Boulevard Sixth Glass Quadrupel

Brewed by Boulevard Brewing Company
Style: Abt/Quadrupel
Kansas City, Missouri USA

Pours a deep ruby with a huge, undying beige head. The aroma is quite nice - lots of sour cherry, with a some backing generic dark fruit plus some nice spice. Very full flavor, warm alcohol, spices, brown sugar, roasted pear, banana. Nice full mouthfeel - the finish is a little rough around the edges, but very manageable. A very pleasant surprise.

750ml bottle. Poured a hazy garnet color. The head was thick and khaki with good retention. Smelled of brown sugar, pear liqueur, and clove. Medium bodied, sweet, and spicy with a warming alcohol effect that lingered with the spices to give a mulled wine-like effect. Carbonation was on the higher end of the spectrum. Brown sugar, clove, pear, and subdued banana flavors were a nice accompaniment to the booze and bubbles. Great beer.

Bottle consumed in a hotel room in Cedar City; if Jon never gets to try this, its on me; auburn in color with a plethora of visible carbonation streams. Head was khaki/off white; solid in size and composition. Aroma of bubblegum, banana, yeast, raisin, fruit and alcohol; some subtle vanilla and brown sugar. Juxtaposition of a soft, almost creamy palate with alot of alcohol in the finish. Alcohol not well hidden initially, but got better with time. Flavor wasn’t too assertive, but it did blend together pretty well. A good to moderate amount of hopping in the finish. Flavors of raisins, fruit, brown sugar, yeast, banana, and alcohol predominantly. Alot of yeast in the flavor as expected. Can’t remember the last time I had an example of this style, but this probably is somewhere in the middle for me.

Misty lava-hued pour, and a thick beige foam; tightly bubbled frothed milk. Solid yeast and malt aroma, with soft cutting bitterness; raisins, dried cherries, cinnamon bread, salt, brown sugar; a haze of pine and smokiness lends a soft but distinctive earthy bitterness that doesn’t lend itself to the style. But it works. Malt tends to dominate anyway, and even if it’s somewhat simple (it never has the bottomless-pit type of depth that the real Belgian examples build themselves on), it’s satisfying. It seems kind of medicinal with rough alcohol and fruit character awkwardly mingling every now and again, while a slightly acetic sharpness meanders around like a drunk.

Thorough and fulsome malt flavor, tobacco-rich and lacquered in fruit reductions. Still somewhat alcoholic, and not impressively deep, but still plenty full, and the heat tends to suggest red wine rather more than booze. That’s pleasant. For style benchmarks, the dried fruit prominence is on pitch, but there’s not much roasted nuttiness or underlying bitter chocolate to properly identify it. Instead, the spruce-like herbal bitterness of hops still lingers with a smooth, almost tea-like character, and if blindly tasted it might be best recognized as some kind of hopped-up la trappe-type of beer. Especially with the mostly-obvious strength of the alcohol, that bitterness is made more apparent, and more harmful. It’s tasty though, as the pureness of the pine flavor sort of gets charming somehow, and as vague hints of candied almonds and hazelnuts struggle to bring it back into the right fold.

Man, the yeast pour really pushes that vinegar through on the nose. With some locker room funk. And wet leaves. Flavor opens up into richness and generally big character; cinnamon, vanilla, warmer yeasts overall, and a fuller sweetness that doesn’t so obviously rely on fruit. The variance between the dirtiness of the nose and the clean character of the flavor isn’t endearing.

Body is rich and full, with a bit of carbonic prickle. But, because the sweetness of the beer is all wrapped up in its fruitiness, the texture is left a bit too syrupy. The finish is plain and somewhat dry in alcohol, but nuanced with dried pineapple and more needly bitterness, and more dried cherries. What a weirdly amiable experience; totally aside from stylistic boundaries, but warm and intriguing in its own backward way.

Pours a hazy red with a lively head that disappears almost instantly with no lace. Plenty of yeast and fruit in the nose. I found the flavor a bit unbalanced, a little syrupy in the sweetness and a bi t one-dimensional in yeast. It’s a good quadrupel, but not a great one.

Light hazed brown almost tan head and lace. Heavy malt and some brown sugar with hints of fruitiness. Molasses with a light hops bitter, light brown sugar and an apple like flavor. Aggressive carbonation and solid mouthfeel. Very solid beer.

Sampled at the 2008 Music City Brewers Fest. Amber in the glass with a creamy off-white head. Some head lasting. Sweet fruit aroma with a light spice backing. The flavor finds fruits (raisin) with light spices and yeast. Medium body and lively carbonation.

A golden-amber colored beer, with a white-amber head that stays for a good while. Smells of fruits and spice. Very carbonated, tastes equally of fruits and spices, but not overpoweringly so. Dry, but with a complex aftertaste that leaves you wanting more. Very well balanced beer that can be appreciated by both the casual drinker and the enthusiast.