N’Ice Chouffe

Brewed by Brasserie d’Achouffe (Moortgat)
Style: Belgian Strong Ale
Achouffe, Belgium

Sampled from bottle. Pours murky dark brown with a faint ruby tint. head is tall, creamy and leaves nice lacing. Aroma is very earthy and spicy with some citrus notes. Flavor is quite complex with leather, earth, citrus, hay, peppery spices (probably some of the thyme) and dark fruit. Wow. Full-bodied, moderately carbonated and quite dry. Very enjoyable - too bad it’s a 2003 limited edition, because I would certainly add it to my regular rotation.

Bottle, at home. A dark brown beer with a light brown head, mostly diminishing, fine lacings. Aroma heavy malty (brown sugar, figs, chocolate, orange) moderate hoppy. Flavor heavy sweet ending in moderate bitter, fine balance. Medium body, creamy, flat carbonated, you don’t feel the strength.

Bottle. Clove, berry and thyme aromas. Dark brown with large tan head. Spicy hops up front followed by a nice sweet raspberry flavor and ending with alcohol burn. Nice beer - very well balanced with a complex flavor that doesn’t allow the alcohol content to overwhelm the more subtle flavors. A nice beer to sip while smoking a pipe (which is what I’m doing right now).

Great winter Belgian. Dark brown in color, nice white head. Tastes great.

Hazy brown colour with a off-white head. Pepry nose and a winous aroma. The flavor i also winous and sweet. Nice!

achouffe of course has it’s cartoon mascots-- a series of not-very-cute hunchbacked dwarfish beings that appear on their labels. these belgian equivalents of leprechauns have red-tipped pinnochio noses suggesting either that they brawl a lot or that they’ve been out tapping on trees like woodpeckers. whatever their proclivities, here the pointy-nosed and red-capped gnome-lings at chouffe have much more sensitively created in the ’04 N’ice a sweet confection for the palettes of big people. by using burdens of belgian candy sugar that would bend the backs of camels-- and flavors lovingly coaxed from cookie-baked malts, one tastes the likenesses of dried fruits and fudge that would attempt to beguile and seduce both young people and hungry honey badgers. yet, those delicacies are held aloft from the innocent by the inclusion of white-hot levels of alcohol. in packaging, achouffe utilizes double-strength kevlar-coated bottle caps and champagne-grade bottles to contain the stallion instincts of it’s potent brews, and so when i opened mine, it’s pent up foam soared like a saturn five in an appetency to burst forth and to sizzle in a snifter-- and then, like a delicately coifed poodle, to be duly admired. it’s color melds yellows and baked-on browns with floaties and burnt plum tones like the bottom of a well-used crepe pan. the foam is a classic of belgian lace: it’s firm cushion of butternut micro-bubbles could be injected into walls for scandanavian grade insulation. aroma is of strawberries, baked apples and baker’s yeast, orange and maple, mint and well-steeped darjeeling chai leaves. the power of suggestion puts thyme into the mixture, but among the green-leafed herbs i’d guess tarragon and sage instead. the carbonation is fiery on first blush, but calms quickly. full-bodied with watery feel, zesty bitterness, sweetness diminishing and alcoholic effect increasing. consumed alone, after a big bottle i found that my left eye could monitor all things on the far right, while my right independently covered appoaches from the peripheral left-- while my mind took up blissful repose in the dreamy center.

2004 bottle. Very thick and full light-brown head. Hazy / cloudy dark reddish/orange copper color. Nice-looking. Uhh... fruity belgian aroma with some spices. Fizzy character. Dry spicy sweet fruit and coffee (very light coffee). Brown sugar. Dry spice rack shit. Good. Very nice complex spicy character. Nice Belgian Christmas beer.

From a bottle shared by Kevin. Cloudy brown body with medium-bubbled tan head. Sweet ’n spicy aroma - chocolate milk, cardomon, peach, and a bunch of other stuff I can’t identify. Very complex. Dry, lightly fizzy mouthfeel. The flavor keeps up the interesting spicy sweetness combo with milk chocolate, lightl roast coffee beans, and strawberry finishing with peppery alcohol. Bit too much alcohol in the finish for me but otherwise a fine beer.