Aldergrove Empirical Staught

6/7/08 On draught at the ExBeerience beer festival. Aroma is of low sweet roast. Appearance is very dark brown with a low tan head. Flavor is rich, toasty sourness. Mouthfeel is full bodied with no creaminess or carb texture. Overall, not terrible, but not easy drinking.

Bottled. Poured a lovely shade of deepest brown with a creamy cap of dark tan head. The aroma picked up a hefty dose of molasses to complement dark chocolate and sticky caramel.. lots of roast throughout and enough character to approximate an imperial stout. The flavor opened with pine and citric bitterness that was followed by a rich array of well-roasted dark maltage (dark chocolates, coffee, and molasses primarily).. lively bitterness again on the back that cut into and complemented the roast factor.. warm finish with pine and sticky dark malts. Medium-plus bodied with enough carbonation to keep it moving across the palate (some sharp prickly notes on the sides).. I thought this was quite good, and It looks like I got lucky with the condition of my bottle.

Black viscous pour lightly carbonated with a small brown head. Pleasant roast aroma. Big and malty with subtle notes of coffee, chocolate, and fruit. Lingering bitter finish.

Bottle. Pours thick and black with a long lasting tan head. Fruity, chocolate malt aroma. Initial raspberry flavor followed up by a sweet caramel note along with some chocolate. Pretty bitter, especially in the finish. Very enjoyable.

A vigorous pour into my 25cl tulip glass produces a three-finger thick, frothy, deeply browned, tan colored head that sits on top of an almost black, concentrated, dark brown stained beer that is quite opaque. Quite sweet and fruity smelling, in fact it has some similarities to fruit loops somehow. A light mustiness seems to linger just beneath the surface of the aroma too. The more typical and expected roast notes of a stout are hard to pick out underneath the artificial fruitiness, but if you swirl it nice notes of deeply toasted grain, roasted coffee beans and dusty cocoa aromatics become noticeable. A sort of cheesy note comes out during the swirling as well though.

Amply roasted in the flavor, from a burnt acidity, to lots of roast malt character. Finishes with a slight, burnt vegetable note that I find in quite a few heavily roasted beers these days. Dark espresso flavors and burnt caramel malt notes intermingle at the front of each sip, though these are preceded by a nice, rich chocolate flavor. Towards the middle and finish the beer picks up a touch of sourness that seems to be a bit more than just roast grain induced. This beer is thick, rich and chewy feeling with a definite heft that makes this a sipping brew. The mouthfeel helps to keep the tartness from being too distracting, though it definitely intrudes just a bit. A bit of the funk from the nose makes its way into the flavor, though it has a much lighter impact, though does become more noticeable towards the finish of each sip (a bit of moldiness is mainly what is noticeable above the slightly suspect tartness).

A decent beer, that has most definitely been infected prior to or at bottling. Based on this sample I would say this is a beer to be drunk very freshly bottled, which at first blush seems to be the case with most of their bottled products.