Belgian Golden Strong
Moody Ales

 

650ml bottle - it's Belgian (in style), it's golden, and it's strong, what else do you wanna know?

This beer pours a slightly hazy, pale golden yellow colour, with three fingers of puffy, finely foamy, and rather creamy off-white head, which leaves a few instances of erupting underwater volcano lace around the glass as it lazily subsides.

It smells of gritty and grainy cereal malt, candi sugar, chewed-out pink bubblegum, some estery old-school yeastiness, banana chips, and some plain leafy, weedy, and gently soused-up floral hop bitters. The taste is bready and doughy pale malt, a lesser crackery wheatiness, banana pudding, simple syrup, ethereal generic dollar-store bin candy, faded yeast, some mixed earthy spiciness, a hint of domestic citrus rind, and more understated leafy, herbal, and floral green hoppiness.

The carbonation is fairly underwhelming in its lackadaisical frothiness, the body a decent medium weight, and generally smooth, with a wee airy creaminess pretty much there from the get-go. It finishes off-dry, the malt, spice, and yeast all given 'er the extra 10 percent.

Overall - this comes across as a pretty well-rendered version of the style, nice and balanced, with a full spectrum of flavour goodness. Easy to put back, especially since the 17-proof (yup, I can still do the hard math stuff at this point) is so ably integrated. Worth checking out, IMHO.