Stille Nacht Christmas Truce 2017
Two Sergeants Brewing

650ml, sparkly rust wax-capped bottle - the second annual release of a tribute to Stille Nacht (ze Germans), or Silent Night (the Brits), the event during the Great War where soldiers ceased hostilities for a little while during Yuletide. A Bourbon barrel-aged stout.

This beer pours a solid black abyss, with the barest of amber basal edges, and three fingers of puffy, loosely foamy, and bubbly brown head, which leaves a bit of boiling cauldron lace around the glass as it slowly but surely dissipates.

It smells of semi-sweet, bready and doughy caramel malt, a strongly vanilla-forward oakiness, some red berry fruity esters, bittersweet cocoa powder, a minor free-range ashiness, and fairly subtle earthy, leafy, and soused-up floral green hops. The taste is grainy and sugary caramel malt, macerated vanilla beans, ethereal spicy wood staves, medium dark chocolate, a hint of day-old coffee, and more understated leafy, musty, and tipsy floral hoppiness.

The carbonation is quite restrained in its barely-there frothiness, the body a decent middleweight, and generally smooth, with maybe a touch of spice and emerging booziness making a minor dent here. It finishes off-dry, the caramel, cocoa, vanilla, and spice all coalescing into a sexy mess of dessert-friendly goodness.

Overall - since Bourbon is American, and the Yanks didn't enter the war until more than 2 years after the titular occasion, I'm not as satisfied with this one as I was with last year's Festbier, on an intellectual level, that is. As for the beer, it's fairly well-made, the barrel treatment hardly obfuscating the heady big-boy stout character therein. Not cheap, but definitely worth a try.