Green Flash Cellar 3 Series - "Silva Stout"

Seems Green Flash sought advise from Port Brewing / Lost Abbey.

Doing nothing seems to have worked just fine for them. And for countless years to boot! Must be something in the water in the greater San Diego area...

 

Apologies in advance for this being a large post, but I hope it might help anyone wondering about their bottle.

Kept my palate as clear as possible today and just ate Cheerios...which means that by the end of this bottle I will be feeling great! Poured half the bottle into a tulip and the other half into a snifter so I could get different amounts of head, which should change the smell portion of tasting the beer. Strong butter on the nose. A little off-putting, but this is no Kronenbourg 1664 skunk vomitus smell. The first taste is buttery up front. Not my favorite, but not nothing that would stop me from taking another sip. Just kind of 'off.' The butter gives way to bourbon/spice/alcohol and then dark malt and slight bitterness. The problem for me here is that a moment after you finish the sip, the dark malt dissipates and the buttery flavor partially reemerges with an almost oily and cloying mouth-feel. There is nothing 'thin' about this stout. As it warms closer to 65-70 degrees the butter smell is still there and is joined by brown sugar, but is significantly less noticeable in the taste. (in my experience making mead, brown sugar notes are usually a sign that it was aged with too much head room for oxygen. I don't know if this is true with beer too.) Starting to get a strong dark stone fruit (probably the cherry the bottle lists) and lose some of the dark malt, but pick up some chocolate. I don't get any vanilla or coffee at all, either in the nose or taste.

This is just one more opinion to throw on the fire for all those with a bottle of Cellar 3 Silva, but I didn't find mine to be the 'butter bomb' so many have complained about. Was there something that I found to be 'off' about it? Yes. Does it mean that the beer (my bottle anyway) was not supposed to taste like this? No. Am I disappointed based on all the hype about the original batch? Yes, but it's certainly not a drain pour. Mine is a decent stout, but not anything I would seek out.

I want to take a moment to compare this to Clown Shoes Crasher in the Rye. To me, Crasher had a butterscotch, smooth, sweet bourbon start but had a strong dark chocolate/bakers chocolate finish that stayed with you. For me, it was a great balance, and I enjoyed that sweet start because it was part of a more complex flavor profile. As a note, I don't like stouts with descriptions that include the words 'anise' 'licorice' 'dark fruit' and stick more to ones with descriptions of vanilla, coffee, and chocolate. As a reference, one year aged Pt5 and Stone RIS are my two favorite non-BA stouts.

 

Just one more note. I'm having the last 8 or so ounces with cooked meat/cheese/veggies and I have to say I like it better with food.

 

I volunteered my other bottle and I am awaiting a label. If it can help them get to the cause of the problem, I'm all for it. I actually hope it is infected. If not, I'll be mad I spent $18 for a beer that I gave back and didn't get to try! Pat, a brewer and the barrel master, has been very diligently trying to find out the source

 

Thanks for being so methodical and for offering such a detailed review, @Kain05. Appreciate the points of comparisons, too. We all have benefitted from your insights, and that's what being a BA is all about.

 

I just opened up a bottle and I cant even finish 4 oz ... still got another 18 to go.

Crasher in the Rye quite easily destroys this..

 

My bottle was a drain pour (although I admittedly choked some of it down and shared with my roommate). I am not a diacetyl expert but it was a little buttery with a bitter, chemical-tasting finish that was unappealing. Very disappointing.

 

Unfortunately in the same boat with the drain pour... it was like trying to drink roasty chocolate butter....

 

Damn, I wish I had seen this thread before I wasted my cash. I've had this on my Wants list since 2010 and I finally get to obtain a bottle (for a mere $20) and ...it's a drain pour.

I'm not even sure how to really explain how mine tasted. I didn't think it tasted like butter. It tasted more like rotten cherry and pomegranate juice that had been aged in bourbon barrels. Or maybe it was like a fake cherry juice more than rotten. Like cherry flavored plastic. It smelled horrendous too. After I drain poured it my wife went in the kitchen and was remarking on how badly the sink smelled. Like rotten plastic fruit. (Can plastic fruit rot? You get the idea.). Definitely not intended flavors, especially since there was really no roasted malt flavor in it at all. MAYBE a hint of chocolate.

Not good, and such a huge letdown from such a normally good brewery. I can't believe they let this one hit the shelves, no QA over there at GF?

Dope

 

I've reached out to the brewery and received a reply back from Mike Hinkley (a few days ago) after opening one of my three bottles which was noticeably off. His response was that they "opened more than 100 and found one that was very high in diacetyl. We sent a bunch more to the lab for analysis.". They appear to be looking further into the matter. Am waiting for another update and am hoping for some insight into what GF recommends for those of us who had a bad C3 and are sitting on multiples.

 

For me, the flavors were all jumbled together and it was overwhelming. Curious to see what happens after a year or two in the cellar. Though it is expensive to just be able to sit on extra bottles as an experiment.

 

I'd say I'm a pretty big fan of the base beer considering that I've had more Green Flash Double Stout than any other stout. The base beer doesn't have any butter notes and I've never heard of butter flavor being intentionally imparted into a beer through barrel aging. I was excited to finally try the barrel aged version but only managed to get through the initial pour before more than half the bottle found it's way down the drain of the sink. My bottle of Cellar 3 Silva Stout was definitely a butter bomb that is not the intended product.

 

No off flavors whatsoever in the bottle I bought and consumed in NJ maybe 4-5 weeks ago. Good, not great, BA stout.

I was a little skeptical about the reports here but they have kept on mounting and some have come in from some real vets with learned and reliable palates. Now the brewery reports finding a bottle with very high diacetyl levels. Sounds like GF has a major issue here.

 

Saw it, almost pulled the trigger but 18,99$ was a bit rich at the moment.

 

My bottle tasted far more buttery than any beer I've ever had before. I wanted to try and figure out how to coat popcorn in it. It wasn't awful but some of the bottle did go down the drain.

 

Exactly what I was thinking. Just going to put mine in the back, and forget about it for a few years. Can't get worse, can it?

 

Had a bottle last night and it was awful. I struggled to get through a third of the bottle.

Edit: the comments about buttery/diacetyl flavours are spot on.

 

Definitely a good call. I wish I had done that with the one I bought but luckily a buddy picked one up so we'll be sitting on that one for awhile.

 

Wow, surprised by all this, I have had two bottles of it and they were just fine. Maybe I should not hang on to the last one?

 

This was stunningly good...