Fox DeLuxe Discombobulator Doppelbock

Brewed by Sand Creek Brewing Co. (Pioneer/Wisconsin Brewing Co.)
Style: Doppelbock
Black River Falls, Wisconsin USA

12oz bottle 2/6/09 (Binny’s Naperville)- Pours a light brown body with a small tan covering that dissipated rather quickly. Aroma of roasted malt, caramel, toffee, and fruits. Taste of the same with some citrus and slight alcohol on the back end. This full bodied brew is very well balanced and quite tasty especially since I am not a big fan of this style.

12 oz. bottle. Cellar-cold. Pours a nice brown color with copper/yellow highlights, and a brownish head. Smell is a bit dusty and light in malts that a beer this color should be showing. Taste has quite a bit of grain Malt sweetness over sugar, and only a suggestion of alcohol warmth. Some dried pear and apple, plus a little German hop spice. Starts slow, but gets interesting toward the end. Perhaps this will get interesting as it ages, but this is doing all right now.

Bright copper color with a moderate taupe head. Toasted malt, caramel and toffee scents. Slightly earthy and a hint of dried floral to herbal hops, but the focus is on the malt where it should be. A sweet grainy start. Moderate body with some light carbonation. Toasted grains and light citric bite. Not a hops component, rather a bit of acetic-ness that creeps in. I’m drinking this at a cool room temperature, so it may be more partial to show a fault. Hints of alcohol show up eventually in the nose and a bit in the finish. Some really good qualities are masked or taken over by some nuances that show no favor to me. I am going to cool one of these off and try again. We’ll see how it changes. This will be the last entry if I feel no update is needed.

Dark amber with big, foamy tan head / Nose of brown sugar, toffee, and dry hops / Medium body, creamy, with nice balance of sweet, sugary malts with hopping, and with good, very sweet finish / Simple, fresh flavors of burnt sugar, caramel, brown sugar, and raisins / Excessively sweet, but a solid effort.

bronze colored, medium tan head, some lacing. mildly malty nose, touch of dried fruit. malty, fruity flavor, bordering on vinous. medium bodied, dry finish. too one dimensional to be entertaining. i think cornfield gave me this bottle.

Attractive dark brown pour, fairly easily seen through, topped by an equally attractive and substantial off-white head that lingers. The nose was pretty sweet, almost sickly so. The flavor was sweet carmel malt, dark fruits, raisins, and an unusually prominant earthy hop bite (unusual for the style, anyways). Not bad, but the sweetness does tend toward the cloying end of the scale a bit too much for my liking.

Picked up at the Binny-apostrophe-s Beverage Depot in Orland Park, IL. This beer was contract brewed by Sand Creek Brewing for Fox DeLuxe in Oswego, IL. Sand Creek can do better than this. Looks nice, a clear brownish amber body with a tall and creamy ecru head. The aroma is basically just caramel, albeit a very candy-ish caramel. The flavor sees the edition of light toasty grains and an earthy bitterness. Once was enough.