Frambuesa Moka
E9 Brewing Co.

2019 vintage on tap, this is wonderful stuff. barrel forward dark wild beer, sour and bretty, woody and charred, with coffee, smoke, and chocolate character all through it, less fruited than anticipated but some cool raspberry tang on top of its fermentation derived acidity, oak forward too, with some minerals, coal, slate, graphite, then root beer and cola, black cherry, vanilla, coffee, and licorice all in the mix. really quite wildly complex, decadent in body and strength, and it warms up brilliantly. it looks like stout in the glass, deep brown to black with almost an inch of thick off white to burlap colored cream head, great retention, looks wonderful in a snifter. i wonder if this a blend of a stout type and a framboise, or if its brewed this way, need more information. the barrel presence is big, along with the body, but the finish is clean and quick for the style, very little residual sugar even with the fruit and chocolate, and this is more wild beer than dessert beer to me, love that. good funk, medium acidity, deep malt layers, subtle fruit and cocoa, tobacco and smoke, wet wood and earth, ambitious and brilliantly pulled off. nobody is making beer like this, mad props!

2018-07-18
375ml bottle served in a pair of Cantillon glasses. Batch number 2.

Pours black with no head and little to no carbonation. Smell is mild -- moderately tart, medium chocolate, strong raspberry.

Taste is tart -- raspberries all over, chocolate a little, and coffee a hint. Bottle calls it a stout -- it's not. It's a sour that happens to be dark with subtle hints of stout flavors.

Mouthfeel is thin, dry, and too still. Overall...it's not a perfect beer by any stretch, but I really enjoy it.

 

375ml, caged and corked bottle - what it sez it is, a raspberry and chocolate, barrel-aged stout.

This beer pours a pretty solid black abyss, with scant amber basal edges, and two fingers of puffy, finely foamy, and mildly bubbly beige head, which leaves some decent paint swath lace around the glass as it quickly evaporates.

It smells of tart green raspberries, bittersweet cocoa powder, subtle vanillan oak barrel notes, a bit of musty earthiness, and some rather weak leafy, herbal, and gently soused-up floral noble hop bitters. The taste is bready and doughy caramel malt, sour generic red berries, kind of middling chocolate notes, ethereal wet barrel staves, a hint of dry cafe-au-lait, some free-range ashiness, and more understated earthy, leafy, and besotted floral hoppiness.

The carbonation is average in its palate-satisfying frothiness, the body a decent medium weight, and generally smooth, once you get acclimatized to the admittedly tame sour character here. It finishes trending dry, the fruity character predominating.

Overall - this is an agreeable enough version of what it purports to be, which has already been delineated, as such. Well-blended, and not particularly tart, which goes the long mile in making this approachable, and rather easy to drink, especially given the more or less integrated, north of 8 points of the ol' wowee sauce, eh?