I must have picked this up at Finger Lake Beverage last February. Lovely new web site. $3.50 USD with as cheery a small bottle as ever there was. Well, to be fair, the 375 ml cork top from Girardin is pretty damn fine but this is swell as well.
Gorgeous. Dark mahogany beer under a tan cream thick lacing head. Subdued nose with an oddly enhanced twigged hop statement over roast but a weird inversion occurs on the first sip. Excellent coffee meets a hint of double cream with dark chocolate wave followed by a nicely balanced mild astringency cutting it all ending in a very pleasant herbal stuff. All this in one wee bottle. Lovely.
BAers have the hots. And, best of all, Roland + Russell have announced that they are bringing the brewer’s stock to me, here in Ontario. It is all working out, this thing called life…
[Original comments…]
Knut Albert Solem – November 11, 2009 2:12 AM
http://knutalbert.wordpress.com
You have lots of good beers to look forward to, they have a consistently high quality.
Bailey – November 12, 2009 1:55 PM
http://boakandbailey.com
I love Meantime’s beers.
The coffee porter divides opinion, I find. I’m a fan, but not everyone is. It does seem to change from year to year (strength goes up and down in strength, it gets darker, lighter, heavier, sweeter; at one point, they dropped ‘porter’ from the name altogether) and I always assume the haters had a bottle from a bad batch or recipe.
I’m not sure how well beers like their Helles will travel, though, it’s charm being largely down a fairly transient Saaz hop character which seems to disappear if the bottle is any more than a few weeks old.