Day 14: Nickel Brook's Bolshevik Bastard Imperial Stout

Apprehension. Nickel Brook provided the first beer in this whole advent odyssey, and it was nasty. This one looked nastier. A whopping 8.5% and an in-your-face name that says this beer will bite you back. It poured so, so dark. And thick. Too thick for any bubbles to escape and form foam. It smelled strongly of....something. I was scared.

The first sip was rough. My fears were being realized. I had my wife taste it so that she could share in the misery. She made the face I expected her to make. I almost bailed on the whole thing.

Glad I didn't. Here's what happened:

I remembered that in the past these stouts had improved with a rise in temperature, so I just let this thing sit a while. When I returned to it, it was markedly better. Okay, I thought, I think this is at a level where I can deal with it. I went downstairs to watch some TV with the family. I don't know if I was overly engaged in the programming or just distracted, but I hardly drank any of the Bolshevik Bastard for the next half hour. Just tiny sips during commercials. By the time I actually turned my attention to drinking it, it had transformed.

Wow, what a difference! That strong flavour was still there, but it was no longer nasty. At all. This was easily the warmest I'd let any of these beers get. I still had no desire to chug away, but the sips were larger and more frequent. I was able to embrace what was being offered by the strong, dark complexity of the Bastard. I started wondering if I'd been maligning a bunch of other beers simply because I'd been drinking them too cold. That made me sad, because a beer is a horrible thing to waste.

A little online research taught me that as a general rule, the higher the ABV, the higher the temperature for consumption. There is also a sliding temperature scale for types of beer regardless of alcohol content, with lighter, lager-y types generally being on the cold end and darker beers on the warm end.

I'm going to rate the B.B. at three tankards. I probably wouldn't drink this very often. And I wouldn't need much of it when I did. But it is an experience worth having, provided you get the stuff up to about 14C first.