Doppelsticke
Brasserie Vrooden

From a 500ml bottle, best by 02/14/19. Served in a... well, first I tried a strange, then a cervoise, then a pub glass but all I get is a glass full of foam. In the end, I drank it out of the bottle.

I can’t say much about how it looks because I’m drinking it from the bottle. I do have a cervoise overflowing with head over on the table that’s been there for over half an hour or so and has maybe a finger of liquid beer in the bottom. So, I guess we can say that retention is, to all intents and purposes, effectively infinite.

As best I can tell, smelling it through the little hole, the aroma is rich and sweet, like brown sugar and cream, and like highly polished old wood. It smells like my grandmother’s antique mahogany table after being polished with Pledge.

The taste is mostly in accord with the nose, rich, dense sticky fig pudding with caramel sauce and a sort of woody character - certainly the beer is not barrel-aged, so I’m not sure where ‘wood’ is coming from. Stickily-sweet, dark dried fruit, dates, figs, prunes, brightened with lemon zest, and rounded with leather and pipe tobacco. There is more biting hoppiness here than I would have expected from what is essentially a big brown ale.

Feel is rich and smooth, medium-bodied but not as thick as it tastes like it had ought to be.

Overall, this is a big beer and, here at the bottom of the bottle, I find that I am too impaired to organize my thoughts enough to write much of a summary.

Bottle: Poured a dark brown color Altbier with a large brown foamy head with good retention and some lacing. Aroma of light roasted malt with some caramelized cereal and chocolate notes is more robust then I was expecting. Taste is a mix of caramelized malt with dry black chocolate notes with some cereal notes also noticeable with very little residual sugar notes. Body is full with god carbonation. Very well brewed with great flavours and balance.