Twelve beers of Christmas: #6

Christmas is a time for classic repeats, so here's my De Dolle Stille Nacht review from earlier this year. With those annoying 'updates' that makes it into a revised repeat, therefore a new episode. Got a problem with that? Go tell it to the judge in the morning!



Perhaps the greatest thing I can say about this beer is - 1.49 GBP a bottle.

It was in a sale somewhere. Let it be said, I am not driven by price. But when a beer this good is this cheap, WAY HEY!

Second greatest thing - liquid easter cake.

Christmas Cake. Quite clearly, I meant to say Christmas cake.

Third - the sugar has rotted my teeth and I am dribbling dentine all over this incredibly expensive keyboard.

It's not madly-sugar-candy-ADHD-inducing anymore. These were 2007 bottles, that spun-sugariness has subsided to a thick apricot tart sweetness.

Fourth - surprise and fear, fear and surprise.

This still stands. Perhaps now moreso with an aged bottle - is it still living? Have the corners been rounded off or just planed away? Something to make you go mmmmmm? Or urrrgh? Is there life on Mars? Is there life in Peckham? What's that switch over there for. Et cetera....


Fifth - the sugar subsides to a licking candy sweetness. The alcohol warms cockles but never muscles in. So, no alarms, no surprises.

Sadly, the Jesus and Mary Chain never actually recorded a track called 'Just Like Candy', so I can't quote it here in a clever-dick stylee. Even though the unborn chicken voices in my head keep telling me it must be true... pardon? The beer? Oh, it's crammed with apricots and toasted nuts and that bit in the middle of a poorly-torched creme brulee that doesn't quite caramalise and is all the better for it. And it's still effervescing.

In summary - the right side of que sera, the wrong side of brouhaha.

Do you ever get that feeling that you know you're going to do something wrong if you carry on doing what you do, but don't care, and do it anyway, and then repulse yourself when with grinding inevitability that thing happens? I've just picked my nose and rubbed snot into a semi-open wound in my hand. Strictly speaking, this is more information than you need to know. Ever.

I'm really chuffed with this beer. It's another over-inking of the HUGE tick that is - buy beers, cellar beers if they have the obvious potential for improving with age, keep your drunken mitts of said beer by hiding them somewhere you don't look/cannot reach; behind your bike/underneath your tax return/next to your wife's sanitary towels.

I'm really, really chuffed to have bought a dozen-ish bottles of this, kept six and given the rest away under strict instructions not to open until 2009. Because one of the great beer experiences for me is giving a good beer to someone who's never tasted anything quite like it before. Some will vomit. Some, with tastebuds sequestered, won't appreciate it. But spreading the love ends inevitably in another convert to the cause. Rather than a slave to the Coors.

PS - Reluctant Scooper would like to apologise for the piss-poor wordplay in the last paragraph.

PPS - this gives me the chance to say "I was more than usual pissed"; quoted from the mind-blendingly wonderful 'Bremen Nacht' by The Fall. See what I did there? This stuff doen't just throw itself together, you know?