Boulevard Imperial Stout

Boulevard makes two imperial stouts.  The regular year-round one, Dark Truth, is made with Belgian yeast, brown sugar, and a complicated grain bill of barley, wheat, rye, and oats.  For Boulevard Imperial Stout, they tweak Dark Truth's grain bill slightly (adding spelt) and then age a large portion of the beer in whiskey barrels.  The final beer is 40% fresh, 60% barrel-aged.  I like Dark Truth, so I've been looking forward to a chance to try this version.  I found the chance last December, though I forgot to post it here.

As you can see from the above video, this beer is crazy carbonated.  What's even more amazing is its head retention.  Note how it looked five minutes after the above video:

No change.

The aroma is a perfectly balanced blend of plums, coco, and licorice.  Faint underlying flavors include whiskey, bread, and very mild smoke.  The fruity-plum scent presumably comes from the Belgian yeast; as in Dark Truth, it adds a pleasantly fruity twist to a style normally known for intense roasted coco and coffee flavors.

The whiskey and whiskey barrel flavors are a little stronger here than they smelled, but their integration is nonetheless seamless.  A mild hint of ethanol (slowly growing stronger as the beer warms) is no match for the vanilla and burnt sugar flavors.  Nearly equal to those are the aforementioned Belgian flavors, chiefly plums and some cherries; an unexpected but welcome hop bitterness; bittersweet chocolate; and some rye malt.  Yes, they all exist together in harmony.  No one component overpowers the whole, which cannot be said for most barrel-aged stouts. There are vague suggestions of licorice and smoke.

I could have guessed this based on both the base beer and the amount of carbonation evident in the glass, but this Imperial Stout is dangerously drinkable.  I find it borderline fluffy, hardly the first choice of words most stouts bring to mind.  If you took away the subtle hint of alcohol flavor this beer might be fatally smooth.

Boulevard Imperial Stout might possess one of the most perfectly balanced flavor profiles I've seen in a barrel-aged stout.  Blending fresh and aged beer was a wise decision on Boulevard's part.  Rather than obliterating their Dark Truth stout, they added additional layers to it.  Quite impressive, and a fair bit better than Dark Truth.

Allagash Merveilleux

My first proper sour from Allagash brewing company is Merveilleux, "Marvelous" in French.  Per Allagash's website, it is a blend of five different beers aged in a mixture of wine and bourbon barrels.  Like their Midnight Brett ale I just reviewed, brettanomyces yeast was used, to which they added various souring bacteria.  It's sold in individual 12.7oz (375ml) bottles.


Merveilleux's appearance is a hazy mixture of amber, deep red, and brown.  It appears opaque unless held up to light.  The carbonation level looks great but as is common for sour beers there is very little head formation or retention.

The aroma is rather mild for a sour beer.  It vaguely reminds me of a gueuze lambic in that it somewhat resembles the aroma of apple cider, but not too much.  There is a hint of bread and some oak tannins.

Merveilleux is surprisingly malty for a sour beer with brett yeast, and not in the same way that Flemish sours are.  Quite bready with a hint of brown sugar, an excellent contrast to the usual sour flavors.  The tartness comes across as a mixture of tart cherries and sour candy here; sour rock candy especially comes to mind.  Oak makes itself more known here than the aroma hinted at.  I'm tempted to say wine barrel stands out a bit, but in truth the blending here is so balanced that trying to identify wine barrel vs bourbon barrel proves difficult.  There is a faint suggestion of butter, which is either the oak or the bacteria.

By sour beer standards, Merveilleux's texture is firmly in semi-dry/semi-sweet territory.  It's definitely maltier and sweeter than the norm for sour beers.  Drinkers unfamiliar with sour beers will still likely find it rather dry.  The sourness is not overpowering.

All in all another excellent offering from Allagash.  Its acidity is up there but balanced pretty well by a surprisingly hefty malt bill.  Merveilleux stands on its own by sour beer standards but that sweeter profile almost makes it double as a decent introduction to the world of sour beers.  Allagash has only released this one time so far, but with any luck they'll make it again.

Once again, Allagash shows they probably couldn't make a bad beer if they tried.

Allagash Midnight Brett Ale

Allagash Midnight Brett Ale is essentially a stout fermented with brettanomyces yeast.  Though this isn't unheard of, it's a fairly uncommon combination.  Allagash further states they brewed this with malted wheat, unmalted (raw) wheat, and malted rye.

Though Midnight Brett looks opaque, a very careful examination reveals a barely perceptible transparency.  Quite black, this only has a slight reddish hue; neither that nor its clarity comes across very well in photos.  Foam is off-white, a finger in height, and retains very well.   The lacing presents excellently throughout.

