No rush

I've never been to Bulgaria, though it's high on my to-travel-to list for exactly that reason. I leapt on some Bulgarian beers when they appeared at Craft Central last year, but then they languished in my fridge for several months thereafter. I was clever enough to not buy any IPAs so the bit of cold ageing shouldn't have done either much harm. Sofia Electric is the brewery.

First is a gose, claiming to be "classic", called Kisel. Marks before even the tab is pulled for being supplied in a 500ml can. The extended refrigeration allowed it to settle in there and only my greedy pouring meant the glassful wasn't completely transparent. A pleasingly firm snowy head tops it off. There's neither nonsense nor novelty in the aroma, just a nice dry saline kick with a suggestion of citric sourness to come. Sure enough, it's cleanly tart; precise and angular in its flavour. The dry cracker base is a little soggier than I'd like, lacking a crispness it suggests but doesn't quite deliver on. That does give it a fuller than expected body for only 5% ABV, and onto that they've spread grapefruit jelly and a spritz of sea spume. Refreshing? I'll say. I drank it very cold and it suited it well. And then there's just enough sourness to keep this sour beer fan happy. Overall it's a cut above what gets tossed out as gose by most microbreweries these days. Some coriander might have been good too, but there's plenty of flavour without it.

It's an abrupt about face to the 9% ABV imperial stout called 6 Months Behind Schedule. My drinking it certainly is. It smells quite sweet and chocolatey, though not excessively so by the standards of modern imperial stout. There's something more classically old fashioned in the flavour. Looking past the brown sugar and powdered chocolate there's hard Brazil nut, blackstrap molasses and something more savoury: aniseed, cardamom and eucalyptus. It's a very classy number, unfolding gradually as it goes, its multifaceted flavour elements held in equilibrium and leaving me trying to decide whether it's sweet or bitter on a taste-by-taste basis. I got good value out of my 33cl, sipping and pondering like some sort of beer nerd. Well sod the finer details: this is lovely, expertly treading the line between the sticky caramelised sugarbombs beloved of small stout-brewing breweries across Europe and beyond, with the sterner, stricter ones from countries with a tradition of this sort of thing. 6 Months? Worth the wait.

It seems I should have bought more from Sofia Electric. I will be looking out for them when I eventually get over there.