Most convincing American Quad

Keg it and tap it fresh. I've had a few kegged "quads" from breweries that don't bottle, and they hardly resemble a quad that's been bottle conditioning for at least a few months.

 

You know, I don't know if I'd dig a Quad without that dark fruity goodness. See Westvleteren 12 and St Bernardus Abt 12.
But who knows.

 

Maybe the term Quad just doesn't have the marketing juju to warrant it.

Quad isn't really a style, so much as it is a category that Americans came up with and assigned to a group of Belgian beers after the fact. The only one calling their beer a Quad was LaTrappe; and oddly enough it's stylistically different from the rest.

The question then becomes: what's the difference between a Quad and a BSDA? A: what's on the label.

 

You are probably right TongaRad. Me personally, I generally associated quads as sweeter in dark fruit flavors, where the Strong Darks lean more towards the brown malt flavors of caramel/chocolate etc. I'm sure that's over-generalizing and the lines blur quite a bit as you mentioned. Many beer styles blur and overlap somewhat though.

 

I'm with you.. I like this beer as well..

 

Another vote for Sixth Glass here. Great molasses and fig notes. No overpowering alcohol taste like I sometimes find in higher ABV beers.

 

I like Central Waters BA Quad, though some may feel this strays too far from the Belgian Quads.

 

See, that's what I think is funny about threads like this. As long as I have access to a good number of solid Belgian quads, and DC being a good beer town, I do, I'm perfectly fine with this just being another thing that our country just doesn't do as well. I mean, Belgians have been making beer a lot longer than we have, and we can't seem to stop ourselves from adding more hops, fruit, wood, doughnuts, whatever, to every country's beer style we mimic, so maybe some things are best left to the masters.

(Not picking on you, Diskord, just using your quote to illustrate my point.)

 

Unibroue Trois Pistoles and or La Terrible? Those are my favorite North American strong darks.

 

for BSDA's i'll go with Allagash Odyssey and AleSmith Grand Cru.

Midnight Sun The Viking was the only domestic to make my top 10 overall.

 

It's not as useful to play the freshness card with this type of beer, too.

 

The quest to age the homebrewed strong Belgians haunts me every time. Tasting them along the way, and the last bottle at about a year old is the best of the batch. Currently have a 1 1/2 year old quad, one bottle...

 

Ommegang has always been owned by Belgians....Duvel was an original partner.

 

As Bill Clinton was known to say: I feel your pain.

With my last homebrewed batch I had plans for that to last me 5 years but I failed there. I have my fingers crossed that I will reach 5 years with my 2017 batch but I am not putting any betting money down on it.

Cheers!

 

Just for fun, it's worth mentioning that Duvel Moortgat was a partial owner of Brewery Ommegang since the beginning and we first brewed The Sixth Glass back in 2007. Our brewmaster, Steven Pauwels, is Flemish and brought our house Belgian yeast strain over with him.

 

I agree that both of these are much better when aged.

Ichor just seems to develop better flavor and mouthfeel after a year or so.

As for Weyerbacher's, that beer is usually way too boozy when fresh. A few months ago I posted a review of a 6 year old bottle in the Cellaring sub-forum. It was still tasty even past the brewery's 5 year best by date.

 

@JeremyDanner thanks for the correction. I was incorrect in my wording.

I'd also like to amend my previous statement, by saying that Boulevard Bourbon Quad is perhaps the best American quad I have had and gets my vote as the closest to Belgian.

 

Dude, personal preference is what it is, personal. I'm never ever offended when folks don't care for one of our beers. I just wanted to toss out some information. All is well, man.

 

To add to @TongoRad 's point, I don't think this is a case of blurred style lines and overlap though. That would only be the case if there were two styles to blur. If you were to look at brewers that date back to at least the 20th century, and compare all beers from Belgium that were labeled quadrupel on the bottle, with all beers from Belgium labeled "strong dark ale" on the bottle... I wonder how many beers you'd actually be comparing and contrasting.