Battle Royal
Nómada Brewing Company

 

Pitch black pour, visibly thick, with a thin and very fine-grained beige head that gives way to a sticky lacing. Molasses, milk chocolate, roasted malts, cocoa, a bit of coffee and some bitter cherries. Super smooth texture with low carbonation and a bitter-sweet and perfectly balanced aftertaste.

Pours a thicker dark brown, almost black color with a small beige head, instantly collapsing to a tiny ring of lacing.

Smells of dried fruit, licorice, Amarena and toffee malts with a soothing, burned earth quality. A whiff of rustic, earthen coffee on top, together with a light smokiness completes the nose.

Has a very creamy mouthfeel, low on carbonation, which lets the profound maltiness evolve perfectly on the palate, revealing a bigger body.

Tastes of bakers chocolate, dried red fruits, almost completely entangled into the malt richness, and a powerfull blend of bitter chocolate and toasty malts. A alcoholic sharpness enriches the malts, gently feathered by cream and a note of smoke, creating a warming glow on its way into the belly. Malts grow very profound, producing a tobacco quality, which gets matched by caramel and rock sugar, while the beer finishes with a long lasting coffee earthiness, exhibiting a malt coated dryness.

Huge, well build beer, with an incredible rich maltiness, producing chocolate, dark fruits, coffee and earth, while always evolving to an intriguing mixture. All this is possible due to the beers awesome, creamy and soft mouthfeel.

 

 

 

On-draught in Warsaw as part of a flight.

B-

 

Bit of warming, but no taste of alcohol. Dark fruit, dark malts, coffee, chocolate and a teriyaki-esque uuuuumami! with a beautiful, thick and sticky mouthfeel really damn good porter!

 

330ml bottle - not too sure about the nature of some of the weapons displayed on the label, or the fact that 'miso' is in the name - are we looking at purposeful soy sauce here? Anyways, made in Spain, according to another part of said label, so I'm at least at the right place here.

This beer pours a pretty solid black abyss, with the barest of red cola basal edges, and three fingers of puffy, densely foamy, and well creamy brown head, which leaves some broad snow rime lace around the glass as it slowly seeps away.

It smells of roasted caramel malt, dark chocolate, sharp coffee, a subtle green yeastiness (probably the fermented soybeans), black licorice, tannic red wine, and further estery alcohol astringencies. The taste is bready, doughy caramel malt, bittersweet cocoa powder, now ephemeral coffee grounds, a consistent green veggie yeastiness (I think of miso as the soup, and this isn't really like that), mildly sour milk, leafy, herbal hops, and a rather polite booze warming.

The bubbles are fairly active, if in a tame, easy on the various palates frothiness, the body a solid medium-heavy weight, and generally smooth, with an attendant cold creaminess. It finishes on the sweet side, all cocoa, coffee, milk cream, fading caramel, and sure - some lingering yeasty greenness.

If you didn't tell me that there were soybeans in this, I might not have really even noticed - Imperial Porters have a way of introducing flavours that make you go 'huh?', and then just as quickly evaporate. So, overall, this is pretty damned good, but not because of the miso, but rather due to the 'Imperial', and the 'Porter' characteristics, capiche?

 

On tap at Mikkeller and Friends in Reykjavik, where it's billed as an imperial porter brewed with miso.

Pours very dark with a decent head. Smells sweet and lightly vinous, similar to American imperial stouts like the Abyss but more subdued. Quite nice.

Tastes like a sweet imperial stout of medium complexity. Raisins and barley up front, red wine in the middle, and a little saltiness in the back end that I attribute to the miso. Nicely brewed and fairly complex, but hardly a classic for its style.