Liquid Desserts 07 - Raspberry White Choc Cheesecake Quad
Big Belly Brewing in Breda, Noord-Brabant, Netherlands 🇳🇱
Belgian Style - Quadrupel / Dark Strong Regular|
Score
6.69
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Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 8 | Texture - 8 | Overall - 7.5
5th January 2020
Almost clear dark amber brown beer, tiny pale tan head. Smooth light palate, mildly soft, reasonable fine carbonation. Soft creamy malts. A decent raspberry vibe here, bright but with some pippy bitterness. Mild vanilla. Floral raspberry. Cheesecake? Maybe a little tangy vanilla. Finishes smooth with a little tingling spice. Most entertaining.
Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 6
Dark browncolour with lasting head. Quite gassy. Raspberries and vanilla. Sharp, fruity and sweet.
Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 6 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 5
Bottle. Deep dark brown color. Raspberry jam, caramel and chocolate in the aroma. Thin, acoholic flavor with raspberry jam. Caramel. Seems artificial.
Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 8 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 6.5
Apparently the seventh in a still ongoing series of complicated flavour combinations from one of the somewhat lesser known craft brewers in the city of Breda. Thick and frothy but slowly dissipating, slightly lacing, pale yellow-ecru, mousy, somewhat irregular head on an initially clear, deep and dark bronze-brown beer with purplish-ruby glow, turning only lightly misty in the end. Interesting and indeed quite 'multilateral', but somewhat artificial aroma: caramel sauce, white chocolate mousse, raspberry juice and even a whiff of actual tart raspberries in the background, Parmigiano cheese, strong solventy effect of shoe polish and fresh paint, Eastern European sweet plum candy, cheap whisky, candied figs, touch of moist toast, elderberry (cough) syrup, liquorish, brown bread crust. Sweet onset, lots of dark candi sugar sweetness, candied figs, prunes, dried blueberries, touch baked banana - but in all rather clean and 'dead' instead of fruitiness the estery way (which is what I tend to expect from a quadrupel), fizzy carbonation but refined and typical for the style, sourish undertone from the raspberry element (but in a non-natural and dull kind of way). Rounded, slick body, bit resinous, sweet-caramelly in its core with a slight toasty-bitterish edge, the sweetness however dominates with indeed white chocolate and cream cheese hints returning retronasally - neither of which are a match for a strong liquorish aroma, that comes to dominate the finish alongside a sour-and-sweet, again somewhat artificial raspberry flavour and pronounced solventy aspects. Warming, bourbon-like, somewhat wry alcohol whipes most of these flavours away in the very end, though the sweetness of artificial raspberry and caramel remain; hoppiness remains limited to a very vague and short-lived herbal bitterishness, but a toasty malt bitterness has a bit more power. Actually more raspberry-forward (with a superficial kind of tartness linked to it) than I was expecting, but there is no denying that the promised white chocolate and cheesecake impressions are there, if provided by artificial additives and hardly feeling natural at all - which corresponds roughly with what I was expecting. Feels very 'fabricated', with a bunch of flavours hastily thrown together in a clean, streamlined, overly sweet (sugary) and liquorish-dominated 'Dutch style' quad, with way too strong solvent effects (still very noticeable in spite of all those added flavours) and a tad too boozy in the finish. More or less corresponds with my expectations as a kind of 'liquid praline' so at least I do not feel cheated (and I am not being sarcastic here); I would even encourage brewers to experiment more with the old quadrupel style, who knows what great things may come out of that other than the (sometimes fantastic) barrel aged variants we already know and love... Kind of a 'pastry quad' if you will, and I have a feeling it will not be the last one. In all: enjoyable and original enough to keep one's attention, but a bit weird and artificial as well.
Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 6 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 6.5
THT December. Kwartje. Bottle. Dark. Sweet fruity, berries. Moderate sweet and bitter. Medium body and soft carbonation. --- Beer merged from original tick of Liquid Desserts 07 - Raspberry White Choc Cheesecake Quad on 14 Dec 2019 at 02:52 - Score: 6. Original review text: THT December. Dark. Sweet fruity, berries. Moderate sweet and bitter. Medium body and soft carbonation.
Appearance - 7 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 6.5 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 7
Sampled at THT December. Dark brown with beige head. Massive sweet and sour berries, cheesecake, sweet malts, sweet jammy berries, fake berry aroma, bitter herbs, alcohol. Medium sweet and over medium bitter. Medium bitter.