Beer of the Weekend #1,064: The Sixth Glass (2017)

With the roads covered by a fresh mix of slush and the two-year old without day care today, I was unable to peruse a local beer aisle. So tonight I am dipping into the small liquid archive I have in my fridge.

The beer tonight is the last from a custom sixer of Boulevard beers I received in 2017: The Sixth Glass, brewed by the Boulevard Brewing Company of Kansas City, Missouri.

The Sixth Glass

Serving type: 12-ounce bottle(!). (One does not see a lot of beer in bottles anymore.) The bottling date printed in a code on the shoulder is “061417,” and the best-by date printed just below is “14JUN2019.” This tasting could get interesting. Since it is a quad, I assumed I could age it. Maybe I aged it too long.

Appearance: Poured into my Schlitz chalice. The color is deep maple-syrup-like amber. About a finger of light amber head leaves a thin collar and blob of thick foam in the middle, a pattern I doubt I have seen before. There is a lot of floating sedimentation.

Smell: Really complex. Cherry, chocolate, caramel, plum, maybe a touch of raisin, a little brown sugar, light citrus, and alcohol.

Taste: Smooth and tasty with a boozy edge. It is very sweet. Lots of dark fruit with cherry and plum at the forefront. Caramel and chocolate are there as well. It has a nice boozy touch. It has a little spice and a touch of orange as well.

Fun facts about The Sixth Glass:

• Style: Quad.

• Alcohol content: 10.2 percent ABV.

• IBU: 22.

• Color: 73.2 EBC. As noted in a review of a beer from the same custom sixer, Boulevard is the only American brewery I have seen use EBC, which is used in Europe.

• Here is the description via the brewery website:


”Do you know what dwells in a glass?” asks Ole, in Hans Christian Andersen's The Watchman of the Tower. Better known for stories such as The Little Mermaid, Andersen wrote this short, cautionary tale for a somewhat older audience. Our quadrupel ale, also meant for the mature connoisseur, is a deep and mysterious libation, dark auburn and full-bodied, its sweetness deceptive. As Ole describes the glasses in turn, their contents become more ominous until, in the sixth glass…

Note the double closing quotation marks.

• I’m glad this bottle panned out. I was nervous about it being too old. I held the unopened bottle to a light and saw flecks of disturbed sediment floating around. I gritted my teeth and thought, “That’s not good.” Sediment is not super bad, but it made me uneasy given the bottle’s age.


The Quiet Man’s grade: A.

Comments

Popular Posts