St. Marienthaler Klosterbrau Dunkel
Privatbrauerei Eibau

 

 

 

 

 

 

500ml can, day 1 of the Costco Canada 2014 Beer Advent calendar.

This beer pours a clear, dark brownish amber colour, with three flabby fingers of puffy, densely foamy, and mildly bubbly ecru head, which leaves some decent spectral lace painted around the glass as it genially subsides.

It smells of toasted caramel malt, biscuity bread, muddled dried drupe fruit, soft earthy yeast, and weak weedy, leafy noble hops. The taste is rising dark bread dough, grainy caramel malt, a bit of roasted nuttiness, and a somewhat strange herbal, grassy, and weedy hoppiness.

The carbonation is quite adequate in its low-key swirling frothiness, the body a sturdy medium weight, and more or less smooth, with a slight burgeoning airy creaminess. It finishes a tad on the sweet side, the barely roasted malt still throwing its heft around, with no mind for the various lagging hangers-on.

An approachable and drinkable enough dunkel, the sweetness definitely large and in charge, but wielding its power in a judicious manner - the hops are at least given the opportunity to balance things out, at which they only partially succeed. Not a bad start to 24 days of what I have been led to believe were to be typical Euro-blandness offerings.