Brewdog: Alice Porter (Export version) (Scotland: Porter: 4.6%)
Visual: Black with dark brown edges. Inch of creamy brown froth that leaves sud rings.
Nose: Coffee. Sour dough and cream cheese. Crushed nuts. Light strawberry. Cut grass. Cloying. Vanilla.
Body: Vanilla. Chocolate. Somewhat thin but oily character. Roasted bitterness. Chalk touch. Cardboard.
Finish: Oily. Light bitterness. Nuts. Chalk. Milky coffee. Roasted. Vanilla toffee. Light strawberry. Chocolate. Cardboard.
Conclusion: While high abv bombs are awesome, the beers that get you through a session are the more gentle and restrained ones, in alcohol content at least. Therefore I was interested in trying the lower abv export version of Alice Porter. If they can pull off the character of full strength Alice Porter but at lower abv we could be looking at one special beer.
Aroma wise this is very promising. Thick and robust, full of porter like notes such as coffee and sour dough and full of that sweet vanilla full strength Alice Porter has in spades. Everything you could ever want, an effortless recreation at a manageable abv.
The body is, well, less than robust, I guess it had to give somewhere, and here it is. It has calls to the good stuff – some chocolate, some vanilla, but a lot of the energy has gone, leaving an empty cardboard touched air in the gaps. Considering what Mikkeller has managed to do with a 0.3% dark beer, this display is disappointing.
The finish recovers a little bit with a nice oily character and with some bitterness but it still feels lesser. In fact the beer feels a lot less robust that a lot of lower abv porters that have been put out there. It feels more like a good beer that has been cut down to a worse state, than a beer polished to match the malt load it was given.
If you can get proper strength Alice Porter go for it, if you only have access to this, go for a different beer.
Background: Wasn’t sure if I was going to do notes on this one as I had already done Alice Porter before. This is a lower abv export version, I presume to get it into places that don’t allow higher abv beers into main stores. In the end I decided to give it a run, I thought the difference the abv can make would make an interesting compression. As always I am not an unbiased actor on Brewdog beers. Drunk while listening to the awesome Svalbard – check them out.
