Stoutilicious Barrel Aged
Brouwerij De Bock in Beveren, East Flanders, Belgium 🇧🇪
Stout - Imperial Regular|
Score
7.13
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Door 9 maanden te rijpen op rode Pinot Noir vaten krijgt deze krachtige stout zijn unieke lichtzure smaak en zijn overweldigende neus van rijp rood fruit. Dit bier smaakt geweldig bij alllerlei vleesgerechten en bij sterke kazen.
Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 8 | Flavor - 8 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 8
Bottle as a Christmas present - thanks, Elke! Hazy black, small, foamy, beige head. Complex aroma of blue plum, blue grape, fig, red fruit jam, toast, fondant, liqueur-filled praline, red wine, cold coffee. Taste has sweetish plum, prune and fig mixing with sourish brambleberry, blackcurrant and grapes, kept together by a dark-chocolatey malt body with toasty notes and wood. Tart, toasty finish, lingering red fruit & berries, soft coffee roast, vague dark chocolate again and woody tannins. Warming red wine-like alcohol in the very end. Medium body, oily texture, average carbonation. Complex and enjoyable, a promising issue by this brewery.
Appearance - 7 | Aroma - 8 | Flavor - 7.5 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 8.5
New addition to the De Bock range (after Desideer, which I haven't tried yet), from my home region - the town of Beveren, more precisely: a wine barrel aged imperial stout, no less, brewed in their own micro installation in the Klapperstraat. Quite surprised to find this one, at De Picker in Zele... Thick and frothy, tightly paper-lacing, beige, stable, moussy head on a black beer with misty mahogany edges. Strong bouquet of a powerful red Pinot Noir wine, black coffee and coffee filters, brambleberries, cassis, blue plum, old bars of 'fondant' chocolate, wet oak wood, burnt brown bread toast, beef stock, port sauce, hints of salmiak, toffee, brown rum, burnt raisins, pear, clove, English brown sauce, Ersatz chocolate, old vanilla beans, dust. Fruity onset, some blackberry, pear and elderberry sweetness mingled with unripe grape and green apple sourishness but more sweet than sour, vague beef stock-like umami element, lively and minerally carbonation (a bit much for a strong stout actually) thinning an otherwise thick, oily mouthfeel. Layers of old bitter-chocolatey, brown-bready and caramelly malts ensue, still carrying this fruity tartness onwards to a complex finish in which a lot of things unfold at more or less the same time: the Pinot Noir effect of a powerful red wine, ripe blackberries and ripe blue grapes, the drying tannic effect of the wood, the tartness of the wine underneath its sweetness, a herbal hop note adding light bitterness, a 'dusty' and bready yeastiness and phenolic spicy notes (clove) - all tied together by a warming, soothing glow of whisky-like alcohol. The malts, meanwhile, have turned all roasted bitter and a bit ashy even, as is the case in many Belgian attempts at imperial stout; this roasted chicory-like effect lingers on together with the Pinot Noir, which in the end may perhaps be a bit too explicit. Feels like a stout diluted with some strong red wine, all things considered, but compared with the earlier De Bock beers (a stereotypical Belgian IPA and a predictable Belgian blonde, though both well executed), this one ups the ante and came as a total surprise to me. With this kind of experiments the De Bock guys may well be able to attract attention from the craft beer crowds - I noticed that Beervikings is already selling it - and if this is the intention, I can only recommend them to continue on this path, even if a beer like this takes a whole lot of thought and care, in which it does fall a bit short. The balance between beer and red wine could have been tilted more towards the beer and less towards the wine (to the benefit of the beer), for example, and the roasted bitterness could have been more coffee-like and less ash-like; having said that, I must conclude that I never expected De Bock to come up with something this ambitious, so have a point for that.