De La Senne Taras Boulba (4.5) ABV

Brasserie de la Senne

Wow. This is quickly becoming one of our favorite beers here at Shelton Bros. This is the perfect session beer — loaded with complex yeast flavors, hopped to perfection, and as drinkable as any beer you’ve ever tried. At 4.5% alcohol, it’s built for drinkability — we suggest buying it by the case.

You’re no doubt wondering where the name comes from and what the hell the foreign text says. It’s all been explained to us by the brewers, but we’re still not entirely clear about it. What we can understand is that a young Flemish man has gone and married a French-speaking Wallonian girl, and his father, Taras Boulba, is very angry. (Smeirlap means ‘fool’ in a bizarre local dialect, which combines Flemish and French, somehow.)

This is all a bastardization of the original story by Gogol, whose protagonist was Russian, a Protestant. His son marries a Polish girl, a Catholic, during the religious war between the two countries in the 1600’s, and the Russian father simply kills his son to eliminate the shame.