Mikkeller 黑 / Black

Damn...I mean...DAMN!!! This beer pours liquid coal with a nice tightly packed milk chocolate colored head. Surprisingly, the head stuck around a while,left lacing, and stained the glass. Visually stunning. The aroma is unsweetened cocoa, dark roasted coffee, and malt. Much more pleasant on the nose than on the tongue!!! This one sent chills...alcohol is HOT at first. Interestingly though, after you get acclimated to the burn, the underlying flavors are quite pleasant. I actually found the bite to be less overwhelming than with Dark Horizon 1st Ed. Sip this one...and don’t bite down, you might chip a tooth it’s so thick. Worth a try definitely.

Bottle. Fantastic nose. Large creamy dark lasting head with good lacing. Hazy black, black body. Heavy aroma of chocolate, coffee, roasted and toasted malt and liquorice. Harsh hop aroma, heavy in alcohol. It has a good mouth feel, a full body, sticky texture and a bitter finish. The flavor has a very long duration and is heavy sweet and heavy bitter - to bitter if you ask me :-) A good beer for a long night in the sofa - it took me more than 2 hours to drink the beer.

On tap at European Beerfestival. Pours black with a yellowish head and some lacings. Sweet and dry. Aromas of chocolate malts and dark fruits with hints of honey and ash. Soft carbonation. Sticky mouthfeel. Long sweet finish.

Bottle, big thanks to henrikb! Shared with Traci on her birthday. Deep dark iron black, lots of burnt tan head that sticks around. Intense cocoa aroma, like taking the lid off the cocoa tin, inserting your nose, and inhaling powder clear up to your brain. A lot of alcohol there too, but of a clean sort: vodka good enough to drink on its own. Some raisins. The smell of new trainers. To taste: anything other than a very delicate sip is very hot. But with a gentle sip, rolled around on the tongue, there is a lovely vanilla and melted chocolate flavor, spoiled a bit by kind of an ashy follow up note. Some lingering resiny hops. This strikes me as a beer in adolescence. The interesting bright notes it may have had fresh have faded, and what’s present now hasn’t mellowed enough to be a great old beer. In a few years, I’ll take out the other bottle Henrik sent my way, and would not at all be surprised to find something sublime. As is, interesting, but noisy and unbalanced.

Pours a deep deep black with a small beige head. Aroma is big time sweet with dark fruits, vanilla, chocolate and mild alcohol. The flavor has more of an alcohol bite although not as much as you’d expect from a beer of this strength. Nice fruity notes, roasted grains, chocolate and some citrus. Large bodied, chewy texture. Long long sweet finish.

Oh, this is a monstrosity. Pure black nectar with a shy pancake head that finally amounts to something half way through the pour. It just sits there, the whole session. Strong aromas of bitter cocoa, roasted coffee bean, leather, and molasses. Full nectar like pudding on the palate with superb carbonation for something so dense. Huge chocolate malt backbone is sliced and diced with surgical precision by a sharp aspirin hop component. The whole sip is a battle zone thrashing and cutting between malt and hop. The flavor is intense and moderately sweet with huge bittering to balance. The alcohol is high and mighty yielding crazy mental abstractions from thought to sip. The finish is as memorable as your fist broken limb or ER suture. Wow! This one gets my Trump card.

The bottle looks strange, but good. The beer in the glass is deep black, almost oily. Aroma very alcoholic. Tastes incredibly strong, very complex, notes of chocoloate and coffee. Dry finish. Impressing! Thanks to yespr for the bottle!

Very dark beer out of the bottle. I had to use pliers to get the artificial cork out of the bottle. Huge dark brown head that left lots of sticky lace. You can tell from the first sip that this is a huge ABV beer, even though the alcohol flavors are not overpowering. Nose has lots of sherry, ripe dark fruit, tobacco, and a thick,sweet alcohol warmth. This is a huge, sipping beer. Lots of caramel, toffee, molassess, chocolate, burnt coffee, fresh ashtray, sweet cherries, just tons of flavors. I just feels like a thick, big, almost dangerous beer. It is a little disjointed, and almost too big. I’ll vote for wildest and craziest.