It’s difficult to escape the Twisted Kilt.
No, that’s not a marketing line from a hackneyed ‘50s Scottish horror flick scored by flailing bagpipes, littered with tattered tartans.
The Twisted Kilt is brewer Ron Chips’ latest play on a Scottish ale. And its flavors linger, tracing your palate with warm bready malts, crisp fruits and pine needle bitterness, even as you head home.
It is loathe to walk away. And as it slowly fades, you begin to yearn for another round.
“I’m real happy with it,” Chips said. “It’s a different style than most of my beers.”
The man behind Kelsey Creek Brewing’s lineup prefers subtlety and balance, even in his most potent beers. In the Twisted Kilt, however, he allowed hops more room to romp. So the beer reaches out to you with fresh, crisp aromas of tangerine, dewy melon and strawberry. It finishes with that floral, almost pine forest bite.
Yet there’s a warm soul under all those bright notes. It expresses itself as baking biscuits on the nose, faintly discernible behind the fresh citrus and berry. It flickers on the edge of your tongue the first moment you sip, as if the new slices of fruit had been tossed into a skillet of caramelizing sugars. It emerges mid-palate as a kitchen in which toffee and dark bread shared an oven with strawberry pie.
It carries toward the finish as soft white pepper.
Chips used three types of aromatic hops in the mash, including the familiar Calypso and Cascade. The other — the outsider — was Hull Melon, responsible for the sweet-tang of strawberry.
But the clever bit was in his use of grains.
“The kicker to this is I bought Crystal Rye,” Chips explained. “I thought that would be a nice twist.”
Rye accounted for just 10 percent of the malt. It yielded, however, a soothing mouthfeel, a sincere heart and that peppery note that blends in beautifully with the hoppy finish.
Oh, that finish. It is captivating.
Chips just completed kegging the kilt on Wednesday morning. It should be available at the Kelseyville brewpub starting today.
It’s likely that Kelsey Creek regulars will not want it to go away any time soon.
Dave Faries can be reached at 900-2016
