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"A beer guru" - Popbitch.
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 Maximus Stout 6 Top Tastings 2012
ABV: 6%
Origin: Utrecht, Netherlands
Website: www.brouwerijmaximus.nl
My first visit to the Borefts Bierfestival at De Molen brewery in Bodegraven in September afforded me a chance to hang out in Utrecht for the first time in a few years – and unsurprisingly I kept bumping into beer bloggers and tweeters. This handsome cathedral and university city has a good few decent beer pubs, and Kafé België and Café Derat (the latter with an excellent lambic list, incidentally) were the ones that particularly drew us.
These outlets now also have a good new local brewery to support. Ewald Visser and Arend-Jan Van Dieën, former managers of Kafé België, first sold contract brewed beers under the Maximus name in 2011, but since early 2012 have been brewing at their own facility and tasting room in the city’s western suburb of De Meern, using a second hand 15hl brewhouse originally at the Hibernia brewery in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.
Maximus, according to its website, sets out to brew the sort of beers the brewers themselves like to drink – “drinkable but with a surprise in every mouthful”. Like several other Dutch breweries, the company also has social objectives, offering training to school leavers and people with long term health conditions.
Two stouts are brewed, at 6% and 8%, and I sampled the weaker one on keg at België following numerous recommendations from the assembled enthusiasts. This very dark brown beer had a foamy beige head and a notably smoky, leathery aroma with an oily chocolate note.
A smooth and very firm palate was slightly sweet, subtly balanced and gently fruity with pipe tobacco notes. A dab of ashy, roasty flavour offset things perfectly. Cherry and blackcurrant fruit showed up on a relatively short but well integrated finish, with more of that tobacco and ashy roast.
The brewers have certainly achieved their stated ambition with this one, which had lots going on at every stage, but all of it in perfect harmony.
 Dying Vines brewery, Oakland, California Top Tastings 2012
ABV: 4%
Origin: Oakland, California, USA
Website: dyingvines.com, lindenbeer.com
One interesting facet of my most recent visit to California in October 2012 was the obvious growth of interest among craft brewers in cask conditioned beer. Numerous bars I visited were sprouting a couple of handpumps or a firkin or two on stillage, and judging by the overall quality the cellar staff seemed to have improved their skills in dealing with the stuff.
As a British beer connoisseur whose tastes were formed in the CAMRA era, I can’t help finding the sight of an Angram beer engine cheering. But it also has to be admitted that many of the signature styles of the US craft beer movement don’t always work so well at the lower carbonation and warmer temperatures of a classic cask ale. So what’s also noteworthy is that a complementary interest in the sort of delicate, low gravity session beers that work well in cask appears to be growing too.
To me, mild is the ultimate cask beer style. A descendant of the original ‘running ales’ that ousted the aged, ‘stale’ flavours of porter in popularity, it flourished as a proletarian refresher in the Victorian industrial heyday. A good mild is an excellent showcase of the brewer’s skill. Exhibiting depth of flavour and character at a gravity perfect for easy, sociable drinking, it best expresses its subtlety at cellar temperature and with the gentle carbonation of a natural secondary conditioning in an unpressurised cask.
Previous tastings of North American milds were chilled and gassy experiences leading me to conclude that brewers across the Atlantic hadn’t quite got the point of the style. But the sample of Dee’z English Mild I tasted on cask on my last visit was something else entirely.
It wasn’t just the best US cask beer I’ve sampled so far, it was one of the very best cask milds I’ve ever encountered. And as for many years my regular strategy at a British beer festival is to start by hitting as many milds I haven’t yet tried as I can find, that’s not an insignificant assessment.
The beer was a deep brown colour with a smooth fawn head. A lightly inky, toasty aroma had notes of caramel and very gentle roast. The palate was smooth, rich and very authentic, malt accented but lightly roasty with light but kind caramel, gently tangy fruit hints, an emerging slightly pursing dryness and a restrained hop bite.
Chocolate showed up in an easy malt finish that developed smooth, fudgy notes over very gentle but cheering roast and a late hint of charcoal. Overall the beer was very well integrated and moreish.
It’s brewed by Kellen Alcala, who now moonlights as a professional brewer alongside his day job in a homebrew supplies shop in Berkeley. Kellen set up Dying Vines deliberately to pursue a largely British-inspired interest in session beers, and Dee’z, named after his wife, was his first product.
