Crabtree Golden 8

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

It pours a burnt-orange/amber with no head retention and sparse lacing. A mildly sweet aroma of bready malts, light hops, yeast, orange-citrus, and mild spice. The mouthfeel is smmoth and rich. Flavors of sweet and bready malts, hops, orange/citrus, light apricot/peach, and a good mix of spices.

Aroma: 6 | Appearance: 7 | Mouthfeel: 6 | Flavor: 7 | Overall: 5

Sampled March 2009
A regular pour into my 25cl tulip glass produces two-fingers of lightly tanned froth. The beer is quite a bit darker than I would expect from a Golden Ale and has a reddish, full amber color to it. When held up to the light the beer shows a lightly hazed, pale amber hue with lots of carbonation that seems to meander up through a beer that is viscous. The aroma has a certain sweetness to it that accentuates notes of ripe pear, some tart plum as well as some caramelized grain notes. There is also a lightly toasted, biscuit like maltiness to this beer as well as a bit of sweet-tea crystal malt character. There is a light spiciness here that reminds me of wild flower, black pepper and perhaps a touch of ginger.

Sweet tasting and full bodied, this beer gets sweeter as the beer rolls across the tongue and it is quite heavy bodied for a beer of this style. This has a creamy, viscous texture to it that seems a bit out of place. Having said that, this beer is certainly not cloyingly sweet or stickily heavy bodied, I was just expecting something a bit lighter and drier (not to mention actually golden colored). This is quite malty up front with notes of sweet grain, toasted whole grain cracker notes, and a certain, seemingly caramel malt influenced, sweet-tea like flavor. The finish has a bit of spiciness to it that tries to balance the up front malt and sweetness with some flavors of white pepper, something a bit like spicy oak, some lemon-ginger as well as an earthy spiciness that reminds me a bit of coriander.

This is a fascinating attempt at a Belgian Style Golden Ale, really makes you wonder what the person who put together the recipe was thinking; this is way too dark, a bit too sweet, and a bit too heavy bodied to be a great example of the style. Not a bad beer, in fact I would likely have enjoyed it a bit more if the label hadn’t stated that this was a “Belgian Style Golden Ale,” as it is though, I definitely wishing I had a good example of the style in my glass instead of what I had.