A carnival of technology

Writing about beer (or wine) is a difficult task. Besides the concentration necessary to pin down just what you’re tasting, there’s a vocabulary involved to try to describe fermented wheats and grapes in terms of other foods, and that can get pretty confusing. That’s probably why I never bother to write anything down.

I bought three bottles of the Trader Joe’s 2006 Unibroue ale when it came out last autumn. I drank one then, did not write it down, and put the other two in my closet (I can’t do cool, but I can at least do dark) to maintain while the yeast does its thing. I chilled one of the bottles for a couple hours or so and am now drinking a glass from my Chimay goblet. I don’t really have the hang of the beer-tasting vocabulary, but here are some attempts at obversations of my now nearly year old beer:

• Smells hella flowery. But not that sharp kind of flowery you’d find while
  frolicing through Sound of Music meadows, but more a dark,
  wandering-through-the-forest sneaky kind of flowery, like honeysuckle and
  those little yellow things that grow on dead trees.
• Tastes sweet. Almost syrupy. Again makes me think of dark,
  smooth-tasting things. Let’s say apples and blueberries.
• Tastes boozy. This stuff was 9% ABV when bottled. I guess it’s probably
  more than that now. It still goes down easy as cherry wine, but there’s a
  little part of me that thinks as I process the taste, “huh, I guess that was
  alcohol.”

So, in conclusion, it tastes like sweet things, but not sharply so. There’s also that big yeast taste that Belgian-style ales have. The head is silky smooth and hanging on to the last. This is a mighty fine beer. I wonder how it’ll taste next year.