Nutcracker
Silver City Brewery & Taproom

 

Was fortunate enough to get over to Collins just after the Silver City beer dinner, and most of the SC beers were still on line.

This beer is described as a Belgium strong dark ale, though it tasted like an outstanding scotch ale to me. This beer had a sweet, spicey aroma, one that was very enticing. The beer pours a dark brown color (with good head retention and nice lacing), and certainly looks like a scotch ale (or Belgium dark I suppose...:-).

On the palate this beer is absolutely delicous, with lovely sweet spice, ranier cherries and butterscotch. The beer has a very long and lingering finish, and just seemed to get better in the glass.

I tried 4 SC beers at Collins (OK, 5 if I count the bottle of Fat Woody that Knuckles brought by), and this ended up being my favorite (though there was nothing wrong with the Fat Bastard, Whoop Pass or Imperial Stout). A very impressive offering from the folks at SC.

Damn this is a dark brew. Could almost pass for a stout. The head even plays along and looks very stoutish. Nose is full of brown sugar and a bit of dark fruit. Taste is heavy on brown sugar, banana (maybe a bit too much banana), vanilla, and fruitiness. It doesn't seem to gel and the flavors do not sing in harmony. This is decent but nothig all that remarkable imo. I have another bottle and am hoping that when I finally bust it out the edges have smoothed a little.


Edit:
I really love this brewery so I felt compelled to drink my bottle to rethink my review. I had a feeling I wasn't in the mood to properly review this brew when I did my initial tasting. Lo and behold, my old review describes this beer better than I feel I can now. I don't think this is a bad beer by any means, someone else out there could really enjoy the flavors it presents, but I myself do not enjoy them at all. As much as I love La Fat, I will not be buying this offering again.

So I'm at Silver City last Friday, just getting over a cold. I get there and I see that Don Spencer has his long-promised spiced Belgian on (just thrown on that day, in fact). I order it, and am completely underwhelmed. Is this a lager I'm drinking? Is this a very lame brown? What is this? I blame it on my cold-destroyed palate and promise myself to try it again. I go again today, and order it again just to be sure. I'm glad I did, as this is one delicious beer (and I'm now convinced that it wasn't simply my cold, but they gave me the wrong goddam beer. The first time that has ever happened at Silver City.)

Appearance: Oooh, lawsy laws, this is one dark frickin' beer. Darker even than the Fat Bastard, I'd wager (and now that I've got myself a Fat Bastard hat, I'm a happy, happy man). On the Muncil beer scale, this beer occupies territory somewhere between Fat Bastard and an imperial stout. Dark brown, very stern, and very serious.

Smell: The beer has spices in it, along with orange peel and a few other bits of love. However, I don't smell them. What I do smell is malt and Belgian yeast, and it smells goddam delicious. I smelled nothing of the sort last Friday, so I'm now convinced I was drinking a totally different beer.

Taste: So the beer I had last Friday was thin, not particularly sweet and had a funky lager yeast finish. This beer, on the other hand, was sweet, thick, slightly fruity with a great nutty, fruity Belgian yeast finish. There are subtler hints of fruit and spice (and the orange plays very delicately across the tongue in the middle), but I won't get into that right now. Suffice to say, this isn't what I was drinking last Friday.

Mouthfeel: Great presence, a Lipizzaner stallion compared to the My Little Pony that was whatever I had last Friday.

Drinkability: Well, I pretty much reached my limit with two VIP Nutcrackers. Any more than that, and you'd best have a designated driver. You'll want them, mind you. I promise that. Whether or not you can actually drink them, on the other hand, is a completely different issue entirely.