He brews at Linden Street brewery in Oakland, which itself focuses on relatively modest and everyday styles, producing old fashioned pre-Prohibition lager and California common beer. Oakland, just across the bay from San Francisco, was a major industrial brewing town before the passing of the 18th Amendment, and operations like Linden Street and Dying Vines are spearheading a modest revival.
The Abbot’s Cellar in San Francisco’s Mission District, where I tried Dee’z, is an upmarket restaurant that must be one of the poshest beer destinations in the Bay Area, so there was a certain irony in enjoying a mild in such well heeled surroundings. Quite what language the $8 (£5.30, €6,25) a (small American 160z/473ml) pint price tag would have provoked from a Black Country factory worker I can but guess – though the condition was immaculate.
 Le Brewery Odo Top Tastings 2012
ABV: 6.6%
Origin: Joué du Bois, Orne, France
Website: www.le-brewery.com
I know of several expatriate Brits involved with small breweries in France – an interesting country for beer at the moment as a new international craft brewing sensibility is supplementing and reinventing established regional styles. Steve Skews is one of those Englishmen abroad, and his outfit, named with the bilingual fusion Le Brewery, is gaining international attention.
The brewery, set up in 2001, is in Lower Normandy, a region with a strong historic connection to England of course, but these days better known for cider than beer. Steve’s label designs and names evoke the era of the Norman invasion – Odo, William the Bastard’s half brother and later Earl of Kent, was the man who, as Bishop of Bayeux, quite likely commissioned the famous tapestry.
Odo’s namesake beer is an unusual but delicious strong milk stout. Unfermentable lactose is added to the mash to give a sweet, toothy note alongside Maris Otter pale and crystal barley malt, wheat malt and roasted barley. Hops are Challenger, Goldings, Styrian Goldings and Cobb, and the beer is fermented with liquid English yeast.
Milk stout is something of an endangered style, though there are welcome signs of new interest in lactose among craft brewers. The best known traditional example, Mackeson, originated across the Channel in Hythe in Odo’s former earldom, but that’s an industrial beer that’s now thought of as an old lady’s tipple, and is about a third of the strength of Le Brewery’s example.
My 330ml bottle was bought at Drinkers Paradise, a surprisingly beer-friendly corner offie at Kentish Town West. It was lively beer, very dark brown in colour with a thick and smooth tan head, and a roasty, leathery and slightly chocolatey aroma.
The palate began dry and malty before tangy, fruity raisin and roasted coffee flavours emerged, the roast note kept well in check by an obvious sweetish milk gum quality. The finish was also lightly roasty with sultanas, black coffee and chocolate, complex leathery notes and a late whiff of smoke.
Highly recommended – including for old ladies.
 Knee Deep Simtra Triple India Pale Ale Top Tastings 2012
ABV: 11.3%
Origin: Lincoln, California, USA
Website: kneedeepbrewing.com
I asked the staff of small but outstanding specialist drinks shop Healthy Spirits, in San Francisco’s Duboce Triangle, for a recommendation of a new West Coast IPA to try and was pointed to this example from Knee Deep at Lincoln, in Placer County in the suburbs of Sacramento. I was glad I asked, as this triple IPA turned out to be a huge and complex stunner.
As its name suggests, Simtra is hopped with a blend of Simcoe and Citra, deployed in apparently enormous quantities. My example, in a bomber bottle, was warm gold, with a dense, just off-white head and a strong and slick hoppy aroma with notes of citric lime, honey and blackcurrant pastilles.
There was also that sharp, animal-like, endocrinal aroma associated with Simcoe that’s sometimes referred to indelicately as “cat pee”— but if it’s attractive in perfume, why shouldn’t it be in beer?
A richly syrupy and mouth-filling palate revealed successive layers of flavour – toffee malt, lemon, pine, liquorice, sherbert, fenugreek and tropical fruit. An obvious alcohol warmth was soothed by silky honey-like notes.
More herbal flavours like rosemary oil emerged alongside citrus on a resinous palate, with a long developing and lingering burry bitterness smoothed off again with unguent lemon and honey flavours.
Knee Deep beers first appeared in 2010 when founder and head brewer Jeremy Warren started contract brewing at Mount Tallac near Lake Tahoe. The next year, with the help of investors, he took over the defunct Beermann’s brewpub in Lincoln and since then the beers have been more widely available.
