Hop Valley Vanilla Infused Porter

Another beer from my brother. This time, it's a porter, and I am so excited I can barely contain myself. I really think that there may be nothing better than a good porter, but there are so few good ones and so many that shouldn't have tried, that I also approach this beer with trepidation.

She's a dark beer, with no light making its way through the beer at all. The head is thin, but it sticks around like an unwanted guest at a dinner party after you've started to run out of the after dinner drinks. The aroma is classic porter with the distinct scent of roasted malt. I can smell a bit of a metallic smell in there with it, though.

First sip is a lot more bitter than most porters. It is really nice and smoky, but the bitter hits pretty hard and might be unpleasant if the bitterness didn't go away fairly quickly after the drink is gone. I'm not sure if this is a good one or a bad one yet. After all, sipping is for tea and possibly lemonade. Beer is for quaffing, dangit!

Tip-in is lightly burned malt. The middle is smoky with a tingle of carbonation at the top of the mouth. That middle is really good, I have to say. Then the finish starts with that bitterness at the front of the tongue and follows the end of the beer the whole way down the gullet. It hits the bottom and kind of intensifies like a louder echo coming back up. The smoke taste remains on the lips and even on the inside cheeks, but the bitterness takes a while to dissipate.

All told, it's a good beer. I can imagine it would be really, really good with something heavy or salty to eat, as this beer is definitely going to stand up to whatever you throw at it - it's taste is very overwhelming.

4.0/5