Finisterra Imperial Porter

Strong porter from Portugal's leading craft brewery, its name meaning the end of the world in reference to Portugal being the furthest known country in the west to ancient Rome. It was also the last country in the west of Europe to join the craft beer movement, coming to the foreground with internationally relevant beers at a time when its neighbour Spain was already teeming with craft beers. This 'imperial' porter produces a very frothy and thick, meringue-like, pale mocha beige, very dense and regular, stable head on a black beer with ruby red glow - only visible for about one millimetre off the edge and under bright light. Rather distinctive, desserty, somewhat ethereal but nevertheless beguiling and complex aroma of toffee, kahlua, Belgian chocolates, cinnamon, cough sweets, cola, caramel sauce, ripe blue plums including their sourish aspect, mocha ice cream and cappuccino, fig compote, incense, candied dates, liquorish candy, Parfait Amour liqueur, nougat, black cherries, tea. Fruity onset, lively carbonated (a tad too much for style, perhaps, in being a bit distracting), fizzing on the tongue's surface, accentuating the basic sourishness that runs through the whole; still considerable residual sweetness as well though, with impressions reminiscent of candied date, raisin and black cherry, even ripe blackberry; smooth, very rounded, almost glueish, oily and full mouthfeel, rather syrupy, with a deeply toffeeish and toasted-nutty malt character, sweet in its core but bitter at its edges, mouth-filling, with a (bitter) chocolatey touch to it. This thick maltiness spreads out thickly over the tongue, with a more and more coffee-coloured roasted bitterness to it in the end, yet in all, remaining primarily sweet-nutty and toffeeish. Herbal and mildly spicy, late but quite pungent hop bitter dash in the final stage, with some calvados-like warming alcohol tying everything together. Syrupy, toffeeish malt bittersweetness pleasantly lingers for a long time, without any cloying effects. With porters having been interpreted as 'sub-stouts' for the past forty-odd years and (imperial) stouts generally having become more and more sweet in the past ten-odd years, terms like 'imperial stout' and 'imperial porter' seem to have become all but interchangeable, although I do maintain that the porter side should be sweeter and the stout side more roasted bitter; this one holds the exact middle, so if you would have sold me this beer as an imperial stout, I probably would have bought it, but as an imperial porter it qualifies equally fine. Regardless, this is by far the best beer to come out of Portugal that has reached me so far: not only does it show all the basic features of the porter-stout conglomerate in a very correct and focused way, it also has certain idiosyncratic phenolic flavours (almost reminiscent of eucalyptus, cloves and liquorish) that give it personality and character. Much better than expected, really, Dois Corvos should really continue to take the lead in the still modest Portuguese craft beer movement, like Nomada and later Napar have done with much swagger in Spain. Excellent sipper, this one!