Sourire De Mortagne with honey and smoked figs – the seventh Fellowship ale promises to be the liquid equivalent of Beorn’s honey cake, but with a special twist… The last one I tasted in the series, this honey beer was eager to get out of the bottle, but with a glass positioned nearby, it should be possible to catch its escaping foam – resulting in a towering high, creamy, yellowish beige, very frothy and densely lacing head resting on top of a misty, beautiful copper-coloured beer with reddish bronze tinge, the haze perturbed by fierce sparkling throughout, clearly the honey added extra fermentative enthusiasm here… The aroma is complex and downright divine: raisin bread, lots and lots of actual fig, a smoky note (from aforementioned figs, which were smoked before being applied) reminiscent of smoking pipe tobacco and growing a bit stronger as the beer warms up, red apple, pecan nut pie, artisanal brown honey, madeira, blackberries, ripe nectarine, stewed plum, brown sugar melting on a hot pancake, red wine, minerals, tea bags, dry tree leaves, sugared rhubarb stew. Lots of lovely fig-like sweetness in the onset, plum, nectarine and sweet ripe apple aspects with a sourish, blackberry-like edge which in the end will become quite tangy but still very refreshing; lively carbonation accentuates the sour side a bit, before plunging into a thick, soft, fluffy bed of raisinbread- and caramel-like malt sweetness, gently dried by the sour effect. The figs continue to guide the palate and their smokiness becomes quite apparent retronasally, with a meaty and tobacco-like colour to it that stirs up memories of earlier Alvinne experiments with smoked pineapple and smoked peach. Sweet-sour, very rich and satisfying finish, honey aroma but sweetness as well, balanced by a dash of earthy hop bitterness and concluded by a soothing afterglow of rum-like alcohol. Wow, this is something else – a “sour quadrupel” so to speak, but only gently sour and in that sense perfectly embodying the idea of a nutritious and healing, luscious honey cake baked by the Beornings. Goes down treacherously easy while never losing its complexity, the aroma changing colours all the time as temperatures vary – this is a stroke of genius.