Grabbed a few of these the other day from the perfect pour and just had a chance to drink one at Johns after our hop trimming. In short this beer is Victory’s flagship Hop Devil fermented with 100% Brettanomyces, which is a wild yeast. When the notice for this was released a few months ago I was very excited because its one two very unique beers just starting to be released in bottles. Plus I love to try anything with wild yeast or bacteria.

I have to say this beer is awesome, way better than I ever expected. The aroma definitely gives off a nice brett character and the head has just as much brett flavor. The beer tastes very nice with just the right amount of brett banyard/horse blanket flavor. The more you drink and the cooler it gets the better it gets. Even better, this beer is balanced with a great bitter finish, akin to it’s devil sibling. All around this beer is very tasty and well balanced. I think I may go get a bunch of this to store and drink because its that good.

It has inspired me to do an all brett beer very soon. Maybe as soon as May 2nd, we’ll see. To do that I will need to have a big container that will fit my stainless fermentor, so that I can acid clean it afterwards. I’m very paranoid about infecting all my beer with brett 

I tried this at Frisco today and have to tell you it has some intense flavor and aroma. So much so that without knowing it came from Southern Tier you wouldn't think that it was a beer at all. It smells very sweet, much like a creme brulee desert but is mostly overpowered with caramel smells. When tasting I got strong flavors of butterscotch, caramel, vanilla, and maybe a little coffee.

This definitely would be a great desert beer though it was a bit too sweet for me. The beer had to be sipped at first to get used to the rich flavors and sweetness, but was easier to drink once the palette got used to the intensity. This would probably be a good drink for some of the ladies who aren't really into beer but like strong flavored drinks like kahlua.

I'm very interested in how they were able to get those flavors into the beer. I would be very impressed if the majority of the flavor comes from pre-fermentation additions. There definitely is a creaminess to the flavor which I would assume come from the lactose additions, but the source of the strong butterscotch flavor is a mystery to me. Maybe simply the combination of the dark caramel malt, lactose, and vanilla are what provide the flavors. Assuming the label highlights all the ingredients (it may not), then this could explain the flavor partially because only the caramel malt would have been used to provide the dark color, no roasted stuff. There are some dark caramel malts available, so this is definitely possible.

I picked up one of these up at the Perfect Pour because I read about it on beernews.org. I'm in a saison mood these days, so I figured I'd see how cherry it is. Overall a pretty good beer. Definitely imperial but still drinks very well with no real overpowering alcohol flavor. I particularly enjoyed the subtleness of the cherries. I was anticipating something sweeter, but I'm glad they stuck to the style and made there saison dry. In fact, if the bottle wasn't labeled CHERRY I'm not sure I would have been able to put my finger on the flavor. It has a hint of mild sourness that I can only assume comes from sour cherries.

Below is a picture of the label I pulled from the beernews.org article site.