Ek Chuah’s
Cigar City Brewing

 

Because of the leap year, technically having it one day from its first birthday. Dark, mild lacing. Strong notes of cocoa and vanilla on the nose, dark malt and coffee as the backbone. Cinnamon is a lot stronger on the taste. The chocolate, vanilla, and coffee are more of a mid mouth blend of flavors, and then there’s a peppery aftertaste. Just a hint of thickness, strong booze presence. Well balanced, flavorful. Very good,

Serving: Bottle
Bottled: Mar-11-2023
Consumed: Jan-4-2023

Smells as advertised. Everything is incredibly melded together but chocolate and cinnamon are most prominent to my nose. The flavor is in the same vein, but sweeter than I was expecting. Chocolate, spiced molasses, peppers, moderate toasty astringent under the rest. Hefty body, sticky, sweet, low-moderate carbonation. Lingering light tingle from the chiles, but not that up-front. Rounds out and melds considerably the closer it gets to room temp.

4...4.5...4...4.25...4.25

Good head production; mediocre retention. Really a beautiful beer in the glass, even after the head has mostly faded; ebony in color, clear around the edges.

Lovely aroma that implies coffee, chocolate, and pepper, along with malt notes of caramel, toffee, toast, and molasses.

Delivers a rich and delectable experience on the palate. The chili pepper heat starts off very mild at first, but builds over time to a pleasant heat on the tongue and throat. Chocolate is absolutely the star, and it's integrated perfectly into the malt base. Coffee is entirely complementary. Cinnamon is restrained and adds more heat than flavor, which is quite nice.

Smooth drinking and full bodied.

Absolutely lovely beer.

From a 500ml bottle, dated 03/11/23. Served in the German-designed, precision-engineered, preternaturally fragile Spiegelau BA tulip glass.

Pours mahogany-black with caramel highlights and a finger-plus of soft mocha foam. Retention is on the order of a minute or so, settling to a wispy cap, a creamy collar and a rousable spatter of slippery lacing.

Nose is sweet and savory. Aroma of vanilla is prominent but also smelling coffee and chile peppers.

Taste is thicker and hotter than anticipated. The chiles and cinnamon merge with the abv to dominate the front end. The more mellow coffee and chocolate base notes gradually assert themselves, with the vaporous vanilla and cinnamon red hots providing a lighter top note throughout from start to finish.

Feel is smooth and unctuous with a relatively full, dense body. Carbonation is gentle, fine and prickly and serves to amplify the chile/cinnamon tongue-coating spicy heat.

Overall, this is a fine one! Right from the get-go the combination of chile-cinnamon-abv-carbonation dominate and are inextricably entangled with both the taste and the mouthfeel. From the description this seems to be essentially the same add-junk schedule as Hunaphu? and maybe it was just my mood and my palate on a different day but I enjoyed this one a great deal better. Certainly I found it to be less sweet and better constructed. I wish I had a basement full of this to drink in front of the wood stove all next winter.