October 2, 2008

Parallel Tasting: The Bruery Trade Winds Tripel

This is a Belgian-style tripel ale brewed with rice and Thai basil. Iiiiiinteresting. As always my partner in crime is Steve from Summer of Beer who incidentally happened to send me this exact bottle we are tasting on opposite coasts tonight.

We drank it last night so here are my mental notes of the most important details:

Its very much in the tripel style -- aromatic, floral notes in the nose and taste, golden in color (this is a very cloudy golden), sweetness. It was fairly well carbonated and less careful pours were greeted with heavy doses of foam.

The Bruery did something interesting, brewing it with rice and Thai basil. I definitely picked up the Thai basil taste, and it stayed the whole time. That was very interesting, more enjoyable at the start although a bit weird when you're drinking 750ml of it.

It had that classic Belgian yeast must or whatever you want to call it in the nose, which is always intoxicating. In general it just smelled terrific and tasted near-terrific as well. Not a world beater, but a fine and most interesting brew and done well. There's always the danger of making an unpalatable beer when being different but the Bruery succeeded here.

Update: Here's the transcript.

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