Switching things up a bit, for beer number five in my Robbie Burns hit parade of tasting notes, I’m going to do a “live review” of a beer, which is to say I’ll type my thoughts on this brew as they come to mind while I drink it. The review itself won’t be posted live, of course, but will only be delayed by a few minutes.
The beer, a left-over from my Craft Beer Advent Calendar, is Mac Queen’s Nessie, a “whisky malt” beer from Schlossbrauerei Eggenberg in Austria.
Given its Austrian origins, I’m assuming that this is a lager, but it says that nowhere on the label, so I’ll proceed with that as a guess. The colour is orange-gold and the aroma, frankly, is not very whisky-ish at all. (Granted, the beer is straight-out-of-the-fridge cold, but still, surely that’s how most people would drink it.) I get a light hint of phenolics, but more caramelly and honey-ish malt than anything else.
The crisp and thinnish body confirms my lager suspicions, and also leaves me wondering about the whereabouts of the hit of whisky-ish malt I was expecting. There’s a suggestion, for certain, and a bit more in the finish, but if someone handed me this saying it was just a normal Vienna-esque lager, I doubt I’d be noting any peat at all.
Perhaps when my bottle of Nessie was younger and fresher – the listed “best before” date is April of this year, which could mean this is as old as nine months in the bottle – it had more peatiness to it. Maybe it did not. Either way, I have a hard time envisioning this as a beer for Burns Day.
I had that a couple of weeks ago, and I have to concur that it was not the smoke bomb that I thought it was going to be. Same grain sweetness as the rest of the Eggenberg lineup, which is not a bad thing.