Great Lakes Brewing Eunuch Brew Gruit Ale

Brewed by Great Lakes Brewing (Ontario)
Style: Traditional Ale
Etobicoke, Canada

Cask at Volo’s ’Pre-Cask Days’ event. Pours a murky dark brown with a small off-white head. Aroma is spicy and fruity -- smells like Xmas spices and juniper. Flavour’s spicy, herbal and fruity along with alcohol and a BIG spicy, bitter finish. The finish gets more subtle the more you drink it. Average to medium bodied. Pretty good and definitely different, enjoyable in small quantities.

[2549-20091028] Cask. Very fragrant sweet floral licorice aroma. Hazy, dark brown body with a quick bubbly off-white head. Flower earthy flavour has strong notes of anise-like gin. Medium-full body is quite dry. Like flowered water, overall a little weird.
(Cask Days @ Volo; Toronto, ON)

2009-10-28. Murky dark brown, headless. 3+ Strong aroma of spice, herbal character. Flavour is similarly strong, very herbal, pretty sharp, quite bitter. Smooth average plus bodied palate. As you work your way through it it becomes a bit less assertive and more nuanced but even after letting it mellow in the glass a bit I still found it to be way over the top. A really neat experiment and others may love it, I just find it hard to drink more than a small amount of it. Cask at Volo, Toronto

Cask. At Volo 2009 English Cask event. Murky red-brown with a small frothy greenish-tan head - looks great! Dry, pungent herbal/bitter aroma - a backbone of vague roast, but solid up-front bitter resin pungency - crushed pine needles, catnip - hard to pin down. The taste - wow, it grabs you - dry cedar/spruce resin and tons of herbal juniper bitterness, with increasing black pepper pungency as it warmed - it tasted a bit like one of those digestif bitters the alkys buy from corner stores, but in a good way. Thick, granular mouthfeel, hugely astringent, with a long pungent resin-bitter finish. Damn, this was terrific - I think it would really settle the stomach nicely after a few too many pints; not recommended as a starting point, though.

Pre-Cask days Volo special, half pint. Wonderful dry herbal assault of unusual flavors that are slightly asrtringent - some flinty stone and cedar wood character as well as the Garrigue-like spice and herb. Not unlike the trademarked Unicum, hence the homonym in the name. Despite the slight medicinal dryness I think Great Lakes has dome something remarkable with this one. Like Orval not everyone will agree.

2009 Volo English Cask Fest. Dark coloured body with a whisp of a head. A fir and floral aroma, powerful for a cask. Average mouthfeel, 50 IBU, and it taste C-hopped in addition to lavender tips. Drinkable, but a sipper because of the bitter complexity, somewhat astringent finish.