North By Northwest Guldenbiere (2005, 2007 and later)

Brewed by North By Northwest Restaurant and Brewery
Style: Belgian Strong Ale
Austin, Texas USA

GABF 2006 post-party. The beer pours to a really hazt straw colored body with a nice white head. The aroma is slightly tart, sweet and sour at the same time. Delicate but powerful. The flavor is sweet, sour, nice. Balanced. The palate is really carbonated. Refreshing. Excellent!

750 ml bottle - Deep murky dark gold, thick foamy white head. Interesting nose here with loads of sourdough bread, vanilla, spice, sweaty gym locker, earth, wheat, and touches of lemon. Flavor is very bready, with soft vanilla, lemon, and spice tones. Full bodied, soft fizzy carbonation, spiced bready finish. Very tasty, but the bready, gym locker aroma started to wear thin on me by bottles end...

HWOH brought by EDA through Walt I think? Pours a very turbid cloudy yellow with a frothy white head that leaves nice sticky cobweb lacing. Aroma is lemon, citrus, yeasty, light funk, and slight citric acid tartness to it. As it warms, some medicinal phenolics are notieced and more pepery yeast appears. Flavor is lemon zest, lemon pepper, leather, funk, lightly sweet and has a bit of tartness in the end. Ok but may have been slightly infected- either way it was lightly funky and yeasty which was nice.

Pours a cloudy yellow with a small white bubbly head. Strong yeasty aroma with hops and citrus present.

Bottle thanks to EDA at the HW open house. Hazy yellow color with a medium sized white head. Yeasty aroma with lots of citrus, some coriander and a touch of black pepper. Spicy, citrusy flavor. Oranges, lemon and coriander stand out the most.

Bottle provided by Eyedrinkale at Heavyweight Open House, thanks Mike. Poured into a small tasting glass. Color is glowing cloudy yellow, cannot see through the beer. Aroma is very present - muted lemon with a nice zing. Best way for me to describe the beer is to call it a soury lemon belgian taste. Slight sour lemon taste dominated with a typical belgian ale coriander ans sweetness.

Poured a hazy golden color with a small, white head that left nice lacing on the glass. Aroma of citrus fruits, yeast, gree apple, spices, and black pepper. Taste of sweet citrus fruits, yeast, with light spices, a moderate hoppiness, and a fair amount of alcohol coming through on this.

This one was a slight gusher, as soon as I pulled the difficult-to-remove cork from this beer it started to foam up and over. Luckily I realized this and was able to get it into my glass before I spilled any beer. The head is pillowy and just barely off-white in color, it is initially three-fingers thick and is falling back into the beer with a rocky-textured surface. The beer itself is a lightly hazy, straw gold color, that shows an aggressive, though not overly so, level of carbonation by the streaming rivulets of bubbles rising up through my tulip glass. The aroma is pretty nice; I get initial sharp herbal notes which take on some softer notes of vanilla and clove. Honey-like malt aromatics add a touch of roundness to the spicy nose (notes of ginger and pepper are noticeable). Notes of tart green apples then follow, but there are also some grassy notes throughout. Towards the end a dry, toasted malt character is noticeable. Quite a nice, complex aroma.

Definitely amply carbonated, the beer gets quite fizzy as it hits my mouth. The ample carbonation had me worried about an infection, but the beer is pretty sweet and it seems like the brewer might have jumped the gun on bottling a beer with one of those finicky Belgian yeast strains. Sweet honey like notes lead the way, and a solid herbal character is also noticeable throughout. This beer actually strikes a pretty good balance between sweet malt notes and herbal / spicy fermentation and hop characters. The finish has a sharp, spicy note to it that is a combination of higher alcohols, lightly noticeable hop bitterness and an astringent, lingeringly, herbal note that I can’t quite place in origin, but is not at all unpleasant. The sweet honey note rides throughout this beer, and it is almost as if a herbal honey were used to make this beer (I don’t think any honey was used but that is what the combination of flavors makes me think of). There is a light acidity here as well, that seems to be played up by a light citrus note, or perhaps it is the product of the citrus note.

This beer, while sweet, still has a nice easy drinking quality to it. The sweetness never becomes cloying or heavy; I think that both the alcohol and the carbonation help to keep this beer an easy drinking proposition, which can definitely be dangerous with a 750ml bottle of higher alcohol brew. As the beer warms up and loses some carbonation, it begins to pick up a bit of creaminess to the body. I am actually quite impressed, I was not expecting much after sampling their bottled, slightly infected IPA, but this is damn good. If the beer tastes like this consistently, I would actually take this over Duvel any day. Ultimately the mix of flavors in this beer is just outstanding! Get some if you can.