This beer is different. Lots of the beers in the tourney are flavored, but mostly with coffee, chocolate, oatmeal, or some combination of those three items. Black is very much not like the others – it’s delightfully Belgian, and the spices and aroma hops punch you in the nose with that Belgian smell and don’t let you forget it as you’re drinking it. It is on the light side color-wise for the beers in this tourney, but not much more than any of the others. It does have a very stingy mouthfeel; there’s carbonation a-plenty, which actually does detract from my enjoyment of it a tiny bit. Clocking in at “just” 7.5% ABV, this is one of the less potent potables in the brackets, but it still packs a punch if you try to down a bottle. After having a few sips I’m getting just a hint of coffee, but mostly it’s just the malt with the taste of the traditional Belgian sugars. I’m a huge fan of Belgian beers and that style in general, so it’s possible that’s the reason I’m much higher on this one than the gents over at BeerAdvocate, who ranked this one 14 out of 16 for the tourney), but I still think they are just plain missing something. This is an absolutely lovely beer, and I would easily put it in my top five, possibly top three, of those here assembled. FBS and Ten FIDY are firmly planted in the top two spots, though I don’t know the order.
Allagash is a terrific brewery up in Portland, ME. It has a pretty large variety of beers, but there’s a good chance you’ve only ever seen or tasted Allagash White, their flagship beer. Most of their stuff can only be found in 750 Ml bottles, such as Black:
Much thanks to Rob Tod, owner and founder of Allagash, for the nice shot of the bottle of Black.
They have a pretty wide variety, but you’ll find a Belgian influence on them all, which suits me just fine. If you want a beer that’ll absolutely blow your mind, I suggest picking up a bottle of Confluence, a “wild ale.” I love it, and it’s the first beer I ever had where I took a nice sniff of the nose and came back with the distinct impression of a smell of bananas… and it didn’t ruin the taste. I’ve had the good fortune to knock back a few fine Allagash brews with Rob Tod at some events in the DC area, and I have to say it’s a real pleasure to chat with a man that just plain lives beer and loves sharing it with others. My sweeping stereotype of people in the beer industry, particularly at craft breweries, is that they are all nice, very cool people. Rob absolutely enforced that stereotype. The only other head brewer from any of the tournament beers I’ve met is Mark Ruedrich from North Coast, and he was pretty cool too. When I do my tour of US breweries, and I sure plan to do it before the wife and I have any little ones tying us down, it will include a stop in Portland, Maine. It’ll probably also include a stop in Portland, Oregon as well, but that’s for entirely unrelated reasons.
As for predictions… hmmm… this one is tough for me. The key here is that this beer is really, truly, damn unique among the beers in this tourney. I’ll be able to pick it out without even taking a sip. I think this is easily a top-four beer. That being said, I don’t think it’ll make it to the final four because it needs to knock off Founders Breakfast Stout to do it, at least as the seeds stand, and my gut says the panel won’t vote that way. They could – they absolutely could. We’ll see. This is why they don’t play the games on paper, as they say. This beer absolutely has what it takes to go all the way.
Best of luck to Allagash Black on Saturday. Who knows? They could pull off the upset and win the whole damn thing. It could happen.
Duff Out.
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