Jeremy’s nickname, the Hoptologist, makes clear where his main brewing interests lie and Simtra exhibits a notable skill with the resinous bine. It’s also an excellent demonstration that ultrahoppy beers needn’t just be about massive bitterness and aroma.
Incidentally, note the warning on the label — despite the strength, this is a beer best drunk fresh for maximum hop effect.
 Jester King Le Petit Prince Top Tastings 2012
ABV: 2.9%
Origin: Austin, Texas, USA
Website: jesterkingbrewery.com
It seems US craft beer drinkers, probably with some relief, are starting to realise there’s life below 5.5%. Session beer is one of the current buzz terms across the Atlantic, as brewers start to take up the challenge their British counterparts have long wrestled with – packing plenty of flavour and interest into the sort of gravity that won’t leave you with a headache.
Jester King, founded by brothers Jeff Stuffings and Michael Steffing in Texas hill country just outside Austin in 2010, is a noteworthy advocate for easy going beers inspired by traditional European models. It promotes itself as a farmhouse brewery, inspired by styles like Belgian saison and the bières de garde of French Flanders. But it’s rare among new craft breweries in also taking note of that often overlooked family of low gravity styles, the table beers.
Look on the edges of the beer section of any Belgian supermarket and you’ll find a small selection of low gravity (1.5%-3%) tafelbieren or bières de table, usually in 750ml screw cap bottles – Piedboeuf, from AB InBev’s Jupiler brewery, is the most common but several family owned independents are also active in the sector. Many of these beers are now bland and additive-laden, but they’re still an intriguing reminder of the days when beer was drunk throughout the day, and still thought suitable for serving to children.
Jester King’s Le Petit Prince, launched in 2011, is considerably better than a modern industrial table beer but shares something of the same aspiration to share a dining table with a simple lunch, and also offers, in the brewery’s words, “a clear, simple expression of the delightful interplay between noble hops and farmhouse yeast.”
Named after cult 1943 children’s book Le petit prince (The Little Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and perhaps in recollection of the family friendliness of table beer, the Texan example is brewed from organic Pilsner, two row pale and Caramunich barley malts, wheat malt and Czech Žatec and East Kent Goldings hops, perhaps with other varieties according to availability.
My sample was a cloudy blond with a good white head. A creamy, yeasty, slighty wheaty aroma had tempting notes of vanilla and spice. The attractively light and easy going palate was well balanced with a good cereal body and classic hop flavours. Though noticeably thin it was still fine enough. Light fruit from the hops came through on a chewy finish that yielded a distinct grassy noble hop hum.
I tasted the beer poured from a 750ml bottle at the Borefts Bierfestival at De Molen brewery in Bodegraven, the Netherlands, in September 2012, where it held its own impressively against a range of weird and wonderful brews at the sort of strengths you definitely wouldn’t want to serve to children.
 Heineken Italia Moretti La Rossa Top Tastings 2012
ABV: 7.2%
Origin: Milano, Lombardia, Italy
Website: birramoretti.com
Even before the current crop of craft brewers producing weird beers in designer bottles, Italy deserved at least a footnote in any survey of world brewing. Although more famous for its wines, there has long been a market on the peninsula for beer.
In the north Italy borders on the German speaking world: some of its territory was once under Austrian influence and communities of German speakers still exist. So unsurprisingly Italian brewers tended to follow German models when brewing took off as a major industry in the 19th century.
The big names still surviving from this period are now mainly owned by multinationals, but the occasional historic speciality has been retained. One such is La Rossa, which I’ve been looking out for since reading Michael Jackson’s writings about it – a beer with the colour of a Vienna lager but the strength of a Maibock.
It originated at the Moretti brewery, founded in Udine, in the far northeast not far from what’s now the Slovenian border, in 1859. Moretti became one of Italy’s big players, establishing its soft pale lager Birra Moretti as a national brand. The brewery was bought by Interbrew (now AB InBev) in 1989, then sold on to Heineken in 1996. The Dutch company had been active in the Italian market since 1974 when it bought the Dreher brewery in Trieste, originally an offshoot of the celebrated brewery of the same name in Wien, where Vienna lager had been perfected.
The plants in Udine and Trieste are long closed, as are several others Heineken took over, and it’s difficult to say exactly where La Rossa is now brewed. Heineken’s Italian production is allocated from a corporate headquarters in Milano between four breweries in Assemini (Sardinia), Comun Nuovo (Lombardia), Massafra (Apulia) and Pollein (Valle d’Aosta).
