By Greg B. With election night upon us, I decided to look around what I had for beer and managed to pull together a rather hodge-podge showing of beers.  But to celebrate the voting, I chilled my bottle of Rasputin, figuring this was a good enough occasion to pop the top.  What a beer this is!  I really recommend you all try it if you can find a bottle, but I’ll go into that later.

I started the night off with a Pale Ale from Troegs.  I would consider this a ‘local brewery’, since it is only really an hour north of Baltimore, about the same distance as DC and Frederick.  Troegs makes some very good beers, which you will undoubtedly start seeing on your local taps coming soon, with their bad elf series.  But the pale ale is a good beer too.   On the pour it has a big, bubbly head with medium size.  Brings a really nice amber color to the table and smells a little of citrus and flowers.  Has a small, bubbly mouthfeel but a very nice body with a very slightly bitter taste on the finish, though only after a few sips do you get this.  The floral aroma stays with you throughout each sip.  Definitely something to check out, if you’ve never had Troegs, head down to the liquor store and find a 6 pack and try them!

From here, I found a stout, Mendocino Black Hawk stout to be exact.  While I had high hopes for this beer based just on the label, I was a little disappointed.  To be fair, the beer was a good beer, but I had high expectations (possibly because I knew the Rasputin was coming soon?).  Anyway, this poured a very dark dark brown/black color in the pint glass and came with a thin light brown head that rapidly vanished.  It smelled a little of chocolate malts at first, and had a sweetness to the aroma but after the first sip I realized that the sweetness was from a lot of residual sugars in the beer, and the chocolatey aroma was more the very black roasted malts mixed with the sweet aroma.  Truth be told, I felt they had a little much of the black malts on the taste, but I could see someone liking this beer.  Despite what tasted like a high sugar content, the body was kind of thin and I felt it had a more sour after taste than bitter.  This is something I would try again, perhaps at a bar, but It was not great.

Last, we come to the featured beer of the night.  The Rasputin.  Brouwerij de Molen Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout, to be exact.  Now, I cannot find a good link online to link to for this beer, and if you search for it you may see why.  Only 978 hits using Google to search for a beer!  The web page on the label sends you here, which is not the most helpful link possible, but if you were in the Netherlands perhaps you can drop by for a dinner.  Per year they only produce about 500-525, which puts the price tag around $30 a bottle.  With a cork and waxed, this beer is a good one for cellaring if you have the appropriate storage conditions (I do not), for even up to 25 years, as the bottle claims!  Now, if I waited 25 years, I’d be 50 when I opened this bottle so I decided there was no time like the present and went for it.

This particular beer was brewed May 8th, 2008 and bottled June 2nd, 2008 (says so on the label!).  It even gives the Original and Final gravities, 1.102 and 1.023, respectively.  Basically this demonstrates that a LOT of malts went into this and became alcohol and that it still has a lot of residual malts in the beer as well.  With an abv of 10.7% and a 1 pint bottle (bottle #348 of 524) this beer definitely stands to pack a punch.

I chilled it for 5 hours in my fridge, and it was nice and chilled upon opening.  Normally I will drink my stouts a bit warmer, but chilling this will allow me to check out the beer cool and warmer.  On the pour you get to see the real rich, opaque dark color of the beer and it gave way to copious amounts of tan colored head.  The top of the head was rather ‘fluffy’, for want of a better term, but over time this gave way to a light, but creamy looking foam.  On the nose the beer smelled sweet and fruity, like a mixture of raspberries and blackberries and to taste… man, to taste was a treat.  This beer tasted similarly to the fruity nose, sweet (that final gravity if 1.023 said there would be malts inside, and they weren’t lying!).  There is a taste of alcohol at the finish, but it is pretty well overpowered by the sweetness of the beer.  The label says it is brewed with Saaz hops, though I did not get much of that in either the aroma or the flavor.

Rasputin bottle and my Official new beer tasting glass

This beer had amazing head retention.  We opened the beer at 9:45pm and poured and at 10:45 the beer still had a good amount of head.  Yes, i did have the beer in the glass for that long, for several reasons.  First, because it was damn good and I wanted to keep enjoying it.  Second, because I wanted to see how it would change over time out of the bottle and third, because it was so high in alcohol and I had things to do, I couldn’t just down the beer!  After being open about 15 minutes the beer still smelled a lot like fruits, though the fruits were taking a darker turn, more very very ripe raspberries and blackberries.  There was low carbonation to start in this beer, and it never really lost any of it over time though the bubbles were fine and the beer had a very powerful body.  Chocolate and toffee flavors were starting to appear.

Rasputin poured... Look at the beauty!

Half an hour after the last tasting, the beer still had a good amount of head, with a nice wide lacing down the glassware.  It had warmed up substantially, and really was a delicious creamy texture in the mouth with fruit highlights and some alcohol flavors.  This really is a great beer, and one that I wish I could find a case of and just age for years to watch it change over time.  Even in this bottle, some of the rougher flavors and aromas that you could get immediately from the first pour were mellowed and smoothed out with a few minutes in the glass.  I’d recommend serving this probably about 50 degrees F, rather than as chilled as I had it in the fridge to start.  Just a very fine beer and one you can tell the brewmaster really put a lot of effort into creating.  Good job guys!

So the election night is over, and we can all get back on with our lives now that the ultimate soap opera is complete.  But it is a night to celebrate a change of things in the news, and worthy of some good beers.  I hope you enjoyed some yourselves for the night as well, possibly with some good friends of yours.  Cheers.