La Rouspéteuse
Les Brasseurs du Hameau

Pours reddish-brown and look muddy.
Very good "pop" at opening and produce a very thick, about two inches, foamy white head.
Nose is grainy and grassy. Funny, but smell like old dust picked-up buy a vacum! Red fruits coming up after a while.
Mouth is a bit unconfortable, carbonation is way to high, almost artificial. Dry palate. Acid.
Taste is very ordinary. I was expecting to have a "belgian dubble" like beer, but nothing like this. Red fruits, mint, common hops. Nothing surprising.
Overall, somewhat thin and disapointing.

Got this through CanBIF6 from philmath. Thanks!

I know nothing about this beer, not even its style. I'm going in to this trusting it's an American Amber / Red Lager, as listed here, but who knows? It's a beer. And it's reddish. And murky. And not that good. Does style even matter at this point?

Pours a turbid reddish caramel colour with oodles of visible carbonation and a whopping great head.

The aroma is masked by the carbonation just now. Might have to skip to the taste and come back to this.

The taste is...fruity...like crisp pears...caramel...honey...light milk chocolate and lemon peel and an odd soapiness...like Irish Spring soap...tastes a bit like it was steeped with potpourri. The carbonation is overbearing and making it tough to pick out flavours...and yet after about ten minutes it's like this beer died and all the carbonation went to heaven and it just tastes watery.

For a beer with so much visible carbonation it sure tastes flat.

This beer in one word? Manky.

From a 500ml brown bottle with a crown top. 4,99$ at Peluso. Second bottle bought, the first time I forgot to take note. The appearance of this beer is awfull, muddy brown colour, the head is nice with a beige colour, with a good retention. The smell is on the grainy side with some chocolate and caramel. The taste is very minty, some chocolate, so chocolate and mint. Somewhat thin for a 7,5% alc. Easy to drink but the taste is not good enough to ask for another.

La Rouspéteuse ("the Grouch", feminine) has a complexion as murky as polluted sea water and it has about as enticing a colour, too. Although the afternoon's rays are more than bright enough to be able to pierce through it, none do; its deep amber colour is just too muddied. The feebleness of its outline furthers the beer's foul and marred image.

There are a few sources that list this as a Dubbel, although the bar for which it is specially brewed lists it on their menu as a "lager(!) rousse". I'm inclined to believe them; if it were intended to be a Dubbel, its brewers would know to use an appropriate Belgian/Abbaye yeast strain which, made painfully obvious from the smell of things, was not done.

In fact, little or nothing about this resembles a Dubbel. There are no esters, no phenols, heck, there's not even a hint of alcohol (despite the 7.5%, this tastes like nothing more than a standard 5% lager). There is, however, a fairly upfront maltiness lending notes of caramel and toasted honeycomb but that alone is not enough to satisfy the palate.

Fortunately, there is a sprinkling of hops on the finish that impart an effervescent floral quality (that is too quickly rampaged over by that thick, lumbering maltiness). Although it certainly tastes better than it smells, the beer drinks with a lifeless, utterly ordinary plainness; it seems as if they were trying to emulate an industrially produced macro lager.

This is brewed exclusively for Montreal's Bistro In Vivo and it's just as well because I can't imagine any other establishment caring much to sell it. I know I wouldn't buy it again. Bistro In Vivo is a very respectable beer bar with an outstanding selection; I know they like to support local breweries but they've been too generous in sponsoring this effort.