09.08.2024, 0,33l bottle @ home:
Small brown bubbly-creamy mediumlasting head, deep dark syrupy pour. Aroma is rich and sweet sour-ish boozy, espresso, roasted coffee beans, dark sugar, dark malts, alcohol, bark, burnt rye bread, soil, chocolate. Taste is sweet sour-ish boozy, dark sugar, alcohol, sour-ish roasted grain, harsh coffee, soil, cough syrup, bark, tar, tobacco, burnt rye bread. Medium to longlasting bitterness, harsh and sweet sour-ish boozy mouthfeel. First smell and sip was very nice. And that's where I should have stopped...

Freeze-distilled coffee stout in a new series of ‘eisbocked’ beers issued by Emelisse, the once very modest local brewery turned world star thanks to head brewer Kees Bubberman but struggling to maintain that level of quality after his departure in 2015 (and since 2016 part of the overarching Slot Oostende project). Thin and open, pale grey-beige ‘head’ lacing in dots for a while before disappearing entirely; black robe with clear mahogany edges. Aroma of iced coffee (very strongly and almost unidimensionally so), melting mocha ice cream, cold espresso ‘tout court’, whisky, beef stock cubes, teriyaki, smoked horse meat, cold tomato soup or even tomato concentrate, bayleaf, hard caramel, cigars, toasted peanuts. Very dense, sweet, iced coffee-like onset, some candied dark fruit and reduced fig syrup, but next to the sweetness also with a very prominent umami flavour (beef stock, gravy, brown beans); very soft carb, thick and syrupy body (as can be expected from an ‘eisbocked stout’). Toffeeish and bitter-chocolatey malts with a weird aftertaste of curdled cream and strong roasty bitter finish due to both the roasted malts and the coffee having been amplified by the freeze distilling treatment; leafy hops also enhanced and finally, unsurprisingly of course, a lot of harsh cheap whisky-like booze. Muscle-flexing for geeks: through the years I have become very wary around these ‘eisbocked’ beers unless they are done subtly like actual traditional Eisbock, and this one is not what one calls subtle; all the flavours, the booziness, the thickness and so on are greatly amplified by this treatment, and this often implies that the balance goes completely lost. This one too is too boozy, too crude and too umami-forward for me to enjoy. I regret to conclude that Emelisse still has not found the same level of sophistication, accuracy and complexity Kees put into their beers a decade ago…