"The Prairie-Grass Dividing" and Bell's Leaves of Grass II

The Beer

Last month, Bell’s released the second beer in their Leaves of Grass series, and I was lucky enough to find it at only one of the stores where I looked for it. (And that was in Ohio, just south of Michigan where Bell’s brews. I hope I can find the rest of this series even though I live on the east coast now.) The Prairie-Grass Dividing is a “gose-style ale brewed with plum, salt, and coriander.” Salt and coriander are traditional additions to a gose; the plum adds something new. It’s worth throwing that plum in just for appearance points: this beer is a rosy beauty.

You’ll find gose not in the “German Wheat Beer” section of the BJCP Style Guide but rather in the “Historical Styles” section. I’ve been seeing this beer around quite a bit, though. Dogfish Head’s SeaQuench is perhaps the most prevalent example of a salted sour (that one with lime), but a lot of local breweries dabble in gose, too.

Photo credit USA Today.

Wondering what a pome fruit is? Think fruits that have not one but multiple small seeds at the center, like apples and pears.

You can tell this beer is a sour in one sniff (that funky yeasty character is really big on the nose) but I don’t pinpoint that it’s a gose until I take a sip. According to the BJCP, most goses will have a “light to moderately fruity aroma of pome fruit” and a “light, bready, doughy, yeasty character like uncooked sourdough bread.” Like a gose should, The Prairie Grass Dividing zings the back of your jaw with a tart sourness. Then, more subtly, you get the salt that, for me, defines this style. I can’t taste any coriander in this gose from Bell’s, but I definitely need a few more years of practice to be able to identify that taste. (It’ll come: a few years ago, I didn’t even know that gose and geuze were two different styles. Always more to learn.)

I love the addition of a stone fruit to this style. The plum adds a soft sweetness that counters the salt and sour without overpowering either of those key characteristics.

The Poem

“The Prairie-Grass Dividing” isn’t a poem that is anthologized (it’s in none of my various Norton Anthologies), and it’s short, so I’ll copy it here:

The prairie-grass dividing—its special odor breathing,

I demand of it the spiritual corresponding,

Demand the most copious and close companionship of men,

Demand the blades to rise of words, acts, beings,

Those of the open atmosphere, coarse, sunlit, fresh, nutritious,

Those that go their own gait, erect, stepping with freedom and command—leading, not following,

Those with a never-quell'd audacity—those with sweet and lusty flesh, clear of taint,

Those that look carelessly in the faces of Presidents and Governors, as to say, Who are you?

Those of earth-born passion, simple, never constrain'd' never obedient,

Those of inland America.

So many demands arise from the speaker simply observing the prairie-grass dividing: that we Americans be open individuals who are also companions, audacious leaders who walk at our own pace and constantly question authority. I like to think that Larry Bell was inspired to brew a gose for this poem because goses traditionally have a grain bill that includes up to 50% unmalted wheat, or “prairie-grass.” Though the beer is a sour, the addition of the plum jibes nicely with the line, “those with sweet and lusty flesh, clear of taint” (6); its note of saltiness matches the “never-quell’d audactiy” that the speaker demands of “those of inland America.”

Keep your eye out for beer III of this series, which will be released next month (September 2019). I can’t wait to see what Bell’s does with Whitman’s classic elegy for Abraham Lincoln.