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Last week I finally managed to round up several friends to help me taste the five bottles I had (2009 to 2013). The beer is brewed by Unibroue exclusively for Trader Joe’s and released each fall. A dark ale brewed with spices, it’s bottle conditioned, which means that it’s bottled with live yeast that consume the sugars and carbonate the beer over time. That makes it a good beer for aging, a fact that Trader Joe’s mentions on the bottle, even printing a “best before” date on each one—something I hadn’t noticed until this year.
My favorites were the 2012 and 2011 vintages. The former tasted sort of like root beer, with more vanilla than the 2013, and was well-balanced and complex in a way that I can’t exactly put my finger on. There’s a slight harshness to the current vintage that dissipates after a year of aging. The 2011 was even better; it smelled exactly like chocolate and tasted like cream soda. The vanilla in this one was intense, and the beer was sweeter, richer, and creamier than the two younger ones.
