The Brown Burn
Liberty Brewing

On tap at GABS festival, May 2014.

Pours a brown colour, red at the edges. Clear with foamy beige head, sitcks around OK. Looks nice.

Smells chocolatey and sweet but a big belt of chilli heat wafting off that. Comes across as sweet spice, chilli chocolate. Pleasant.

Taste is similar, slight caramel edge upfront but then all chocolate and chilli heat. Fantastic stuff. Sweet, chocolatey but so much burn. Feel the burn.

Body is full, mercifully. Really pads out the chilli heat.

I love, LOVE a good chilli heat. I know I'm a small minority but this is yum. Awesome sensation on an otherwise pleasant beer.

Looking at my scores now, I can only assume I missed this one when compiling my top ten of the festival because this should at least have been mentioned in that conversation.

Tried on-tap at GABS.

Pours a deep reddish-brown colour with some mild haze in the glass. Body is solid. Head is firm and fine, leaving a slightly orange-tinged beige cap to the beer. Not much in the way of lace or visible carbonation. But it looks good.

Nose is brown and toasty, with a slight aromatic vegetative quality like capsicum spice. It's a solid, if a little dull aroma—mild in its way, but otherwise pretty good.

Round brown toasty entry to the palate sets you up for what's coming up. No, there's a hint of coffee, that's not it... the back has a little vanilla and a mild capsicum character... Wait, did I say "mild"? Holy hell, here's the burn—huge spicy chilli fire wrecks the aftertaste with a heat that doesn't go away. It's more of a feeling that a flavour, and it hurts. Hot hot hot. By the time I took more than a couple of sips, I could not longer taste anything—and yet it's quite insidious the way it creeps up.

It's intense, and the flavours on the palate are quite nice until the wrecking ball, burn-and-salt-the-fields aspect of the chilli comes in. It's a bit much in the end, and I doubt I could take much more than a sample.