A beer that I didn’t expect, this one, appearing in my Christmas order from Brewdog as a replacement for one of the beers that they’d run out of. It’s a brew that was put together during a visit to Brewdog HQ from Greg Koch, Steve Wagner and Mitch Steele of the Stone Brewing Company (see the post on the Stone blog for more details), and is described as a double black Belgian IPA.
Stone are a brewery that I’ve been looking to grab something from for a while. I might have had something from them back in the days before I obsessively recorded everything I drank (what some might call ‘The good old days’), but they’ve been on my list ever since I heard about their love of making interesting craft beers over in the US. In particular I have a hankering after the Ruination, a beer that I missed out on by not going to this month’s Draft House beer tasting (extreme american IPAs…), their 100+ IBU hop beast, guaranteed to shred the taste buds and reduce any following beers to pale shells of their regular flavours. I like hoppy beer…
The Bashah is a really dark beer, eventually giving up a reddy brown hue if you stick a bright enough light behind it. It’s got some bitter chocolate malt notes on the nose, as well as a hint of hoppy bitterness, and sits quite thickly in the glass and mouth.To taste it has dark chocolate, coffee, oats and a concentrated wine fruit punch on the end of a burnt finish, as well as a big slab of hop bitterness running through the lot. A nice chewy dark beer, with hoppy IPA and chocolate malty dark ale combining to make an interesting beer, and something a little different from the regular Brewdog stable.
Black Belgian Style Double IPA
8.6%. Maybe available from a few online retailers who have a bottle or two left, but probably not.
mmmm sounds delish – and similar to this (which is fairly epic on the mouth and thick in the glass as you say): Dogfish Head Palo Santo Marron -stone and dogfish serious players in the global kick ass bottled beer stakes…I am learning how to get the bottle beer happyness!
What’s the APV? Didn’t Brewdog get a bit of flack in the press for an overproof beer a while back?
I knew I’d missed something, ABV added to the post – 8.6%.
Brewdog did indeed get into some trouble for a few of their beers – first for the 18% Tokyo, then the 32% Tactical Nuclear Penguin (which I have bottle of waiting for a special occasion) and then the 41% Sink the Bismarck… Once the TNP is opened I suspect I’ll be forced to write something about it 🙂