Bottled. Deep brownish black colour with not too much head. Aroma is dark dry fruits, alcohol, some liquorice and mild notes of alcohol. Flavour is thick dark fruits, sour wood and mild vanilla.

Bottled 375ml (PBF, BB 06/2012)
Deep opaque black, small white head. Licorice, burned malts in the nose. Medium to full-bodied. Licorice, wood, hard candy, burned malts, soy sauce, sourness in the flavor. Soft palate, some milk lactose. Feels like barrel-aged beer :) Probably not intensionally.

4th March 2011
ACBF. Opaque black beer. Tiny tan head. Light palate, a little soft. Rich dark malt, complex. Coffee and unsweet chocolate. A little bubblegum. Soft finish with some lactose sweetness. Warming afterglow!

Tap at ACBF 2011. Pours black with a soft, tan head. Burnt cocoa nose, light sugars. Medium sweet flavor, some tar, sticky, peaty, mossy. Full bodied, thick, with lively carbonation. Warming finish, more peat, light sharpness to the malts, faint chocolate. Solid.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I got the bottle and how big it was and all of that fonefan kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece they knew how much effort I put into getting rare beers. Besides, I’m not going to tell you about my whole goddamn beerhunting history or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that I tasted in Munich around last Oktoberfest just before I got pretty partied-out and had to come here to dry out a bit.

My host, Jonas, picked up my notebook the next day after a big session and read my rating for Freigeist Caulfield out loud. “Would you care to hear what you had to say?”

“Not very much.”

He read it anyway. You can’t stop that guy when he wants to do something. He just does it.

“Imperial stouts are a type of beer in the stout family. The latter are part of the ale family, of top-fermenting beers.”

I had to sit there and listen to that crap. It certainly was a dirty trick.

“Imperial stouts are extremely interesting to us today for a variety of reasons. Modern brewers would still like to know what the secret ingredients were that the English brewers used when they sent the imperial stouts to Tsarist Saint Petersburg. This interesting riddle is still quite a challenge to modern brewing in the twenty-first century.”

He put the notebook down. I was beginning to sort of hate him. “Your rating, shall we say, ends there,” he said in this very sarcastic voice. You wouldn’t think a German guy would be so sarcastic at all. “However, you scribbled a little note at the bottom of the page.”

“That is all I know about Freigeist Caulfield. I can’t seem to get much aroma out of it besides rich dark fruits and dark sugars, and the plummy notes and sugar-fruitcake character are very interesting. It’s all right as an old ale, it flunks as an imperial stout, and I don’t get much rye out of it anyway.”

He put the goddamn notebook down and looked at me like he’d just beaten the hell out of me in ping-pong or something.

Bottle at a tasting. Huge thanks to Roman for this bottle. Black with a light brown head. Aroma of coffee, roasted malt, some wood notes, chocolate and acidic fruity notes. Sourish-sweetish flavor with berries, some chocolate and acidic coffee. Medium-full-bodied. Nice and interesting.

Pours viscous, and first almost headless, but a small dark-beige head slowly builds up afterwards from the dark cola-coloured beer. Very vinous nose, liquorice in quite a good measure, and som strange, syrupy sugar; touches of alcohol. Sourish mix with more liquorice and stoutlike burnt/roasted notes, masking the syrupiness beneath. Bit aggressive taste, and a MF that borders on astringency. Quite carbonated, some alcoholwarming. Sticky liquorice keeps hanging around, certainly warming up. I’m just not totally convinced...