Behemoth 2012

Three Floyds recently put out their Behemoth, American Barley Wine. You should be able to find it in liqueur stores around the city. It is 12% abv and 80 IBUs. This has huge flavor and tons of booze. They also released a barrel aged version. I am giving it a year to age before cracking it open (aging hoppy beers is tricky because as it ages the hop flavor gets less strong. You want to allow the booziness to mellow without letting the hops die out so I talked with someone much more experienced than I am and he recommended giving it about a year).

It pours out a hazy dark orange brown color... sort of a burnt sienna, with a nice light cream colored head that turns into slight lacing. It smells like pine and citrusy American hops mixed with alcohol... lots of alcohol. It is medium to heavy bodied with a nice amount of carbonation. So often you don't get much effervescence from thees bigger beers. It was great to get some good head and tasty bubbles.

This beer has a huge caramel flavor right up front. Big sweetness with a hint of roasted malt flavor. It is almost syrupy sweet. There is a great hop character to it all that balances the malt really well. I didn't notice it as much at first but as I drank the beer, the hops started overwhelming the flavor of the rest of the beer. It wasn't necessarily bad, actually I should have expected it from FFF. It was good enough that I picked up two regular bottles to age and the barrel aged version. I will make sure to post about the differences after giving it a bit of time to mellow out.

Go grab two of these. Drink one now and set one aside. This beer has a 100 rating on ratebeer and anything that scores that well is worth waiting on a bit. As it is I give the beer a 4 and I am hoping that with a bit more time it could be a solid 5. Check out my post on aging beers at home to get more details on how to let your beers sit right too.