Red Sky at Night

by Dom Perry
(Beer Delegate, MD, USA)

Red Sky at Night Saison by Clipper City. Not red

Even though your beer
Is called Red Sky, you bottled
A wheat ale, why lie?

Why does Clipper City hate me so much? I’ve done nothing to them (at least not that I remember). I’d really like to know why they called their saison (a type of farmhouse wheat ale) Red Sky at Night, and put it in a red bottle with a red label, causing me to think I just bought a red ale.

Instead of the tasty Irish malt flavors I should have gotten, I was rewarded with bread. That’s right; the best way to describe this beer is bread. Not tasty "mom just baked some" bread, but rather "Oh, you only got so far as to put yeast in warm water" bread.

There is an overwhelming taste of yeast upon first taste, with a nice yeasty middle taste that fades into a yeast-like finish. The taste is a bit too overpoweringly yeasty for me. On top of that, the aftertaste is god awful and the beer itself too sweet. None of the complexity that Clipper City would like you to think exists, actually does.

Being the good beer reviewer I am and, out of some morbid desire to complete my review, I poured the beer into a glass to see if it at least poured nicely. The answer is an unsurprising no. There was no head (or at least it ran away quickly, embarrassed at having lied to me about being a red ale) or lace to the beer at all. The smell can only be described as yeasty (surprise, surprise).

I wouldn’t recommend Red Sky at Night to anyone but the most die hard yeast fans (do these people even exist?). I’ve never been a large fan of wheat beers to begin with (I thought I bought a red), so this was a particularly bad experience.