By Greg B. Given how delicious the 2 Turtle Doves beer was, from The Bruery, I was excited to try some more of their beers!  I saw a bottle of the Black Orchard which sounded very interesting.  Apparently it’s a style that is no longer brewed by the brewery, so if you want to try this beer, check out your local beer store and horde a few bottles for yourself.  It turns out to be a good beer, hard to compare to their 2 Turtle Doves and the Rugbrod (I drank it… it’s amazingly excellent, but that review will be another day!) but it’s a good beer… just it stands out from the other beers from the brewery as the most ‘average’ of the extraordinary beer lineup.  Not a bad thing!  Anyway, I had some time to kill before going over to a friend’s house for new years dinner, plus I was cooking a duck, which if you’ve cooked duck you know takes some good preparation, time and attention to cook, so I popped open this beer to help pass the time.

I poured the beer into a spiegelau wheat glass, mostly because the beer contains wheats and oats and I anticipated a lot of head.  Well, this beer definitely delivered!  Large, pillowy light tan head that definitely ’sings’ as it recedes, which it does fairly quickly (the beer has easily 3 fingers of head, but what’s really interesting is that it leaves almost no lacing as it recedes!  I’ve never seen this before!).  The beer pours a deep brown color, though if you shine light through it (or look at it while it’s back lit) it has a reddish tint to it.  There are aromas of Belgian yeast, herbs, chewy bready malts and some nutty aromas are also detectable.  The taste is very interesting.  The carbonation is a bit aggressive for my palate and for the style, the body is a bit thin (I would have thought the wheat and oats would have not led to a beer that had this mouthfeel, but I’ve been wrong before!).  There is a nutty, caramel flavor that dominates, but there’s an air of citrusy flavors as well, with a bit more lemony citrus than orange, if that makes any sense from a beer flavored with orange.  The finish, after drinking a few sips, has a nice chocolatey exhaling type of flavor that stays with you in a pleasant way.  it’s a good beer, given the color I expected a more malty-chocolate flavor but they managed to coax more subtle style and flavors from the components.  And with a medium/lower alcohol content, one could easily make this beer a drink they would drink teh whole night through!  3.3/5, 5.7%abv