I genuinely don't have much to say about
Hollow Pointe. I know that they're a
Tennessee brewery, but I've only had
one Hollow Pointe beer other than the one I'm about to enjoy. That particular one was a
dunkel, and I was suitably impressed with the
lager-based dark beer. Typically, when I think of a dark beer, I am inclined to assume that it is going to be an
ale, but their dunkel was remarkable in its clear vision for what the beer should be.
This beer is just a few shades too brown before assuming that it is just black. There isn't much head, but I think I have discussed ad nauseam about the trials and tribulations of getting beer in growler form; it just doesn't seem to produce a head when you pour it. I tried to coax one out, and what you see in the pictures all I got. That said, the off-white bubbles coalesce around the rim of the glass with a smattering of bubbles sprinkled across the top. The aroma is scrumptious; toasted sweet malt mixes with vanilla with a little coffee and chocolate bitterness added to it. Normally, coffee would put me off, but the other flavors seem to be expressing themselves very well.
First sip is not as good as the aroma was. The coffee that seemed like it was going to fall into the background is way too far forward, and the overall beverage is significantly dry. Any sweetness that I could expect from that toasted malt is sucked up into a vacuum of bitterness that doesn't even have the accompanying chocolate that I thought I smelled in the aroma. The overall beverages offputting and genuinely unlikable.
Tip-in is moderate carbonation burn with coffee and brunt grains above a prickliness. The middle is a toning down of the beer where everything gets watery and the overall beverage loses the bite that it had in the tip in and also in the sip. Unfortunately, that bite comes back with a vengeance when the finish starts and the coffee reasserts itself with dryness and bitterness before eventually trailing off into a coffee afterglow of coffee ground dust.
Bottom Line: No.
0.5/5
