New Belgium Cascara Quad

Well, this was an unfortunate experiment.  New Belgium decided to make an abbey ale brewed with cáscara, the berry of the coffee plant.  Cascara is commonly called "coffee cherry."  The beer was also fermented with date sugar.  I had it in April but forgot to upload it.


It is a well-carbonated beer with a fiery hue and some modest head retention:

It smelled decent enough, mostly cherries and plums with a faint hint of toffee.  The usual quad aromas of figs and/or dates were not present.  The flavor profile was all over the place, and not in a good way.  It started with coffee---bold, acrid, burnt coffee.  This isn't something I ever want to taste in a quad.  And I especially don't want it to taste like boozy coffee.  The alcohol is not hidden very well.  I continue to not taste the date sugar whatsoever, but I do taste plums and cherry cough syrup.  Cough syrup flavors in beer earn an instant F from me.  I also taste chalk (what the hell?). 

In the interest of disclosure, I should probably note that I drank this about five hours after licking some envelopes.  But I had plenty of food between then and this, so I don't think my palate was all that affected by it.  This just wasn't very good, which is why I poured just under half of it down the drain.

Avoid.