Taster at City Works, in Disney Springs. Pours a murky, brown color, with a small, beige head. The aroma is orange juice, grassy rum, cloves, rotten apple, and rye. Sweet and malty and yeasty, with a fairly mild, earthy bitterness. Medium body, sharp, and slick. Interesting and tasty enough.

12oz can from Total Wine & More, St Petersburg. Pours chocolate brown, muddy with a tiny uneven layer of tan/khaki head. Big toffee, molasses, carob on the aroma. Taste is dessert-sweet with a touch of umami and lot of big flavours: vanilla, sarsaparilla, raisin bread. Some bitterness in the short to medium finish. Soupy body, low carbonation. Delicious, if a bit odd.

On tap as part of a flight at Crafty Chameleon Bar. It’s a gorgeous clear, dark maple-syrup brown with no sparkle, finger-width off-white foamy head with good retention and soapy lacing. Aroma is moderately strong spice, caramel and dark fruit. Taste is strong dark fruit, fig, caramel, spice. Mouthfeel is medium bodied with smooth texture, soft carbonation and finish as taste. Overall, good all around.

Crowler: Poured a deep burgundy brown with a beige colored head. Aroma is dark fruit, caramel, figgy, spice, yeast, esters, malty. Taste is sugary, dark fruits, malty, spicy, yeasty, esters, boosty.

Pour is a dark brown with a very small tan head. Aroma is treacle, dark fruit and molasses malt. Flavor is dark fruit and musty basement malt. Finish is a little sweet with dark candi sugar leaving a layer on the tongue. I have seen this beer on 100 beers to try before you die lists and I may not go that far but this is a wonderful quad, maybe not up to par with Westy 12 or St. Bernardus 12, a bit thin in the mouth is the only knock, but this was plenty flavorful.

So it came up in a reddit thread the other day about quads and such and I realized it had been many years since I've had one, that I had effectively stopped drinking belgians altogether. Not only had I gotten tired of the really high grav beers (as noted in my prev review of an impy stout from this brewery) but I had also tired of the esters and phenols found with belgian yeasts - and so I've really been drinking very clean fermentation profiles for a few years now, with the occasional sour or brett beer thrown in for fun, because I still like those, for sure. But anyway, here goes on a quad. I had almost went to get something familiar, just to revisit something I knew I had liked, but I'm a sucker for new ratings too. This one poured a dark brown, not opaque. Only haze once it got to the yeasty bottom. Small thin but last tan head. Nose is quiet, a little caramel. Maybe a hint of phenol, I can almost taste a hint of bubble gum. Flavor is nicely complex, as others noted, there are some sweet caramels, some nuttiness, some dark fruits, but also the phenols are there in the background, hinting at something vaguely medicinal, approaching clove territory but thankfully not. I think one big factor in my dropping belgians was my acquired distaste of cloves coupled with an increasing sensitivity to clove-like phenols. Here it is not bothersome. The body seems big enough, and well, its pushing 11% so of course it is. Leans sweet to semi-sweet, somewhat low in carbonation so that contributes to the heaviness. In sum its decent, interesting, but not particularly drinkable. As I said in my previous review for their impy stout, I mostly want to drink a beer, and that means drink a beer. I've nothing especially bad to say about this beer, but I'm unlikely to go back to the well, as they say.

12 oz bottle from Tavour. Deep mahogany pour with a lasting creamy beige head. Aroma is malty, woody, leather. Taste brings some sweetness, prunes and chocolate, raisins. Light warming notes trail behind. Really nicely done.

Pours dark reddish brown color with light tan head. Aromas of dark fruits and Belgian yeast. Fig and raisin flavor with candi sugar and Belgian yeast. Medium to full body with moderate carbonation.