It certainly shouldn't be a forgettable beer. From a head the colour of old ivory comes a gorgeous lightly roasted aroma and on the first pull there's the sensation of a classic old-fashioned stout: impeccably smooth and tinged with a complex damson sourness. After a beat the sweetness kicks in, flooding the palate with condensed milk and brown sugar. Then at the end it turns dry again, clearing the way for the next sip.
More than anything I'm impressed with the balance of it all. The set of flavours it offers are ones that other beers get wrong far too often. Even in less complex efforts you get stickiness, you get metal, you get lactic tang, you get watery, you get gassy. Herold Dark deftly side-sidesteps all these pitfalls.
It's a lager I could drink all day and never get bored. Well worth darkening the doors of Dublin's Czech pubs for. And if The Czech Inn has pork neck on the specials board, get that into you too.
I Love it and encourage anyone who has not had it before to try some.
ReplyDeleteah yes, but is it a schwarz or a dunkle? ;)
ReplyDeleteHmm. In the wake of the post-1945 Unpleasantness, I'm going to go with "neither".
ReplyDeleteSo, černý or tmavé?
if I remember rightly, the only legal term in the Czech brewing law is "tmavé", "černý" is more of a colloquial name and there is certainly no consistency in naming - Kozel's černý is markedly paler than Kout's tmavé.
ReplyDeleteIsn't it odd to have what amount to state-sanctioned beer styles?
ReplyDeletePerhaps, but it is always fun to pull that little nugget of information out of the hat when someone on a forum who has never been to the Czech Republic starts claiming that černý and tmavé are different styles, or worse analogous to schwarzbier and dunkle.
ReplyDeleteIf most people on forums had ever heard of černý/tmavé beers, even if they get confused about what exactly they are, it would be progress.
ReplyDelete