No Collusion
Double Mountain Brewery & Taproom

Bottle from Slice & Biscuit. Dark brown, small bubly beige head. Aroma is chocolate, roast grains, and a ton of booze. Taste is pretty up front with the booze, everything else is covered up by it. Alcohol on the finish too. Hopefully this gets mellow with temperature.

I aged this for about a 2 years.

Pours a rich walnut/mahogany brown with a robust coffee colored head the rises up well over the rim of the glass, holds it's shape and settles into a nice stable finger wide cap of foam.
Nose is muted roasted malt and charred wood. nothing especially prominent
Taste is mellow and oaky with a lot of chocolate malt and other milder malt flavors. Has flavors like a brown ale or porter, not nearly as aggressive or bitter as I would expect from the strength and style (or the 100 IBU claimed on the label). Drinking at about cellar temperature and it's just a very soft malty flavor that dominates.
Mouthfeel is smooth but thin for the style. It's not watery but there's not a lot here, again it feels like a porter or a brown ale or a stout like guiness. Not like a 10% russian imperial stout. I guess that's impressive? not sure
Overall I'm enjoying it more as I sip into it (common characteristic for strong brews maybe?) but it's not what I expected at all. It's a very mellow drink for such a strong beer. That's impressive in it's own way but I must admit that I don't crack open a 10% RIS for a light flavored easy drinker so I'm a little torn.

I recently realized the extent of the backlog this past weekend when I peeked into what I thought were empty Tavour boxes! Eeek. 8=O I just returned home from a day of teaching & while I might normally take a nap, ALCS Game 3 was getting ready to start & I have been watching a LOT of baseball this year.

From the Bottle: "A Non-Collaborative Stout"; "100 IBU"; "This ain't no witch hunt. Just an interrogation of ingredients assembled for a common goal. It's big, bold, and great. Imperial to say the least."; "Recycle is good[,] Reuse is better"; "Our heavy-duty glass bottles can be cleaned & reused many times. Bring this bottle back to our Hood River Taproom or to one of our retailers."

I Pop!ped the cap & started a slow, gentle C-Line pour into the awaiting glass. Things looked good for the home team as it foamed up to create just under two fingers of dense, foamy, rocky, deep-brown head with very good retention, leaving a load of lacing in its wake. Color was Black/Opaque (SRM = 44), allowing ZERO light penetration. Nose was roasty, chocolaty, but also with an odd acetone-based nail polish remover chemical sharpness. 8=p Mouthfeel was medium-to-full, kind of light for this style. The taste was really roasty & smoky to the point of being ashy. 8=p I once said essentially the same thing of Sheaf Stout & I didn't care for that one, either. Finish was dry, but sharp, reminiscent of cherry cough syrup when I was a kid. Man, this just was NOT making it.

My bottle had close to a year (or perhaps more) of aging on it & I was still noticing variations on the same theme of flaws that others had mentioned. It was not undrinkable, at least not for me, but its level of unpleasantness was making me wonder if had been a collab with MInhas. I'd be curious as to the culprit. My guess - something about the yeast utilized in its fermentation. The high IBUs & high ABV suggest that they may have used some heavy duty yeast to get it to go & there was a biochemical reaction that occurred.

 

This one pours a fairly dark black color, with a small head, and not much lacing.

This smells a bit like grain alcohol- the aroma brings so much heat here. This isn't subtle. There's some roast and smoke, but also mostly booze.

The taste is also just booze. It's so ashy and astringent, it's just bad. I imagine this needs about three years before it becomes drinkable. Beyond the heavy alcohol flavors, it's just bitter, and too roasty, and too smokey. They should have colluded with a better recipe here.

This i s medium bodied, and not all that drinkable, at all. I couldn't finish my pour.

I don't love this. I don't like it, either.

Appearance – Dark brown, clear body with a two and a half finger head.

Aroma – Roasted malts, coffee, and chocolate. Very faint, however.

Taste – Coffee, dark malts, a little bitter. Alcohol evident but maybe it was too warm.

Mouthfeel – Pretty thick but cut by the alcohol.

Overall – Not equal to others I have had from Double Mountain.

Dark chocolate
Smooth
Wood
Slightly bitter finish

 

500ml bottle - great name and concept for a brew, I gotta say!

This beer pours a clear (I imagine), very dark, amber-highlighted brown colour, with three flabby fingers of puffy, rocky, and bubbly tan head, which leaves some tiered frilly lace around the glass as it slowly sinks out of sight.

It smells of roasted caramel malt, a bit of gamey meatiness, bittersweet cocoa powder, indistinct black stone fruity notes, mild anise spice, and some earthy, weedy, and perfumed floral green hops. The taste is bready and doughy caramel malt, some metallic ashiness, very dry chocolate, salted licorice, estery alcohol, and more leafy, herbal, and grassy verdant hoppiness.

The carbonation is quite restrained in its complacent-seeming frothiness, the body a solid medium weight, and not particularly smooth, as that weird acerbity definitely takes a chunk out of the frivolity here. It finishes off-dry, the malt still dealing with a strange, unpleasant lingering bitterness.

Overall - yeah, I don't know what the hell they added to this one, because something ain't right. It's not the north of 20-proof booze (that I can deal with), it's that untethered acridity, that is seriously making me consider an expensive drainpour.

Very dark brown with a dark beige foam in the Orval chalice. Strange, even bizarre aroma of medicinal herbs and a distant brushfire. First taste is bitter licorice. That's about as good as it gets. Darkness descends.

Burnt sugar cut with charcoal. Woody, leaf mold, massive astringency. This is so bitter it hurts. At least you get the feeling it's from hops and not some chemical reaction. Hate to waste all that alcohol, so I'll keep the rest for medicinal purposes. From the 500 ml bottle purchased at Central Market in Shoreline, Wash.

Poured into a Fremont small snifter. Pours a very dark mahogany brown, appearing nearly opaque black in the glass with a half finger dark khaki head with great retention and nice lacing. Aroma of dark toasted malt, cocoa, mild dark stone fruit, almost a Baltic porter profile. Flavor is dark toasted malt with light char, lots of licorice, a grainy light rye-like tartness and grassy hops. Finishes with hop bitterness with little herbal hop flavor and some mild dark fruit. Medium bodied with light creaminess and sharp carbonation. Quite a novel tasting stout that is licorice and hop forward. Fortunately, the deep malt body handles these sharp flavors well. A bit disconcerting on first taste, it grew on me over time (the high ABV probably helped with that). This skirts on the edge of unbalanced to the bitter, dark grain and licorice notes very forward, but manages to leave an interesting malty, bitter finish that reveals rye or dark fruit flavors. Confusing and nearly disturbing as intended. I liked it and would definitely get it again if in an adventurous mood for a hoppy stout.