Westvleteren 12

Brewed by Westvleteren Abdij St. Sixtus
Style: Abt/Quadrupel
Westvleteren, Belgium

Serve in Trappist glass

From the time I opened the bottle the aroma was of herbs and carmel. The appearance was dark brown and a little cloudy with a nice minimal head. The taste was full body and had hints of coffee...nuts and caramel and the overall raiting is very high.....one of the best beers I have had in a long time.

not a big fan of belgiums, i still needed to see what the hype was about with this beer. shared with my buddy dave at the am rep 25th anniversary show. pours dark brown with visible setiment and good carbonated head. nose is a little odd, definate sour and some sweet fruit and something else, perhaps a little soy sauce (?). taste is heavy and not that boozy considering it’s 10%. Definate fruit up front with sweet molasses with a little sour on the finish. i must say, this is an excellent beer, but #1 in the world??? if readily available here, i would buy it quite often.

Bottle thanks sparky. Pour is brown with bubbles and kahki head like cola. Aroma sweet malt and molasses. Taste is malty grapes and sugary malts. Palate is sticky and carbonation with a chaulky dry finish. Amazing!!!

Bottle. 12 oz. Split with James and Vin. Pours a deep, turbid mahagoany brown with a thick, velvety tan head. Lacing is like snowflakes and clouds. Sticks down the side of the glass. Aroma of grapes, honey, cinnamon, graham cracker crust, fresh baked doughy bread, pure fresh yeast, raisins, vanilla bean, and some lovely, subtle traces of candied Belgian sugars. Fuller bodied with a suave, silky, sweet finish. Seriously fantastic quad.

Big thanks to TheFerm for sharing this one. Has a very sexy pour with a medium size foam head that was off white. The head retention was just about perfect, as was the carbonation. The aroma was fruity. Dried fruits, such as raisins, dates, and maybe a little bit of apricots in there as well. It had a lighter body then I was expecting, but the flavors danced on the tongue very well, the flavors did the polka actually. Can’t wait to try it again.

UPDATED: SEP 15, 2010 Consumed with Travlr and Jason on 21 Aug 10. Strong caramel overtones over a mildly spicy beer - in a good way. Mild carbonation with a med weight on the tongue. Smooth after taste.

An excellent beer, though sort of a letdown considering the monstrous hype. Without a doubt, no beer is hyped more than Westy 12. I’ll eventually try a whole bottle and revisit this rating, but splitting one with a few others was enough for now. Pours dark brown with ruby highlights with a great, creamy, beige head. Great looking beer. Aroma is weaker than expected, but it could have been the relatively small pour. Very fruity with some bready malt notes, a bit of Belgian earth and a hint of booze. I usually prefer earthier Belgians and was surprised by the fruitiness, but it’s still quite good, probably one of the best fruity malt notes I’ve had, particularly in the taste. The beer’s taste is intensely likable. It’s of balanced sweetness with lots of fruity Belgian yeast notes. Mouthfeel is quite smooth. Overall, Westy 12 is an excellent beer and I can see why its consensus rating is so high. However, I wonder how many people would really call it their all-time favorite, particularly with similar and nearly as good beers easily available.

Westy 12 Review The Westvletren 12 is my 500th beer. And it marks my passage from beer drinker to beer appreciator. I am thirsty for more. I chose the Westy to mark a half-thousand beers consumed not only because it is an excellent and well-regarded beer. It is symbolic. More than a sample of a precise chemical craft, or brewing, the Westy represents the origins of my beer hobby, and the evolution of my palate and my interest in the field of beer. Above all, this particular bottle was a gift from the very person who introduced me to beer. It is a gesture that I took his invitation to heart, and have faithfully pursued the hobby well after we parted to different parts of the globe. And it is a mark of my respect for his patience in enduring my initial skepticism, callousness and thick-headedness when it came to drinking beer and taking notes. I owe him a great debt, and I honor that debt by drinking his beer. I took great care and attached great ceremony to reviewing the Westvleteren. Ambient noise and smells were minimized. Paper and pen were placed nearby, ready to receive observations and hastily scrawled epiphanies. I cleared my head of distractions (there are many) and focused exclusively on this laughably humble bottle and its innards. I girded myself for my Westvleteren 12. The pour is pretty standard, even mundane. It kicks up a light brown head, little to no lacing, and aside from a few flecks of yeast in the last droplets to fall from the bottle’s mouth, I have no physical evidence that this beer will be a milestone in my beer drinking career. That evidence appears in the aroma. I am stricken with childhood memories of happy Colorado Christmases, as an intoxicating blend of vanilla, oak, ribeye steaks, fig, and a touch of chocolate fill my nose. It is incredible, and it is here that I first get a taste of what all the praise, writing and hype is about. The Westy isn’t hype at all. It is credibly amazing, and deservedly loved. And the taste fits the Quad. style I’ve come to love so much. It is big and rich, barreling onto the tongue with the same aromatic flavors that caused me to reel in my chair. A few seconds later this boldness attenuates, exposing an undercurrent of fig and a deep, sweet red wine flavor. And then again, moments later this layer of flavor recedes to expose a tertiary layer of molasses, oak, smoked wood and a parmesan cheese like umami. To be short, there are three distinct layers of flavors, each of them characteristically delicious, and each a little quieter than the last. That final touch of umami savoriness is practically a whisper, but you can still make out the words. With all these flavors in a single beer there is a very real threat that the flavors may become crowded and muddled. This is not the case. The Westvleteren 12 delivers these flavors in stages, and on a perfect palate. The beer is thick, but not syrupy, and it textures the flavors without warping them. It is a crowd of luminaries, each in perfect concordance with the others, a kind of harmony of brilliance without egos to interfere. By the very end of the beer I am questioning whether this is actually a Quadrupel. It has all the basic qualities of a Belgian Strong Ale according to my taste buds, and possibly according to a rigid style guide. But I think the Belgian Strong Ale tag might be slightly too tight on a beer like this. The Westvletren is an expression of a style, and a permutation so fantastically brewed that it almost breaks from tradition. These breaks are sometimes called revolutions, which would be the highest form of irony for the Westy’s brewers who are steeped in tradition themselves. But they are also steeped in this beer, and they must know that what they do, they do very well. This level of brewing is intentional, and it shows. One need only look at the lines of avid drinkers banging on the monastery’s doors to understand that there must be some authentic draw to this beer. And now I finally realize it through a few intense sips. I’ve extended a dimension of my understanding of beer and the craft beer world with one bottle of a highly-esteemed brew. This really is a fantastic hobby. Cheers Stéphane!