Nonetheless La Rossa, though filtered and pasteurised, is still a pretty good beer, as I discovered when I stumbled unexpectedly on it in the fridge at the Albion pub in London W14. This friendly pub is Good Beer Guide listed and a former local CAMRA pub of the year with a few well kept cask beers from Caledonian and Theakston – it happens to have a Heineken tie through the brewery’s ownership of Scottish & Newcastle. But it’s hardly a specialist beer haunt, and indeed the manager felt obliged to forewarn me about the beer’s strength before I bought it.
La Rossa’s rich reddish chestnut brown colour lives up to its name, with a thick foamy light beige head. A lightly nutty spiced toffee aroma has a very Germanic ring, with grassy noble hops and soft chocolate notes from the coloured malt.
The firm raisin and nut palate rapidly dries with notes of chocolate, minerally pencil lead and treacle toffee. The swallow is very smooth, setting up a dried fruit finish with an emerging hop bite and some roast.
Overall this is a big boned but smooth beer, spicy and complex enough to reward considered sipping, and surely one of the most interesting entrants in Heineken’s international portfolio of brands.
 The unlikely handpump that lured the bloggerati — Greene King Old 5X on cask at the Great British Beer Festival, London, August 2012. Top Tastings 2012
ABV: 12%
Origin: Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, England
Website: www.greeneking.co.uk
It has to be admitted that these days the Greene King bar is rarely the hottest place to be at a beer festival. Yet at the Great British Beer Festival (GBBF) at Olympia, London, in August 2012, that expectation was turned on its head.
At an appointed time in the early afternoon of the first day’s trade session, many of the most influential beer opinion formers in Britain could be found gathering around the Suffolk brewer’s bar – top beer writers, widely read bloggers, international beer judges and various other industry figures.
And no, they hadn’t all suddenly undergone a mysterious conversion to the delights of Greene King IPA. Instead they were there for the GBBF debut of one of the most extraordinary beers brewed by an old established British cask ale brewery. The beer was Old 5X, a unique matured stock ale that has miraculously survived in an era when its brewer has become the biggest of Britain’s “new nationals”.
I’ve written about Old 5X at length before on this blog – but this was before I had a chance to taste it neat, as until very recently it was only made publically available as a component of blends. At 12% it’s strong stuff, brewed with roasted malt and rich cane sugar, with Challenger, First Gold and Target hops, but what’s more remarkable is the process used to produce it.
Following primary fermentation it’s matured for at least a year in two old oak vats holding 100 barrels (16,366l) each, retained by the brewery for the purpose, before being blended with younger beer for release. For years it’s been mixed with Burton Pale Ale, another beer not allowed out on its own, to make bottled speciality Strong Suffolk, and more recently it’s emerged in Old Crafty Hen.
Long maturation and blending were once common in brewing – at a certain stage in its history, porter was a blend of wood matured beer which had become flat and vinous, or “stale” as it was once termed, with young “mild” or “running” beer. Inevitably, wild yeasts and other microflora resident in the wood contributed a certain character and complexity, and often a sour or funky note, to vatted beer.
Before such practices were revived in the more experimental corners of the contemporary craft beer world, Greene King was the only British brewery at which they clung on, though like so many quirky old techniques they could be encountered more readily in Belgium. West Flemish oud bruin, once an everyday quencher in its region of origin and now a prized speciality, is brewed in a similar way, and the huge oak foeders still in use at Rodenbach in Roeselare bear obvious resemblance to GK’s vats.
GK long resisted suggestions from beer lovers to make Old 5X more widely available in its own right, insisting that nobody would want to drink it – widely interpreted as yet another sign of how out of touch the Bury St Edmunds brewery was with the way the specialist beer market is developing, and perhaps how dedicated it had become to the pursuit of blandness in the name of palatability.
 Cask Greene King Old 5X So what changed the brewery’s mind? Apparently a long serving local CAMRA volunteer was due to retire and head brewer John Bexon suggested creating a special beer for him at the East Anglian Beer Festival, held at Bury. Instead the volunteer requested a cask of Old 5X. Contrary to John’s expectations, the cask rapidly sold out, prompting the brewery to repeat the experiment.
