From a bottle trade, though I've since had it at WF tastings. It doesn't have a strong typical Belgian character with all the candi sugar and spices and such. It's much more of a plain golden with a notable pils hop character with some extra white wine astringency on the back.
Style tweaks are getting ridiculous. This is like two cousins having a baby. Is it a rye ale crossed with a black IPA or is it a rye IPA crossed with a black IPA? It's a pretty hoppy black IPA, regardless. Smells malty, tastes malty, feels malty. And the hops are muddy in a rich way. A little too much residue for my liking though and not terribly spicy.
Not going to lie, I'm not a big fan of Christmas ales or wee heavies or winter warmer usually. Not a fan of this one either. Too much fruitiness, cherry, prune, a little bit of dark chocolate, too sweet and tart instead of malty and smooth. No more words here.
Yeah, so Blogger has basically neutered the functionality/semantics of "draft" to the point where it is not really usable for me. I start a draft when I drink something, but I don't upload a picture at that point because I do those in batches. But if I go back and edit a draft and try to publish or not even publish, just edit, the publish time gets set to current time. So, in order to preserve the ordering, I have to publish from the UI and then go back and edit to insert the picture, which preserves the original publish time. What a headache.
So there's going to be lot of posts without pictures for a while.
A bottle from a trade. Most bourbon barrel-aged stuff tends to me stouts, so I was pleased to see something different here. Typical looking pour. First taste, my face: >:*
This thing is sour. At first I thought infected, which would be a bummer because this is a limited brew. But after reading some comments on BA, maybe this is just how it was intended. The nose is really pleasant: smoky vanilla and caramel. Which is also what you get in the center of your tongue, but everything around it is pretty tart. A quick swig without too much pontification will save you from most of the funk, but still, pretty weird.
Wow, I don't even have a scotch tag. That seems weird.
From a bottle sale from earlier in the summer. I had a great tripel from Straffe Hendrik last summer so I was stoked to try some more stuff. This is pretty damn good. A bit of chocolate in the nose. Rich, decadent malts; molasses; dense fruit like raisin and prune, with a slightly tannic and hop bitter finish. A late toffee and coffee finish.
BA reviewers are funny sometimes. I read some that gave low marks because it was too boring, to textbook. To be fair, this is a solid quad. No, it's not amazingly unique. Yes, it's pricier than your average 22oz/750ml. What are you expecting? Be appreciated that they can nail the style, at least. That's my beef with the BA scoring, a one-dimensional number to compress a 5/6-dimensional tasting. If a beer nails the style but is nothing special, some people rate it low while others rate high. Sometimes, people like a beer because it's different and rate it high, even if it may not represent the style very well. What do?
Also, I'm not very consistent with the use of my "belgian" tag. Oh well.
