05/04/2019 - draught taster @Barboteur. Black colour, medium creamy light tanned head. Nose is very fruity, chocolate, roasted. Taste is roasted, dark fruits, bitter hops, nice balance between the two, nice fruity ending.Very nice first acquaintance with Slovenia.

Black IPA by arguably the most renowned representative of Slovenia’s brand new craft beer movement, thanks to Davor. Thick and frothy, papery lacing, yellowish pale beige, stable head over black beer with hazy mahogany hue at its edges. Classic BIPA aroma: pine resin, yellow grapefruit peel, salmiak, dried wormwood, toasted walnuts, burnt toast crust, black olive, cedar wood oil, dry earth somewhere. Subduedly fruity, clean onset, low in sweetness with some dried porcini-like umami, spritzy carb, smoothly oily body; well-developed toasted nutty maltiness, very roasty but with a smooth black-chocolatey edge, building up to a long, resinous bitter finish, quinine-like and peppery, drying and completely taking over from the roasted bitterness in the end, releasing retronasal piney and grapefruity aromas, rooty and quenching. Piney, clean, persistently bitter ‘old school’ Cascadian dark ale, a textbook example of its style, extremely well-balanced with the – for this style sometimes hard to achieve – perfect proportions of roasted black malt bitterness and resinous, aromatic hop bitterness. Absolutely loved this one, it’s been a long time since I had a black IPA this exemplary, more of these should be produced in these NEIPA-dominated times. Its position in the top-50 of black IPA on this site is completely justified.