Mikkeller: Three Floyds: Risgoop (Denmark: Barley Wine: 10.4% ABV)
Visual: Tanned gold. Large off white loose bubbled head.
Nose: Resinous. Tangerine. Slight dry hoppiness. Quite clean. Dry spices.
Body: Slightly creamy. Moderate bitterness that rises. Clean and smooth. Cherry. Malt drink. Shortbread. Toffee. Pineapple. Dry apricot. Sticky rice. Lime. Slight toffee. Slightly musty up front.
Finish: Sake (Nihonshuu). Tangerine. Dry bitterness. White wine. Lime. Pineapple. Slightly tart. Champagne feel.
Conclusion: It is always hard to rule out some taste elements as being psychosomatic. I know this beer is made with rice syrup. Then I get a smoothness that is very sake like and I get elements like sticky rice. You can see why I would look twice and wonder if my mind is making stuff up.
Anyway, as mentioned it is a very clean textured beer, even with the slight creamy touch to the body. This smoothness gives an open field for the citrus flavours which is pushed forwards, very fresh pineapple and lime with a good bitterness rising up within. There is slight mustiness at times, but it goes out into a fresh champagne like finish.
Very rich, bright and fruity. The unusual ingredient gives a very different texture, you can see the alcohol within the beer but as a syrup booze feel rather than alcohol burn. Then the finish is very dry, giving a progression throughout the beer.
For a Barley (rice) wine the beer is not exceedingly sweet. The emphasis seems to be on the citrus hops, giving a very fresh and slightly tart set of notes. This does mean that there isn’t quiet as rounded and wide flavor as the “Boogoop” but is compensated for by the very different mouthfeel.
Overall very good. Not as big on complexity as it seems to lack balancing sweetness, but much cleaner and easier to drink. A very good tart hop delivery system.
Background: Ingredients “vand, malt, ris, sirup, humle og gær.” I mention this as when I left language as detect automatically on the translate tool it translated that first word as “Hiking”. A BEER MADE WITH HIKING! When I picked Danish it turned out to be much more normal “water” which was a bit of a let down.
Anyway, the fifth collaboration between Mikkeller and Three Floyds. This year they have two versions, one at each brewery. This being Mikkeller’s (or more technically De Proefbrouwerij as Mikkeller don’t own a Brewery). This year’s special ingredient is “rice syrup”. Well I think so, either that or google translate is lying to me. Again. I really enjoyed the prior collaboration “Boogoop” so was looking forwards to this. Also Mikkeller and Three Floyds are both easily in my top ten breweries of all time.
Drunk while listening to “Rolo Tomassi: Astraea. A nice mix of melodic and growl metal as hell. Apparently the genre type is Mathcore. There exists something called mathcore. How cool is that?
During doing the tasting notes my friend Will who I was sharing the beer with asked “are you getting banana from this?” To which I could but reply “Well I bloody am now.” I’m not sure if it was psychosomatic so I just left the additional note here.