The cask version at GBBF, available as a limited edition of one nine gallon firkin (41l) a day, was a year-old ale kräusened with fresh beer. Served by the third pint (197ml) nip, it poured a hazy rich reddish brown with a thick yellow head. The aroma was beautifully full, rich and very fresh with chocolate and orange peel notes, and just a hint of sourish balsamic vinegar.
The palate was sherry-sweet, nicely matured and, to me, utterly luxurious, again with just a slight funky sweet-sour touch, almonds and citrus. The big, orangey and nuttily malty finish wasn’t quite as long as expected, but amazingly rounded for the strength.
I spoke to John at GBBF and he still seemed bemused, though pleased, with the interest in the beer. Let’s hope it prompts further releases, and perhaps a special edition bottle conditioned version.
 Gueuze Girardin 1882 (Zwart etiket) Top Tastings 2012
ABV: 5%
Origin: Sint-Ulriks-Kapelle, Vlaams-Brabant, Vlaanderen
Website: www.brouwerijgirardin.com
Girardin is arguably the most consistently and rootedly traditional of all the lambic breweries. The others were either founded since the self conscious revivalism of the 1970s or, like Cantillon, heavily influenced by it – or at the other extreme pursued the commercial path towards the fruit syrup bottle and the aspartame jar.
Instead what we have at Sint-Ulriks-Kapelle is something pretty close to the traditional independent farmhouse lambic brewery the Girardin family first took over in 1882 – the date that still appears on the bottles. The family remains in charge, still producing a simple and limited range: a filtered and unfiltered geuze, a faro, a kriek and a framboise.
Throughout, the brewery has also continued to make its unblended lambic widely available to pubs, geuzestekerijen (independent blenders) and other brewers. This policy alone has got many a revivalist out of a difficult spot, and in the process made a major contribution to the continued health of lambic culture.
Girardin’s unfiltered geuze doesn’t carry the recent Oude Gueuze appelation, though this is nonetheless what it is. Instead it’s identified by the black colour of the simple, classic label (zwart etiket or étiquette noire), as opposed to the white label of the filtered version. It’s the sort of beer that I don’t drink often enough, but I picked up a 375ml bottle at the London Drinker beer festival in March 2012 and reminded myself of how great it is.
This pale gold beer has a warm orange glow, topped by an unusually persistent fine white head. The characteristic pippy, funky lambic aroma has fruit and citrus peel, with hints of mastic.
The fine and very well integrated palate yields grapefruit pith and lemon marmalade, with slight sweetness offsetting a thick, petrolly lambic smack. There are elusive herbal notes on an apple core and marmalade finish.
Tim Webb, the leading writer on Belgian beer, says he uses this geuze to demonstrate to the unitiated what lambic is all about. You can see why – the beer is properly, authentically tart, but not severely so, and an excellent example of its kind.
 Fuller’s Past Masters Old Burton Extra Top Tastings 2012
ABV: 7.3%
Origin: London W4, England
Website: www.fullers.co.uk
Burton Ale is one of the great near-lost beer styles, and one that has intrigued certain beer writers (including myself) thanks in part to its difficult to explain contemporary obscurity. Most beer enthusiasts who read the occasional book or blog can tell you a (not necessarily accurate) thing or two about the history of porter or India pale ale, and if you mention Burton will probably assume the latter.
But in fact Burton ale was a distinctive style on its own account, different from pale ale. Although it originated or was perfected in the great brewing centre of Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, in the days before the regulation of designations of origin it became a generic term for beers in the style wherever they were brewed. And it remained widely consumed right into the 1950s as what beer historian Martyn Cornell describes as “one of the three most popular draught beer styles in Britain” – by then more appreciated in London than in its Midlands homeland.
Burton was a dark, sweetish beer already around before pale ale took off in the town, originally made from brown malt in the days before pale malts became widespread and affordable. Like most beers it was later modified to fit the now ubiquitous practice of basing beer recipes on pale malt, with additions of coloured and speciality malts as required. It therefore became paler in colour, though still brown, giving rise to the confusing term Burton Pale Ale (BPA) – pale in comparison to the old brown malt version but still notably darker than the beers we now think of as pale ales.
Like porter, Burton was originally made in a variety of strengths, including very strong versions which at one point were widely exported, but by the time the first stages of the current beer revival kicked off in the 1970s, it had fallen from favour so comprehensively it was near-completely forgotten. It didn’t help that the few remaining Burtons to survive now hid under other names.
