By Greg B.  I have to say, since I randomly came across a bottle of Rasputin last fall, I’ve been extremely lucky at finding more bottles of beer from Brouwerij de Molen!  The Wine Source in Hampden now has an entire shelf devoted to them, and I regularly check it and buy the beers.  It hits the pocket hard sometimes, but I always consider it as though I’m buying a bottle of fine wine.  And compared to a really good bottle of wine, a $17-23 bottle of incredibly beer is well worth it (and much more affordable to the everyday consumer!).  However, most of the beers I’ve tried from de Molen have been stouts.  This time around, I saw a few bottles of beer that were not stouts.  And as always, my curiosity got the better of me, and I bought a few different bottles.  This time, I’ll review the Storm & averij (storm & damage).

I opened this bottle, actually not for any old reason, but to relax a bit.  You see, while driving home from work one day, a bunch of kids ran into the street and threw a bottle of colt 45 threw my rear window on my car, shattering it.  Whether they were trying to give me a message to review colt45 or not, I’ll never know.  But if my answer is popping open a bottle of Storm & Averij, then my answer should seem clear.  It’s a resounding NO!  Anyway, after dutifully duct taping and covering my now shattered window, I placed this beer in the fridge for a few hours, while I prepared a 3 (really 4, if you count the box of hot pockets that were cooked and rapidly consumed) course meal to de-stress (the recipes and such will be posted in the future!).  But while waiting for the crab pot pie to be done, I pulled this bottle from the fridge, popped the cork, and poured two beers, one for myself, and one for my roommate Renee, into the Spiegelau lager glasses, a generous gift who’s review is pending can be found here!  One should also note the beautiful label, fully informed as to all the statistics of the beer, simple, elegant and enticing.  It is different in style compared to the other stouts I’ve purchased, but it is in a very similar vein.

The beer pours a deep golden honey color with a very large frothy white head.  The head is beautiful, large, foamy and leaves a beautiful Belgian lace on the side of the glass as it recedes, which is rather slowly.  The head on the beer lasted the entire time I was drinking the beer, and even when I got close to finishing, the head was still replenishing itself and standing strong!  The beer has an excellent yeasty aroma but this is coupled with some hops on the nose.  It is definitely interesting, as the hops remind me of some more American hopped beers, rather than the noble varieties of classic European styles though the end of the nose has this spicy characteristics of some of the old world Noble Hop varieties.  This might be the result of dryhopping with Saaz hops, rather than introducing them into the boil.  If this is the case, you can all expect a future recipe with some Saaz dryhopping!  The beer is so smooth, the carbonation is surprisingly low but the beer is cold and flows awesome.  It’s almost as if I’m drinking something of extreme softness, like silk, if that makes any sense at all.  The flavors are many and varied but work great together: honey, with grassy herbal notes and a hint of sweetness make this a great beer!  There are also absolutely no hints of alcohol, either on the nose or to taste, which is a testament to how well the beer is crafted to be able to hide the 9.2% abv among the flavors.  But man, as I drink more and more of this beer, it just tastes better and better.  As the beer warms up, there are hints of spice that develop towards the back end of the flavor.  This really is an excellent beer, and for $17, for 750ml, it’s a steal.  Like I said earlier, for the price of a good bottle of wine, you can have an outstanding bottle of beer, why would you go for the wine! (I can say this, as Mike is still abroad in Italy ).  I have to rate this beer a 4.3, go out and check it out if possible, they only make around 600 bottles a year of this stuff, so if you are lucky enough to get one, enjoy it!  In the meantime, keep up the great work, Brouwerij de Molen!