Tasting: Trois Pistoles

Today, I thought, “Hey, I’ll do an easy tasting! I will try one of my favoritest beers of all time, Trois Pistoles!”

This turned out to be harder than I thought.

Trois Pistoles is a dark, bottle conditioned ale from the Unibroue brewery (check out the website!) near Montreal. It either comes in 4 packs of 12 oz bottles, or corked 750ml bottles. I went with the latter. The brewers claim that this beer, like their other, redder, dark ale, Maudite, can be cellared for richer flavor. I would welcome an opportunity to test this out in the future.

Truth be told, I lack the skill in tasting to do this brew justice. There’s just so much there. I think that I will resort to bullet points.

• I bought it fully chilled, and poured it into one of our oversized Reidel red longstems.
• The head was robust and stiff, but did not adhere to the glass.
• The first sniff revealed the distinct smell of…brown? It’s such a rich, almost wine-like aroma. Barleywine comes closest, I suppose. Jill smelled clove, I smelled licorice (just barely), but the overall impression was one of A Lot Going On With This Brew.
• Think Imperial Stout with a much lighter body.
  
• The first taste fairly explodes in your mouth. There’s an undeniable sweetness up front that cannot be explained away by malt sugars. They must be using the trippel Candi sugar for the priming.
• It is richly carbonated with tiny bubbles that wake up your entire mouth with a song of deliciousness.
• The bitterness has the quality of a really clean coffee, and is hard to attribute to hops, so it must be the dark roasted malt, but...it’s almost a sarsaparilla kind of thing, comforting and warm.
• The finish is as enjoyable as the initial sip.
  
• It is the color of Coca Cola, and in many ways, just as sweet.
• Do not drink most of a bottle on an empty stomach, as I did just now.
• Try this, please.
• Also, Maudite.

Trois Pistoles!

Trois Pistoles!