Beer review: BrewDog Abstrakt AB:09

Yet another review of a beer in the Abstrakt series from the guys at BrewDog. This time we have a “Cranachan” Imperial Stout. Cranachan is a traditional Scottish dessert, made from a mixture of whipped cream, whisky, heather honey, and fresh raspberries, with toasted oatmeal soaked in whisky.

Abstrakt AB:09 is an Imperial Stout brewed with heather honey, raspberries and oats, and have been aged in whisky barrels for about 6 months. The beer has an ABV of 17.1%.

Let’s see if the beer is as dessert-like as it sounds!

Looks

The beer looks oily as it’s poured. The colour is dark brown and the head looks like a milk chocolate mousse.

The head is quite fizzy and leaves no lacing.

Aroma

I’m getting alcohol, vanilla, coffee, cocoa, sweet liquorice and hints of oak. There are also some small hints of red berries hidden beneath everything else. I’m not getting any hints of the honey.

Flavor

The booze is strong in this one! At first I’m struggling to get past the alcohol, but after a while there is a whole lot going on. Many of the hints found in the aroma is in the flavor as well, but they blend more into each other. Most notable flavors are liquorice, cocoa and vanilla. As the beer warms up the raspberries comes through. As in the aroma I can’t get any clear honey flavors.

The mouth feel is pretty thick and oily and the carbonation level is medium but slightly sharp.

Finish

Strong hint of alcohol up front with a good amount of sweet liquorice after a short while. There is also a good amount of chocolate and coffee present in the finish, which, lasts forever!

Rating

An intriguing beer, as most of the other Abstrakt beers. This one is not among my favourites though. The beer has a hint of alcohol throughout which I don’t care for. Score: 3.5/5.

The beer has been added to my calendar next year so come back on April 2nd 2013 if you want to find out how a year in the bottle has treated the beer.