Rare Form unveiling 'relatively' good beers

Your average craft brewery tends to release its new brews one at a time. The Rare Form Brewing Company, however is in ... rare form, so to speak. It plans to release three new "extremely limited" offerings simultaneously.

At 1 p.m. Saturday, August 27, Rare Form will be introducing two beers in what it calls the "Family Tree" line, as well as a Karass porter.

The Family Tree line stems from Rare Form's one-year anniversary beer called Dark Tropic, a coconut porter aged in sour dark rum barrels. A small amount of that beer was left in both of the barrels in which they were aged. That added branches to the "family tree," and, say the brewers, "each barrel embarked on two different paths, leaving a small amount of beer from its previous aging. Over a year later, we’ve created two beers that are accumulations from blends of every barrel-aged sour produced by Rare Form. Thus creating Family Tree 1 and Family Tree 2."

• Family Tree 1: Dark Tropic > Wee Plaid > Table Beer (spontaneously fermented) > blended with Table Beer 4.8% abv

• Family Tree 2: Dark Tropic > Wee Plaid > Plum Love > blended with Table Beer 6.6% abv

• The rye barrel aged Karass Porter is "inspired by one of the great Troy authors (*), Kurt Vonnegut. This robust porter is a part of our Karass.” (Vonnegut coined the term in his novel "Cat's Cradle" to refer to a network or group of people somehow spiritually linked.) The beer was aged in fresh rye whiskey barrels from Yankee Distilling Company of Clifton Park, bottled at 7% abv.

Rare Form Brewing Company is located at 90 Congress Street in Troy. Phone: 326-4303.

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(*) The reference to the late novelist (1922-2007) as a "Troy" author might be considered by some to be a bit of a stretch. Vonnegut, who lived in Glenville, Schenectady County, while working as a technical writer for General Electric, did set some of his stories in the fictional city of Ilium, which many people took to be Troy (the Roman name for ancient Troy was Ilium), but some insist was based on Schenectady even though Schenectady is referenced as a place separate from Ilium by various characters in Vonnegut's "Player Piano," "Cat's Cradle," and "Slaughterhouse-Five." Let the debate continue.

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