Posted on 17 juni 2011. Tags: Avery Brewing, Belgium, Quadruple, The Reverend
A Belgium Style Quadruple
From Avery Brewing Company, Colorado USA
10% ABV. Systembolaget Article Number 11585. Price 79.90SEK (650ml bottle)
Pours a tawny chestnut brown with a 'smokers teeth' white head that quickly collapses to leave a blotchy head with sticky lacing.
Lots of caramel. Candy sugar forms the sweet centre of this beer and dominates the nose. There's some delicate fruit esters of raisins and melon (?) in there too and a bit of booze poking through. But it mostly smells of thinned out treacle.
What's really impressive about this beer is the mouthfeel. It's as sinfully smooth as glass to drink with tiny tight bubbles and a rich, velvety feel. Not unexpectedly there's a powerful burst of candy caramel upfront (think butter and rum) and then.....surprisingly little but a faint afterburn of alcohol. I struggled to find all the layers of complexity the brewery speaks about. This beer is unquestionably well made - it's just sweetly one-dimensional in my book. A true malt bomb!
A beer this rich and sweet can handle the most pungent of cheeses such as a runny lump of Munster or other washed-rind cheeses with strong earthy aromas. I imagine it would be divine with the pastry and juicy meat of a sweet lamb pie (http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/sweetlambpie_76005)
Nerd note
The Reverend was created in tribute to the life of Avery's Sales Manager Tom Boogaard's grandfather, an ordained Episcopal Reverend. Tom was inspired by the life of his grandfather and wanted to create a tribute beer that reflected his character. It contains lots of Belgium malts and dark Belgium candy sugar is stirred into the brew kettle.
Posted in Beer Reviews
Posted on 17 augusti 2010. Tags: Avery Brewing, New World Porter, Review
A porter
Avery Brewery Company, Colorada, USA
6.7% ABV. Systembolaget Article Number 11738. 26.40 SEK (355ml bottle)
This is a pretty looking porter with a dense black body (actually hold it up to the light and it's deep, deep brown with a splash of red wine colour) under a compact, fluffy mud brown head.
Oh I like this! Thick smells of dark chocolate, dark roasted coffee (that reminds me of those small intense cups of café noir served in French cafés), brown sugar, salty liquorice, caramel fudge and nuts. There's also an underlying whiff of wood, earth and citrus (more like the peel of lemons rather than the juice) from the tag team of Colombus and Fuggles hops. I found myself sniffing this beer for ages before drinking it.
This beer draws you in with its oily texture, coating the mouth with sweet flavours of dark fruit, orange and chocolate. Then it suddenly turns on you, delivering a bitter slap in the face of pine needles, liquorice and sap. There's a load of roasted flavours in here that border on being burnt and induce a long drying finish. Perhaps the body is a little skinny and I get an unsettling off-flavour (I wrote plastic bin liners but that can't be right, can it?).
This porter would embrace a sweet chocolate cake (kladdkaka) as its dry and bitter roasted character would balance out the sweetness in the cake perfectly.
Nerd note
Avery's New World Porter owes its intense hop aroma and tastes to the fact it has been dry-hopped, which means that dry hops have been introduced into the beer after fermentation. Dry hops add no bitterness to the beer but the technique does often 'give back' some aromatic oils that are normally lost in the boiling process.
Posted in Beer Reviews
Posted on 11 november 2009. Tags: Avery Brewing, barley wine, Hog Heaven, US
..or a hog in heaven, because if hops are your thing, you’ll feel like both.
Hog Heaven is a barley wine style beer from Avery Brewing, a respected US brewery that specialises in taking old world beer styles and giving them a huge American twist.
Barley wine, despite the misleading name, is actually a strong ale that became popular in England in the 19th century. At that time England was often at war with the French and it was considered the duty of true patriots among the upper classes to drink beer rather than wine.
English barley wines tend to be elegant, rich, smooth, wine-like beers that can be stored for a quarter of a century or more.
American-style barley wines on the other hand are generally far, far more aggressively hopped and higher in alcohol, with ABVs that can land anywhere from 8-15%.
Hog Heaven is packed with US Columbus hops, delivering a tongue-curling 104 IBUs. IBUs – International Bitterness Units – is a measurement that indicates just how bitter a beer is. Technically the scale goes from 1-100, after which the tongue reacts like a slug that’s had salt poured on it.
However modern brewers have worked out a way to ‘trick’ the palate by adding huge amounts of malt to make the beer sweet enough to balance out some of the bitterness. Hog Heaven succeeds in doing just this, with rich vanilla toffee malts doing just enough to hold back the onslaught from the grapefruit, pine resin and quinine hops.
Rather than a hog this is more of a wild boar of a beer and can be a bit brutal for those of you not used to drinking US hop-bombs. However if you want to tame it a bit try pairing it with a medium strength blue cheese – a stunning combination!
Hog Heaven
A Barley wine style beer from Avery Brewing in the US
9.2% ABV
Article number: 11543
Posted in Beer Reviews
