May

Struise Black Damnation IV Beer Review

I have a camera full of pictures, and quite a few things to blog, but motivation has been hard in coming this spring. I don’t know if it has anything to do with the prolonged cool weather and never ending rain…. or just plain laziness. In the meantime, it’s been several months since my last beer review, so I thought a review might help get me jump started again.

I attended the Dark Lord Day beer festival in Munster, Indiana last weekend, and I’ve had beer on the brain ever since. As a result, I’m back on the beer tasting bandwagon after a brief hiatus. A couple of days ago I tried a brew that combines two of my favorites, beer and coffee.

Struise Black Damnation IV – Coffee Club
The commercial description: The Black Damnation series is a dark twist of Urban’s mind. His idea is to realize a dozen beers with the use of Black Albert, and over a period of two years, that are as black as hell, filthy rich in the nose and with a massive taste.

Black Damnation IV was made with Black Albert that aged for 6 months on very old rum barrels.

My take: This beer is one of my favorite styles, an imperial stout. As you can see, it’s a near black beer with a creamy tan head. You can’t see it in the picture, but the head laced nicely on the glass. For those of you who aren’t familiar with beer tasting jargon, lacing refers to a lacy pattern of foam that remains on the sides of the glass after the head has dissipated. At first sniff I was hit with coffee, coffee, coffee! I love coffee. I love coffee so much that I own a coffee roaster, burr grinder, and more than one type of coffee making paraphernalia. We’ll save my coffee addiction for another conversation. Going back to the beer, once my nose moved past the coffee aroma it was able pick out chocolate, sweet lactose (milk sugar), and an earth aroma. Yes, that would be dirt, but believe me…. it’s not a bad thing in beer. Upon tasting, again there was that coffee – rich dark roasted coffee. Balancing out the coffee flavor was dark roasted malt flavor, charcoal (probably related to that earth I got in the aroma), dark fruits (prune/raisin), and a lingering creamy sweetness (back to that sweet lactose in the aroma). As for the palate of the beer, it was full bodied and had a nice creamy mouth feel.

The bottle was a gift from my brother in law. I have no idea if I’ll ever run across this beer again or not, but if I do I will definitely drink it again.