Utenos Porter

Brewed by Utenos (Baltic Beverages Holding - Carlsberg)
Style: Baltic Porter
Utena, Lithuania

Bottle. Looks like a pale stout and lacks foam. Strong, peculiar berry aroma. The taste is bitter with a medium finish. Simply nothing special.

Bottle. Dark red-brown with a nice fast-disappearing bubbly beige head. Sweet malty aroma with a hint of alcohol and some chocolate. Sweetness, liquorice, coffee, chocolate and dark fruits in the taste. Quite a dry finish.

[bottle at RBESG 06] Coffee, dark fruit, alcohol. full bodied and sweet, a little too sweet for me.

Dark red-brown with a fast-disappearing bubbly beige head. Sweet malty aroma with a hint of alcohol. Sweetness, liquorice, coffee and dark fruits in the taste. Quite a dry, ashy finish. Too fizzy, but otherwise quite appealing.

Botl. Churlish grilled sweet corn aroma, mountain water, alcohol metal pipes. Translucent reddish brown with chunky large beige head. Cheap flavor. Overly sweet, lacking in roast characteristics, corn syrup with a macro beer note. tastes a little heavier on the alcohol. no hops, all malt. no thanks. way too sweet and lacking in hops, sticky cheap palate. There is a very light whiff of smoke but it’s weak and doesn’t redeem the beer, though it just saves it from being a drain pour.

Amber, very nice offwhite head. Malty aroma, vanilla and some chocolate. Malty, strong flavor, figs and fruity.

The label says porter... but this doesn’t really look, smell, or taste much like a porter. That said, it pours out of the bottle a dark burgundy color, barely a noticeable head. Smells very fruity (plums?) with a little bit of maltiness. It actually (weirdly) tastes a lot like a chilled tawny port, especially in the aftertaste, which is a bit smoky. Can’t really taste any of the alcohol in it. Mouthfeel is a bit syrupy, very little carbonation, smooove (again, like port). Not at all what I was expecting, but decent.

Good, but I’m not sure what makes it a porter - lager-like smoothness, sweet, almost too sweet. Minimal hop flavor, some light notes of roasted malt but barely noticeable. Blood-red in the light. Pretty, but not a whole lot going on.