Thursday, October 12, 2006

Saint Arnold's Divine Reserve #3

As I have mentioned before I am a big proponent of supporting Local Breweries. Well here in Houston there is no brewery more local than the great Saint Arnold's Brewery. I have talked about the brewery before here. They brew very good straight forward beers. Very rarely do they stray to far into extreme beers. One regular example is their Christmas Ale, that while not extreme is a very big departure from their regular beers. Another is their recent Divine Beer series. 3 Versions have been released so far, all are small batch artesian ales, and all are very different. The first was a barley wine style, that was due to a filtration problem pretty hit and miss from what I understand since I didn't get a chance to taste it. The second one I actually got to taste was an incredibly rich malty caramelly sweet quadrupel style Belgian ale. The third? Well that's what I got to taste today at the great downtown beer hall Gingerman's. I love this place as it has an incredible beer selection and you have some really good seats outside, which in this recent weather is a nice to have.
The Beer: Ahh yes Divine Reserve #3...an Imperial IPA. The beer was poured from the bottle into a regular British Pint glass. It was nice deep amber with a good inch head. The head dissipated into nice amounts of lacing. The nose was full of floral hops, grapefruit and some underneath sweetness that was hard to identify. The mouth was overpowering hops great amounts of that zippy bitterness, but with that same underlying clove type sweetness. I couldn't identify it so I went to the website and its Honey and Molasses. It was added to the kettle to up the starting gravity and lighten out the beer. It was a nice touch that seemed to keep the hops from burning the tongue. I really enjoyed the beer, so hats off to Brock and the guys. I didn't even notice that it was 9.5% until I got to the bottom of the glass, so its not something overly noticeable in my opinion. Very nice beer. Heres what the folks at BA had to say.

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