Black Magic
Bent Stick Brewing Co.

 

650ml bottle - it is strange but still quite cool that Alberta craft brewers list the local maltsters whose products they use right on the label!

This beer pours a fairly solid black hole, yet with prominent amber basal edges, and one chubby finger of puffy, loosely foamy, and bubbly beige head, which leaves some dissolving ice floe lace around the glass as things lazily progress.

It smells of lightly roasted and bready caramel malt, some indistinct black stone fruitiness, faint cafe-au-lait, subtle anise spice, and very understated earthy, musty, and floral noble hop bitters. The taste is grainy and doughy caramel malt, a bit of buttered bread, bittersweet cocoa powder, stale coffee grounds, still difficult to parse dark fruity notes, and more weak earthy, herbal, and floral hoppiness.

The carbonation is average in its basic form frothiness, the body a decent medium weight, and more or less smooth, with just a wee clammy pithiness evolving when no one was looking. It finishes off-dry, the malt and cocoa wanly leading us out the front door.

Overall - this is not a bad iteration of the style, but there's a few unsettling off-flavours with which to contend. That said, it generally works, once some of the ol' cognitive dissonance sets in, aided and abetted by the well-integrated 14-proof wowee sauce quotient, as it were.