Tripel
Swiftwater Brewing Company

This guy was served on tap at Swift Water Brewing Company’s taproom in Rochester, New York. It arrived in a pair of house snifters, showing a shimmering, clean golden coloring. A simple rim of white foam added highlights to the scene, but otherwise was noncontributory to the beer’s appearance. Carbonation was tame, as was haze or sediment. The aroma gave bright lemon flesh, hot tannic tea leafiness, raw Stromboli dough, heavy phenolic clove, chemically printer paper and photo chemicals, soft and cloying wheat, distant caramel grain, and dense pale malt dextrins. Warmth brought out notes of cane sugar and vodka booziness. Crossing the tongue came a blend of curiously bitter banana esters, moldy Flintstones’ vitamin chewables, immensely overdone clove roastiness, lemon skin and dried seed, mustard seeds, wood lacquer chemical twangs, intensely bitter quartz mineral, dried sorhum, sawdust, heavy Belgian yeastiness, and synthetic orange peel bitters. The aftertaste, of note, was dominated by warm and seedy Elderberry and fig jams, and again, the cutting, hot knife that was the beer’s booziness. The body was thick and oily, but not in a very satisfying way. There was a general lack of pop, smack, or creaminess to help cool the mouth. In this wake it was left feeling a bit burdened. Despite all of this, the abv remained stylistically reasonable, and the beer disappeared surprisingly quickly from out glasses.

Overall, we felt this offering to lack a certain balance of taste. The nose was innocuous enough, but with the flavoring came an overly clovey bitterness that was not met nearly enough by a malty, or sweetly boozy backbone. Instead, all three of these components pushed towards the same bittered, chemically, boozy end of the spectrum, in a way that couldn’t readily be rectified by anything else swirling amongst them. This also made for a relative denseness of flavoring, which subsequently hardened the mouthfeel out. We’re still only getting to know these guys as a brewery, and have had overwhelmingly positive experiences thus far, so this one didn’t quite live up to this growing reputation in our mind’s eye.