Samichlaus

Origin: Austria | Date: 2008 | ABV: 14% | On The Beer Nut: August 2006

Ho Ho Ho! It's Samichlaus Day, the feast of St Nicholas, the day when Schloss Eggenberg brews its annual strong Christmas beer, before ageing it for ten months. The recipe was inherited from Hürlimann in Zürich, now nothing more than Carlsberg's outpost in Switzerland. Eggenberg is pretty good at strong lagers and has preserved the basic specs of Samichlaus as a 14% ABV doppelbock. My bottle is badged as being bottled in 2008 and the brewery set June 2014 as the expiry date.

It's as dark a red as you'd expect a doppelbock to be. There's a distinctly festive aroma, all cookies and spiced fruitcake. And booze. Lots of booze. I was expecting a blast of heat on the first sip but it didn't arrive. It's surprisingly clean, though definitely thick, packed full of treacle and chocolate sauce: powerfully sweet with a slightly metallic tang and almost chewably heavy. A dry wheaty cereal element finishes it off and there's a classy tawny port vinousness too.

It shouldn't work, but it does. It doesn't get cloying, it doesn't linger too long on the palate and it doesn't congeal in the stomach the way some strong sweet beers do. Most amazing, though, is that there are no age related off flavours. Having peeled off a cap that looks like it's been through a war, I expected at least a bit of oxidation, but there's none whatsoever. I guess the people at Eggenberg are as good at packaging as they are at brewing strong beer.

I last drank this too long ago to be able to tell you if it has improved with age, but it's grand now and I suspect will continue to be grand for many Christmases to come.

Porterhouse Celebration Stout

Origin: Ireland | Date: 2010 | ABV: 7% | On The Beer Nut: April 2010

This won't be the last time Porterhouse Celebration Stout appears on this blog: I have a few of them. It often shows up on multibuy offers, which lends it to drinking a few immediately and putting a spare bottle or two away. There's also a barrel-aged version and I think I still have a bottle of the original 2006 10th anniversary version around somewhere. But this is an early iteration of the recipe that made it into the core range, bearing the green livery of the Porterhouse's first ringpull caps. The best before is 12th April 2011 so I'm reasonably confident it's from the first run.

I get a distinct waft of savoury umami in with the coffee on the aroma: a dash of soy sauce in your espresso. It tastes very strange and I think oxidation is the culprit. But before that there's a warm and mellow coffee sweetness, much more than I recall in the fresh version, and then that autolytic soy sauce thing which is definitely more character than character flaw, leaning as it does towards cherry liqueur chocolates. It's the finish where it gets weird: a hard, acidic edge which could just be big hops shorn of their lighter nuances, but with a dusty parchment dryness that leads me to theorise that oxygen was at work. My suspicion that those caps just aren't as suitable for long-term storage as crown corks adds to the hypothesis.

A strange drinking experience and by no means a wholly unpleasant one, but I think you may be seeing more Porterhouse beers on here sooner rather than later.

Orval

Origin: Belgium | Date: 2011 | ABV: 6.2% | On The Beer Nut: October 2007

I used to have a job that paid in Orval. I accumulated a couple of cases and I haven't even finished the first one yet. So I thought it might be interesting to throw a bottle from that stash-within-the-stash into the mix every now and then. 2nd September 2011 is the bottling date, with a best-before five years later, so this is still inside the timeframe envisaged by the brewers for the beer to be as they intended.

It's lost none of its gushing power in the years I've had it: lots of foam generated the mess lacing on the inside of my glass. It's brighter than I was expecting, the yeast mostly stuck fast to the bottom of the bottle.

No horses on the nose, that's for sure. It smells sweeter, all sultanas and similar dried fruit, with a pronounced pithy zest. There's still quite a fresh bitterness in the flavour, the orangey Styrian Goldings still making their presence felt. And I get some hot higher alcohols too: some marker pens and nail varnish remover. Thankfully it finishes abruptly and cleanly so this isn't as much of a flaw as might be imagined.

The overall vibe is warming and cuddly; a slice of fruitcake and a hot cup of tea. Based on recent experiences of drinking vintage Belgian beers brewed with brettanomyces, I expect this one will dry out and get funkier in time. But for now, it's doing a great job.

Thomas Hardy's Ale

Introduction

A floor was installed in my attic in 2008. I've used it to store beer ever since. It's particularly handy in winter when everything inside is kept at perfect drinking temperature. And right from the early days I began hoarding odd bottles, ones I'd already reviewed on my main blog and I thought it might be fun to leave them aside to see how they age, or to drink on a special occasion. The problem is, in seven years, the special occasion never arises. I'm the luckiest fucker alive: every day is a cause for jubilation, and it never seems to occur that I should probably mark this with a celebratory vintage beer.

But no more. The stash is getting out of hand, I'm no closer to actually drinking any of it, and I've begun to worry about fires, earthquakes, sudden death, or any number of other inconveniences that might prevent me from getting to those bottles. So today begins the project to do just that. I reckon a blog is the way to encourage me to keep it going. It won't be as regular as The Beer Nut, it won't cover beers I haven't already written about there, and it's not as open-ended: there is only a finite amount of liquid up there, after all. But I'm looking forward to getting stuck in, and especially to the first beer that's sitting in front of me now, awaiting the attention of the bottle opener.



Origin: England | Date: 2003 | ABV: 11.7% | On The Beer Nut: November 2009

I got a waft of umami on opening the cap, a hit of soy sauce that made me reconsider this whole project from the outset. The inside of the cap was wet with beer, though the bottle has been sitting upright for about six years, so I'm not sure how that happened. It came out completely flat, a clear dark russet colour. At this stage I still wasn't convinced the beer would be any good. One sip put that to bed: it's fantastic.

Smoothness is the main feature and biggest selling point: there's a slight trace of sparkle, but mostly a big and silky liqueurish roundness. It spreads decorously across the palate then slinks casually down the throat. I get plump raisins in the foretaste in convincing imitation of Pedro Ximinez sherry. There are sweet cherries and dark cocoa, and the finish offers a mild rasp of bitterer liquorice. Funny how all of these are things that other brewers add in to beers in search of the same effect, but really there are no shortcuts when doing it properly.

A triumph of a beer, and an auspicious start to my project. Cheers!