funky beers. Perhaps peculiar could be the better word choice, but since the results of drinking these beers should surely produce pleasure in the pursuit of happiness, I make a motion to let 'em stay funky!

More Autumn menu changes coming real soon...