Dark Cherry Abbey Ale
Big Rock Brewery

 

Legitimately one of the best offerings to come out of Big Rock in quite awhile. Nice depth, lovely sweetness, and beautiful tart-sweet cherry presence that feels very "natural," for whatever it's worth.

 

Appearance - Pours a dark brown with ruby highlights and a finger width of tan head.

Smell - Cherries, candied sugar, Belgian yeast, dark toasty malts, hint of orange peel, earthy hops.

Taste - Dark toasty (almost chocolate-like) malts with cherries, sugar, Belgian yeast, and earthy hops. Slight hint of orange peel. Not overly cloying or tart, considering the ingredients in this brew.

Mouthfeel - Medium bodied with moderate-to-high carbonation. Finishes with a pleasant stickiness.

Overall - A well-constructed Belgian dark strong ale with good flavours. I'd like a little more cherry on the palate and the appearance (head retention) could be improved.

 

 

L: Dark brown almost black with a nice brown head head that leaves some small lacing down the side.

S: Sweet molasses, and a slight smell of cherries and rasperries.

T: Sweet chocolate and slight amount of cherries and raspberry.

F: Full body mouth feel. Kinda boozy though but enjoyable besides that.

O: A pretty nice beer even though it's kinda boozy.

750ml, caged and corked bottle, which comes inside a tall white cardboard box. One stupidly difficult to remove flared cork, check.

This beer pours a very dark, hazy brown colour, with a teeming tower of puffy, finely foamy, and faintly creamy tan head, which leaves a bit of randomly splattered sudsy lace around the glass as it swiftly abates.

It smells of bready, doughy caramel malt, a pleasantly musty under the basement stairs thing, biscuity cherry fruit notes (like those Nutri-Grain 'granola' bars), some estery booziness, muddled citrus, vague coriander and white pepper spice, brown sugar, and a generic earthiness. The taste is sugary caramel malt, fairly indistinct cherry cough drops, still benign seasonal spice, a subtle (or maybe just weak) orange rind fruitiness, stale gingerbread, and a hovering, but politely declining to really interfere for the most part alcohol heat.

The carbonation is nice and fluffy in its generally engaging and playful frothiness, the body a solid medium-heavy weight, and mostly smooth, with a small attendant creaminess. It finishes sweet, yeah, but moderated just enough by a masked fruitiness and a still weirdly genial big booze measure.

If you didn't tell me that actual cherries were sacrificed (and hurt!) in the making of this offering, I probably wouldn't have noticed, instead attributing my perception of them to yeast or malt (or maybe even hop) complexity. At any rate, this is a not too shabby BSDA, all on its own, but don't go in expecting your cherry, um, 'cherry' to get verily popped here.