 DruncanVeasey (1631), Burbage, Leicestershire, England
Jul 9, 2008 Updated: Jul 10, 2008
Glossy black milk pour welling beautifully up with tan. My. For a stumbled-upon pasteurised bottle from Tossco, this is fucking great. High cocoa bittersweet dustiness, brine, nuts, Jamaican Ginger cake and coffee on the snout hinting immediately at the roasty dark treasures within- smoke, chocolate, leather and....more smoke and chocolate. YEAH. There’s some seriously impy-like notes lurking in the background here. The perfect antedote to all those interminably pissy GAs crowding your supermarket shelves like squeezy bottles of Jif. Living festival mild, dry roasty stout and a tablespoon of Baltic mingled. Porter or seawater. Clearly alcohol-free. Wouldn’t have picked up on the ginger blind if I’m honest. A lovingly crafted harmony of ingredients. But let’s face it, these boys could tip Stella and Smirnoff Ice into an ashtray, swill it around a bit, and it would still taste great. Hats of to ’em.
Thomas_E (4956), Copenhagen, Denmark
Sep 2, 2008 Deep reddish, brown colour with a beige head. Light roasted malty aroma with a coffee note and hints of yeast. Light roasted malty and coffee bitter flavor with sweet and fruity notes.
iammarc (177), Inverness, Scotland
Jul 31, 2008 Bottle, 50cl. Tesco, Inverness. Pours nicely but its browny foamy head quickly fizzles away in a matter of minutes, if not, seconds. I found it to have a very soapy aroma, here’s hoping I rinsed my glass properly. Nice dark body, creamy tasting. Very chocolatey taste.
Doppelganger (1123), Oxford, Oxfordshire, England
Jul 21, 2008 Bottle, from cgarvieuk. Thanks Craig! Pours a nice ruby highlighted black with a big layer of noteably noisy tan foam. (Noisy enough that if you poured it in a quiet room, your significant other would look up from her book and say: what’s that?) After all that effort making a racket, the foam gives up and settles into the mysterious nothing, like so many noisy things do. First sniff is distinctly sour. Coffee perked and left to concentrate into a viscous sludge, prune juice from the deep recesses of refrigerator neglect. Softens after a few minutes of air to include cocoa, hay, blueberries. Very light body where the noisy bubbles from the pour assert themselves again. Very aggressive coarse carbonation, like a trippel or pale lager. Decidedly sour flavor, significantly more than many modern Flemish sours. Seems like this has got to be bacteria at work, but that’s very odd in a filtered and pasturised beer. (If it’s possible to make a beer taste and smell like this without a dose of lactic acid or the help of bacteria, I’m curious to know how.) A little coffee edge to the flavor here and there...or maybe the dark color is just suggesting that: very little dark roast flavors for sure. As a porter in the modern sense, this is a disaster. As a refreshing, neo-sour sort or beer, its actually not bad.
Pyobon (139), Sydney, Australia
Jul 17, 2008 Black with good beige head. Aroma of dark malt, chocolate, ginger and seaweed. Medium body with light carbonation. Flavour mainly dark malt and toffee with a hint of ginger in the finish. Little hoppy bitterness. A nice example of a style of which I am not terribly fond.
dunkpigen (274), Kolding, Denmark
Jul 13, 2008 Bottle at Århus Ølfestival 2008. Pours black with brownish bubbly head. Aroma of anis and som citrus. Flavour the same...
|
