Last evening, I sat down to sample a few beers with a friend of mine by the name of John Szabo. He’s a wine guy, a Master Sommelier, in fact, but a nice fellow nonetheless and someone with a terrific palate. We opened several bottles over the course of a few hours, including some very local stuff — a few homebrews from John’s cousin — a couple of more obscure offerings — two large bottled ales from Birrifficio Bruton in northern Italy — and one extraordinarily rare brew — a single bottle of the 2005 vintage of Pannepot Grand Reserva. But it was a pair of semi-related black beers that stole the show.
The beers were broadly in the Imperial stout class, except that the first up, a Narke Kulturbryggeri Kagen! Stormakts Porter from 2005, is more from the Baltic porter side of the family, although unlike most in that class, I suspect rather strongly that it’s the product of an ale fermentation rather than a lager one.
Pitch black of hue, it sports an incredibly complex aroma, containing notes of everything from toasted hazelnut to grilled pineapple and cinnamon sticks. A passing sommelier took a sip and remarked that it reminder her up front of Wherther’s Originals candies, and she was quite right. After the initial toffee candy character, however, the Porter settled into a flavour almost as complex as its aroma, with an astonishingly creamy texture and notes of caramel-butter sauce, roasted peach, various brown spices and a soothing, lingering, sweet malt finish. Beer Guy and Wine Guy alike couldn’t stop sniffing and tasting and making notes on this one until it was sadly all gone.
The second in the pair was a can of Ten Fidy from Colorado’s Oskar Blues Brewery. Where the Narke is more sweetness and comfort, Ten Fidy is bold, brash and entirely unapologetic, with an inky black colour, strong espresso, roast malt and bitter chocolate nose and almost oily texture. In the body, it offers less complexity than the Swede, but more intensity, with some background anise helping along a coffee-ish bitterness and loads of 80 or 90 percent cocoa content chocolate notes. We finished this one, too, but I think Wine Guy was slightly less enamored by this bruiser of a stout.
In the end, I had to conclude that these were two extraordinarily flavourful sides of the same coin, one Imperial and the other Baltic, one stout and the other porter, one powerfully assertive and the other deeply seductive. But like paintings by Jackson Pollock and Claude Monet, each beautiful in its own, unique way.
