N2 Parallelogram
Parallel 49 Brewing Company

Great, deep, rich coffee flavor with creamy mouthfeel due to nitrogen bubbles. Love it

 

341ml bottle - seems that I might have done this one before, on draft, so in the spirit of long-lost packaging format options on this site, I'll do it again, for science, of course.

This beer pours a somewhat murky, dark orange cola-tinted brown colour, with one finger of puffy, silken, and creamy beige head, which leaves surprisingly little in the way of lace around the glass as it very lazily recedes.

It smells of bittersweet chocolate, slick cafe-au-lait, grainy caramel malt, a twinge of black licorice, faint wet ash, and some plain leafy, herbal, and floral hop bitters. The taste is bready and doughy caramel malt, subtle biscuity toffee, laid-back sugary coffee, a soft lactic sourness, plum and dark cherry fruit notes, and a growing perfumed earthy, musty, and floral hoppiness.

The carbonation is, well it's not, because this is nitro, baby, so the bubbles are quite fine, which engenders a complete smoothness and a decent creaminess. It finishes sweet - the java now having ceded way to the lingering cocoa, caramel, and cream.

Overall, this comes across as a genuinely engaging and sultry porter - the nitro treatment very well applied. And the coffee's less than up-front performance? From an avowed cuppa joe agnostic, that don't matter much to me. An easy sipper for a day when winter seems to have let its foot off of the gas for a spell.