Gingerbread Man
Privatbrauerei Loncium

 

330ml bottle, day 20 of the 2017 Craft BeerAdvent Calendar. A dark ale made with ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon, so goes the marketing blurb.

This beer pours a murky, dark orange-brick brown colour, with three fingers (yay!) of puffy, finely foamy, and somewhat fizzy tan head, which leaves some cannonball splash aftermath lace around the glass as it rather lazily subsides.

It smells of gritty and grainy caramel malt, earthy ginger, musty nutmeg, and sort of metallic cinnamon (so, yeah, gingerbread), a hint of candied fruitiness, and very, very subtle leafy, weedy, and floral noble hop bitters. The taste is grainy and crackery caramel malt, a suggestion of biscuity toffee, zesty ginger, muddled nutmeg, still edgy cinnamon, anise spice, brown sugar syrup, ethereal black stone fruit, and more well understated earthy, musty, and floral hoppiness.

The carbonation is adequate in its palate-mollifying frothiness, the body a decent medium weight, and sort of smooth, as those zingy spices make for a hard row to hoe here. It finishes off-dry, the malt still a contender, against the lingering spiced morass.

Overall - well, this certainly delivers the goods on the whole gingerbread front, evoking a liquid version of that particular love it or hate it holiday confection. I fall somewhere in the middle - like pumpkin pie, it's okay a couple times or so in season, but the rest of the year, I'll pass, thanks.