I poured this bottle into the wrong glass and so didn’t really get the head I was expecting.

The rest of my notes go:

Dark brown in colour.

Very bubbly.

Sour, chewy, comfortably bitter —> IPA

Score: 15/20

Stille Nacht from the made Belgian De Dolle Brouwers rocked me.  For a 12% beer the alcohol was nowhere to be seen.  The bottle I had poured bubbly with a small head.  A fudge like colour.  And it was oh so dangerously tasty.

Here’s what they say about it on the De Dolle website:

Stille Nacht (Silent Night) is a prestige beer from De Dolle Brouwers, brewed for Christmas. It has the highest density of any Belgian beer (27°Pl). It has been boiling for many hours, brewed with pale malt with white candy sugar in the kettle. The Nugget hops gives an extra bitterness to balance the extreme sweetness due to the density. The taste triangle is completed with some acidity of the fermentation. It is a very interesting beer to age. We have samples of every bottling we have done so far and aging hasn’t decreased the quality of this beer. Keep some samples at 10°C and mark the year on the cap with an alcohol marker. Cheers!!

Sounds like great advice and gives me inspiration for 09.  Collecting beers that can age!!!

Due to missed connections, earlier tonight I was able to pop into a favourite little shop of mine.  I had to hold off the growing extensive Christmas beer collection there (only so much room in my bag) and picked up a few new ones.

First to get the pour was the Watou Tripel, a Trappist beer from the town of Watou, Belgium.  Michael Jackson has a great breakdown of Watou Tripel vs. the  St BernardusTripel.

I’m getting used to the opening of the Belgians and so had a glass all ready and waiting (in the kitchen sink).  What I loved was that my bottle (a 330ml) was dated Best before:  21 02 11.

Poured with what I would call an off-white head, that even 30 minutes late is still hanging around.

Colour wise, I’ve got written down a caramel orange colour.

I got a bit of a malty nose.

Taste, I thought it was fairly smooth, almost light upfront with some of the bitterness of the hops coming in towards the end finishing with quick a clean citrus note.

I would definately have this one again.

Belgoo Magus was suggested in response to the Tanks request for some beers to help build the Belgian pallete.

Got to say that maybe the pallete is coming in because though the beer on the bottle sounded really exciting:  Belgian artisanal 4-grains beer.

In reality in tasting it was disappointing and tastes typically Belgian (not sure how to define that yet though…so obvioully I need to work harder at this…) and then falls flat pretty quickly – that is the upfront first tastes go away and the beer tasted like something is missing.

Saying that, my bottle did pour with an almost non-existent head and so maybe I didn’t get a proper taste