Brew It Up! Czars Tar

Brewed by Brew It Up!
Style: Imperial Stout
Sacramento, California USA

Serve in Snifter

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12oz bottle...gusher, big time. Tough to get much of a handle on it, with it being so overcarbonated and yeasty. Overall it had a nice smokiness to it as well as some nuttiness...I’d try it again...drank in a flight of 11 different Imperial Stouts.

Eclipse black color. Small to no head. Aroma is roasty malt, chocolate and vanilla. A medium to full bodied Russian Imperial Stout. Malts are caramel, chocolate and vanilla, with a hint of coffee. Hops are slightly bitter. Nice soft carbonation. Sooth taste. A touch roasty and slightly sweet. Somewhat understated. Mouthfeel is full and round. Finish is clean and smooth. Aftertaste is very slightly sweet.

Bottle. Dark beer with no head. Aroma of brown sugar, molasses, stone fruit, caramel... Very rich and thick. Flavor of roasted malt with some bitterness to back it up, but mostly it’s a bit fruity to go with the good backing - stone fruits, figs, coffee. There’s some alcohol warming of course, but it’s very complimentary. A nice one.

Rich ebony with bronzed-ruby shimmers at the edges. Creamy, semi-rocky caramel foam. Bottle-conditioned. Soft aroma of buttered chocolate and caramel surrounded with rich smoke wafts. Ravishing java, coconut, shoe polish, and ink interplay touched with charcoal, dark chocolate, vanilla, crackery malts, and muffled dark fruity esters. Soft and flowing on the tongue. Gentle carbonation. Mix of bittersweet chocolate and oxidized black malt flavors with sporadic earthy hops teases. Takes on a flavorsome coarse, grainy note from the copious amount of black malts. Hints of vanilla and ink deepen the malts. Malts are borderline acrid, which lends a bit of dryness to offset the sweetness and bring out the vanilla flavors. Finishes elegantly with seared malts and lightly toasted pale malts crowned with rich dark chocolate and juicy, earthy hops. Hats off to these guys. This is a beauty. Big thanks to Mitch!

A brew that starts, proceeds and ends with all the subtleness of a freight train. Upon opening, the cap shot off, leaving a formidable divet in my forehead. And believe me, the last thing I need is another divet in my forehead. It's not every Friday night your life flashes before your eyes. I saw lots of people, most of them brought with them a host of good memories, a few were particularly pernicious, but on the whole it was a good life. But then I noticed that I still had vision, and I had not been popped in my modest hovel in Davis's version of suburbia. I looked down to see the brown foam pouring forth with an odd, parabolic cadence. So I had to put it in the sink and there it sat, spewing forth its bilious eruptions for 6 minutes full (I timed it). I actually only lost about a quarter of the bottle. Are they all like this? Did I get a bad bottle? Doesn't matter to me. QC is QC. And I'm not on the QT. Ah, the foam has settled down nicely now. It's quite handsome now; everything calms down if you subdue it with enough vacuous rhetoric. This may be the darkest brew I've seen, showing only the slighest dark brown shade at the edges under 75 W illumination. Sniffle sniffle. Nice aroma. Whoppers, hazelnuts, prickly-pear cactus that you just took the weed-whacker to, columbian coffee beans, cool whip. Flavor is where it gets a bit rough. A good sour edge to it, and not in a particularly good way. But it does grow on you. That draws back into the shadows like a recalcitrant cheating lover when discovered, lingering in abeyance to the full-on tsunami of roast and tongue-numbing blunt bitterness that are to follow. Yeah, it actually made my tongue go numb. Nearly completely, too. Smoky, roasty, perky, squirmy, and so bitter it makes me want to rip my clothes off and run through like the titular drunk academic that I am. Yeah, I'm joking. And then there's that girl at that coffee shop that you like who always gives you the eye--the sweep-over of the full body, smiles, blushes and turns away (or is that rosacea?) and then does it to the girl she works with. So I take a similar attitude with this beer, assessing tongue-in-cheek, knowing that there's another to come but enjoying its somewhat raucous flavor profile. Oh, and a lot of pecans. I will try it again. Tung till numbt. A bit too yeasty, and a bit too raw, but it has potential. Serious potential.