The Borbóndias: Blend No. 2
de Garde Brewing

Taster at share. Flat, golden pour. Aroma is honey, apples, wooden barrel notes. Taste offers mild tartness, fruity, apple notes, white grapes. Mildly dry.

poured from a 750mL bottle into a stemmed taster glass. pours an apple cider cloudy light brown. no head but lacing around the rim of the glass. huge oaky funk on the nose with a bit of cacao and vanilla. taste has more cacao and vanilla but also an insane amount of oaky funk. medium-full mouthfeel with a dry oaky finish. really good. better than expected based on the initial description of the beer.

This one pours a light orange ish color, with a small head, and not much lacing.

This smells vaguely sweet, but I don't really get any chocolate or vanilla.

The barrels here - bourbon/sherry - give this an intriguing and interesting sweetness, but i do wish the chocolate or vanilla came through. There's barely any flavors from those additions. There's a lemony tartness and some white wine barrel, too.

This is light bodied, and semi-acidic, with a decent enough mouthfeel.

This was definitely interesting to try, but I would have liked to get more character from the chocolate and vanilla.

Intensely funky and also fairly acidic, somewhat leaning in the oud bruin direction, it's a unique expression, but I'm not sure the adjuncts are very expressive here. I'd love to try this with a base version just to compare and contrast, but I think I enjoyed b1 a tad more.

A bit on the bitter side. Decent.

 

 

 

Darker purple body. That is pretty complex. Cocoa nibs and oak provide a balanced dryness to it backed up by bright lemon, citrus zest, mild-moderate acetic acidity that lingers all the way through. The vanilla seems to give it a full-length slight sweetness and thus body.