Midnight smells fairly mild…and what is there is mostly brett.  Definite funk here, lemons and mild sweat.  There is an extremely subtle hint of roast.  I don't get any of the suggestions of berries Allagash mentions on their website.  This may be over 7% alcohol, but it doesn’t smell like big beer.

The flavor is sort of intriguing.  It tastes almost like a lite (5% or less) bretted and dry-hopped stout/porter with a dash of coffee.   The coffee flavor comes from roasted barley, I assume; if so, they used just the right amount.  This is not a sweet beer, and if they had used any more it could have descended into acridity.  The brett is milder than the aroma indicated, but still present; it takes on more of a leathery note here.  A hint of bread and a faint kiss of hop bitterness rounds out the flavor profile.  Once again, the tart berry flavors Allagash mentions prove themselves a ghost. 

As I said, Midnight Brett is not sweet.  It feels quite a bit lighter than the 7.3% listed on the label.  The brett must have done a thorough fermentation.  I could use more sweetness in such a dark beer, but I don’t expect sugar and a thick body from a beer fermented with brett.

Allagash crafted a fine beer here, though not one I will personally seek out again.  Not that it would matter if I did, as I don't expect to see this in bottles again.  In any event, I’ve had better and easier to find bretted stout/porters for less money (namely DrieFonteinen Zwet.be).  I suppose this could age well, but the brett has already dried it out so much that I don’t think there is much point.  Midnight Brett is still a tasty ale.  I'm not sure Allagash could brew a bad beer if they tried.

DuClaw Sweet Baby Jesus! Chocolate Peanut Porter

I like where craft beer is right now, a lot.  I like its (usually) reasonable pricing structure.  I like the variety of craft one can find within a single decent store---and increasingly, within a decent bar or restaurant, a trend I hope continues.  I like the relative ease with which one can find a big, burly, sucker punch of a strong beer like New Holland Dragon's Milk, Sierra Nevada Bigfoot, or North Coast Old Stock Ale; but I also like the recent trend of lighter "session beers" in IPA form.  And I like that I don't have to go to a boutique liquor store to find one or the other; most stores now carry at least a few of the heavy hitters alongside lighter fare.

That being said, some enthusiasts find reasons to believe that craft beer has jumped the shark, or will soon.  Between beers made with bits of real Moby Dick (so you know it's good, I guess?) and beers made with real moon dust (a sexier way of saying "space dirt"), craft brewers' penchant for experimentation seems to be getting a little out of hand.  Need I mention that beer bottled in a squirrel carcass?

Everything has to peak and then fade at some point.  If craft beer soon does too, I hope historians don't phrase it this way: "everyone understood craft beer jumped the shark when brewers started adding fake peanut butter to their beers."  Why?  Because that would mean we are about to see a lot more beers like Sweet Baby Jesus! Chocolate Peanut Butter Porter, which is the last thing craft needs right now.

Sweet Baby Jesus looks the part of a porter.  It is nearly pitch black; when held to the light, a reddened hint of transparency shows itself.  Head retention and formation are both minimal, though I'm pretty sure that is my fault (or rather, my dishwasher's fault).  At any rate, Baby Jesus appears to have adequate carbonation, perhaps verging on too much.

Many moons have passed since "curious" was the first word that popped into my mind upon first smelling a beer.  There is not a shred of (for lack of a better term) "beer flavor" in this ale.  No hops, not really any barley; just peanut butter, chocolate, and sugar.  DuClaw should have dropped "Sweet Baby Jesus" from the name and just called it Chocolate Peanut Butter Porter.  This aroma is a dead-ringer for peanut butter cups.  I must confess that although I have smelled a great many strange things in my beer----melted almonds, pizza, ice cream, garbage can, the color purple, Cutex, freeze-distilled agony---peanut butter is not one of them. 

Same, but different.

It tastes much more like a porter than it smells.  Some of the trademark porter flavors---coffee, molasses, chocolate, a hint of licorice---are there.  Of those, chocolate stands out the most.  Unfortunately, there is something else lurking under the base beer.  That peanut butter flavor...I don't know if there is such a thing as spoiled peanut butter, but that's what this tastes like.  It's very artificial.  Fake.  The bottle proclaims this to be made with artificial flavors and that shows up quite strongly on the taste buds.  Baby Jesus sort of reminds me of Millstream's Pumpkin Stout, in that the phoniness of the ingredients gives the impression something rotten was added to it.  The beer is definitely sweet but the carbonation is a bit too much for me.  It feels lighter and thinner than it should be.


This is one of those new experiences that sounded good on paper but turned out just really awkward in practice.  Equal parts fascinating, perplexing and unappetizing; I haven't quite decided what to do with the remainder of my six pack.