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.
Rating
4.0 of 5
