Country of Origin: Canada
Price comparison: A whopping 3½ times what I pay for everyday beer.
Alcohol percentage by volume: 11%. That's not a typo.
Cute bottle/label? This is Unibroue's eleven-year anniversary offering. A 750ml brown glass bottle (with the still-amusing-to-me cork). No label; instead, gilt lettering is applied directly to the bottle.
Appearance: I'd refer to this beer as honey-colored, but something about it makes me prefer the Anglicised spelling. Honey-coloured. Dense but short-lived foam and little to no lace.
Scent: Orange peel, pineapple and crushed mint leaves, maybe a dash of anisette or fennel.
Flavor: Very bright and sparkly tasting at first, like sauterne, but deepens upon further investigation and adds a bite of fresh ginger and nutmeg. There's also a caramel-apple undertone that does a sneaky little play on you, making you think you've had less alcohol than you actually did.
Impressions: I felt like this beer was a little bit sweet and needed to age more, so I'm going to buy another bottle or two and cellar it for next year or the year after. This particular bottle, which, to my embarrassed drunkenness, I have finished, I shall convert into a candlestick 'cos the gilding is just so quool.
Having emptied the bottle, I do venture to say that this is a refreshingly summery beer and yet would also qualify as a satisfying beer on a cool autumn evening in New England, like tonight. Nice by itself anytime you'd normally find yourself drinking cider, but I got very imaginative and decided it'd also be a nice accompaniment to a Thanksgiving or Christmas turkey dinner with trimmings. So probably I should grab another couple of bottles for the holidays.
Will I buy this beer again? What, did I not make enough excuses for buying more already? If not, let me tell you now, they've only bottled six thousand cases of the stuff and only exported twenty-five hundred to the States. Buy some while you can, because when it's gone, there'll be no more. And yes, it is worth the extra money.
Rating:
4½ out of 5 cute beer glasses
(I will probably need to rereview L'Onze next year when I have a more aged bottle on hand. I believe that's going to be the difference between the above score and a possible perfect score.)
Reviewed: September 29, 2003
