Cigar City / The Bruery Dos Costas Oeste (Cedar)

Aroma: 7 | Appearance: 9 | Mouthfeel: 8 | Flavor: 8 | Overall: 8

Pours dark deep gold with off white head. The aroma offers up apricot, peach, pear and apple mixing with salty malts, a mild pepper note and hints of yeastiness. Hmm. The taste is full of pears, apples and apricots blended with notes of grainy malts and funky yeast. It gets both salty and a bit peppery to midway with growing yet mild levels of spicy cedar. Interesting.

Aroma: 7 | Appearance: 7 | Mouthfeel: 7 | Flavor: 7 | Overall: 6

You get a hint of the spices and fruitiness in the aroma and flavor, but all of that takes a back seat to the cedar, which is pleasant, but also too dominant for anything else to really shine, and therefore taking away from the beer as a whole. Pretty good, but pretty simple. Don't see the need to collaborate on this as this is what CC's Humidor beers taste like.

Aroma: 8 | Appearance: 9 | Mouthfeel: 8 | Flavor: 8 | Overall: 8

Huge upfront cedar aroma that fades into the flavor. I've never smelled a beer like this before. An aggressive saison. Once you get past the fresh cedar there is a nice medley of spicy citrus and yeast. Bright golden yellow, a touch tart and very quenching.

Aroma: 7 | Appearance: 7 | Mouthfeel: 8 | Flavor: 8 | Overall: 8

I wanted to enjoy this more....especially given the price...just did not do it for me that much. The cedar and pine/citrus hops worked well, but found the other stuff a little overbearing, mainly the pepper. There are 3 varities to this brew/style (Cedar Wood, Grapefruit Wood, and Lemon Wood). My gut instinct was the grapefruit wood, then was hesitant on the lemon wood....so just played it "safe" and went with the cedar. After sampling thinking that the grapefruit would be the way to go, but I am not going to spend another $14 to find out! The best part of this was the mouthfeel and decent hop finish to balance out the flavors and spices. Has potential, but more a "miss" than a "hit".