I Must be Delirious

So we're at my wife's best friends house for Thanksgiving. In addition to blowing weightwatcher points, I brought over a couple beers to consume with the turkey and mac-and-cheese. First off, that woman can cook. Second, the Shiner Holiday Cheer with it's peachyness and nuttiness goes great with Thanksgiving food. Maybe I was in a joyous mood, but I tried the Heiner Brau Oktoberfest again and it was pretty good at room temperature. But I had to sample one new beer and we had this one in our sites for a while.

Delirium Tremens was one of the first beers I tried at the Saucer when I was trying to make my way up to 200 beers to get a plate on the wall. I just thought they had a cool name. That had to be almost 2 years ago, and I had not tried a Delirium beer since. Specs has your hookup in Houston, and so we cop this "Noel" version of Delirium. I'm pretty fired up b/c if nothing else, it's in a cool bottle, and it has a champagne cork thing going on. So here we go.

Delirium Noel

Smells bananay and spice, with a touch of hops. I like the thick creamy head but I cannot get too good of a bead on the color as it's in plastic cup. WOW. Tastes of something like ginger bread. Lots of spice and some caramel and plum in the second or third slurp. I'm tasting the alcohol in there as well. Not a big fan of that. I'm getting some banana deep in there as well as some fruityness. As it warms, it gets more sugary and I'm detecting a slight sourness in the back of the palette. But as it keeps warming, the boldness of the alcohol and sweetness just plain turn me off. It took me a while to think of what that alcohol tastes is comparable to, and then it hit me...

Straight GIN and JUICE, heavy on the GIN. And Gin to me tastes like Gasolina. Add to that that this beer has a LOT of yeast sediment swirling in my glass. I thought it was the oats from my oatmeal cookie that I had earlier, but no, it was a GANG of yeast. I should put it in a vial and brewed with it later. But the flavor of gin and yeast sediment have a likelihood of turning someone OFF from beer. But I give it a low 3 Star rating for now.

Methinks this beer needs some serious aging. We will buy a couple more bottles and cellar it with a few of our other barley wines and Christmas beers that do not seem "together" yet and give them another go next year or the year after that. Oh it's real.