The most familiar is Young’s Winter Warmer, a cask London Burton of moderate strength renamed in 1971 and still regularly brewed today as a tasty seasonal by Wells & Young’s. A BPA is also one of the components of Greene King’s blended bottled speciality Strong Suffolk but hasn’t been sold in its own right for decades.
Only in the past few years has the history of Burton Ale been rediscovered, though revivalist experiments remain rare even among brewers who make a habit of such things. It was particularly exciting, then, when John Keeling announced he was dusting down a 1931 Burton recipe for the third entry in Fuller’s Past Masters series of revived beers from the archive.
Old Burton Extra is a relatively strong version of the style at 7.2%, made from pale and crystal barley malts boosted by maize and brewing syrup. The hops are a traditional combination of English Fuggles and Goldings used both in the copper and to dry hop the beer.
The result is a rich deep Burgundy brown with a thick yellow beige head. There’s sultana and chocolate on a rich, smooth, malty and slightly spicy aroma with honey, black grape and a subtle hint of violet.
A thick, cakey and very fruity palate dries rapidly, revealing roasted notes over a treacle base with spicy orange around the edges. A charred dry finish has an almost iron-like quality, with more chocolate, cake and spice.
Given its historical interest, I was particularly eager to try this beer when the taster sample arrived from the brewery, and I wasn’t’ disappointed. A wonderfully rich bottleful that’s also beautifully poised, this is a very welcome revival, and if it contributes to the growth of interest in the style, all the better.
 FiftyFifty Eclipse Imperial Stout 2011, white wax version Top Tastings 2012
ABV: 9.5%
Origin: Truckee, California, USA
Website: www.fiftyfiftybrewing.com
Craft brewers, particularly in the United States, are increasingly recognising the potential for “event beers” and limited editions in capturing the growing market of beer connoisseurs prepared to pay over the odds for something a bit rare and special. There’s an obvious temptation towards cynical exploitation in this, resisted so long as the quality of the contents lives up to the hype and the restricted supply.
Based on a recent tasting, one brewery reliably ensuring that all the fuss – and the cash – is worthwhile is FiftyFifty at Truckee, not far from the state line in Nevada County, northeast California. FiftyFifty is also a brewpub and restaurant producing a range of beers from the sessionable to the challenging but is best known beyond its own locale for the Eclipse range of barrel aged imperial stouts.
Brewer Todd Ashman was one of the earliest US champions of barrel ageing at his previous brewery, Flossmoor Station in Illinois, and was instrumental in persuading the Brewers Association to recognise such beers as a competition category in their own right in the early 2000s.
His first experiments in ageing FiftyFifty’s award winning Totality Imperial Stout to create Eclipse were in 2007 and since then approaching 30 different expressions have emerged.
Totality is already a complex brew, with more than 18 separate ingredients. The grain bill alone contains various pale, coloured, Munich, chocolate, brown and black malts from Crisp, Gambrinus, Rahr and Simpsons, red wheat malt and roasted barley, plus dry malt extract, brown rice syrup solids and exotic sugars. Besides this, the hops seem relatively straightforward – German Magnum and Perle and US Mount Hood.
The stout is brewed and conditioned in March or April and put into barrels in May, with bottling and kegging taking place in November for a December release. To add to the mystique, beers from different barrels are packaged in identical 650ml bomber bottles, but sealed with different coloured wax to indicate their provenance, with a key on the brewery website.
Healthy Spirits in San Francisco’s Dubose Triangle is a regular outlet and I found several 2011 vintages on sale there in October 2012 – I was particularly recommended the white wax version, which had spent six months in Elijah Craig 20-year-old bourbon barrels (that particular whiskey is not regularly released as a 20-year-old so this particular barrel was itself a rarity).
This was a very dark mahogany coloured beer that left oily yellow iodine-like traces on the glass, with a deep tan foam. A smooth and inky aroma had raisin and berry fruit, dark malt and woody whisky fumes.
There was plenty of fruity, oily sweet bourbon-tinged malt on the full, smooth, lightly honeyed palate, which warmed and dried out in the mouth with woody tannins softened by raisins and chocolate.
The sweet black coffee finish was very long with delicate wood notes and late cigar ash. Overall, this was an amazingly complex but well integrated, long lasting and delightful beer that amply evidenced the care spent on it.
At $28.99 (£19, €22.30) the price might seem steep, but as always it’s worth remembering what you’d expect to pay for a wine of such quality.
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