Bluegrass Mephistopheles Metamorphosis

Brewed by Bluegrass Brewing Company
Style: Abbey Tripel
Louisville, Kentucky USA

Clear golden, small diminishing head, no lacing and bad retention. Aroma is big alcohol with some orange spicing, sugar, grass, yeast. Medium bodied, sugary alcoholic finish. This woulda been a 3.5 beer if the alcohol was a few points less.

750 mL bottle. Pours gold with very small white head and some bubbles. The aroma is tree fruits, alcohol, and malty sweetness. The flavor is spicy malt at first, with a blast of alcohol. Then some fruity esters play around into a woody, yeasty finish. Woody spiciness comes out in the aftertaste, too. Decent, but pretty rough around the edges.

Bottle. Sour apple and peach aroma with noted acidity. Orange-yellow color with minimal head. Sweet peach-apple flavor with a moderate hops and mild acidic finish. Very nice tripel.

A pretty, golden color with a soda pop-like head that is not particularly rocky or tight-bubbled. It has a nice clarity at first pour but I cannot sat that about the rest of it as the yeast disrupted in chunks from the bottom of the bottle and created turbidity.. Very nice, lush, honey-like richness in the aroma that is also incredibly spicy with some vanilla notes as well. Flavor has a lot of the aroma components with some hot alcohol that is borderline overdone. There is a lot going on in this beer and it is all happening at the same time. The only critical problem witht this beer is the extreme carbonation level distracts the palate and gives the beer a cheap, soda pop-like character.

Bottle and served in my Duval snifter: Poured a clean golden hue with a small ring of foam and little lace. The nose detects fruity esters of banana, apricot, tangerine along with vapours of candi sugar, floral and spicy hop, and some barnyard yeast esters. There is also a noticeable alcoholic presence on the nose. The flavor profile starts very fruity and loaded with brash alcohol and finishing hop bitterness along with a spruce hop note character. In the end the balance is off but the beer is more than drinkable enough with just enough tribute to the style. The mouth feel is sticky and the effect warming but not overpowering. Well hardly world-class, a well constructed brew and worth an effort.

on tap at the brew pub. clear dark golden/light amber with a disappearing white head. fruity warm roasted banana aroma. bitter banana but bread flavor with white grape almost wine like notes. medium to full bodied. finish bittersweet medium dry with some off metallic flavor that makes it very unpleasant. this just seemed like the average failed attempt at a belgian style. i need to re rate this beer perhaps from the bottle. i remember it being a lot better from the bottle. maybe i just got a bad batch.

Absolute horse urine. I didn’t mind the floating globs of yeast, though it made the beer look muddy rather than yeasty. What really burned my biscuits was the overwhelmingly hot alcoholic flavor. Bitter as hell and as strong as nail polish remover, I could hardly finish the bottle.

750ml bottle. Last of the bottle. Yeasty banana apple aroma from the head. Funky but good. Dirty greenish orange hue. Thick and grainy. Tight and lively. Bitter alcohol burn. Great bitter hops. Sweet malts. Sugary. Good yeast. Good alcohol burn. Good hop. But needs something?