Beer Review – Stille Nacht by De Dolle Brouwers

Every year breweries roll out special beers for the holiday season. Here in Ohio the dominant style of Christmas beer is the spiced winter warmer, as epitomized by classics that date back to the mid-90s like Great Lakes Christmas Ale and Barley’s Christmas Ale. While I enjoy a good winter warmer at this time of the year, my favorite holiday beers tend to come from Belgium.  In the most recent episode of the All Things Beer podcast, we profiled four classic Belgian Christmas Ales – Chimay Grande Reserve (first introduced as a holiday seasonal in 1948, now available year round), Delirium Noël, Scaldis de Noël, and De Dolle Stille Nacht (click here to listen to the full episode). While most Belgian brewers add spices to their Christmas beers, Stille Nacht (Silent Night) eschews that tradition and relies on their characterful house yeast strain for a potpourri of fruity esters and spicy phenols. While this 12% abv bruiser might lie slightly outside the normal confines of Belgian Christmas Ales, it is beloved in it’s home country. In fact it has garnered best in show honors nine different times at the O.B.E.R. Christmas beer festival, held every year in Essen, Belgium. Here in the US it is not the easiest beer to track down, and before this year I had never tried this gem. Now that I have I feel compelled to spread the word on one of the world’s most interesting beers.

• Brewery: De Dolle Brouwers
• Style: Belgian Christmas Ale
• ABV: 12%
• Package: 11.2 oz/330 mL bottle

De Dolle Brouwers translates into English as “The Mad Brewers.” The brewery is located in West Flanders, approximately 40 km southwest of Bruges. It was founded in 1980 by the Herteleer family. At the time it was the first new brewery to open in Belgium since Pierre Celis launched Hoegaarden in 1966. Their first attempt at a special Christmas beer came a year later in 1981. It was initially a dark beer and quite popular by all accounts, but the recipe was later changed to differentiate it from their flagship Oerbier. The ingredients are simple – pale malts, candy sugar, hops from nearby Poperinge, and the house yeast strain. To get the rich malt character and the golden amber hue they employ a very long boil, some 5-6 hours. The house yeast strain also makes an indelible, some might say defining contribution to the beer. For the first two decades of existence De Dolle got it’s yeast from nearby Rodenbach. That agreement ended in 2000 when the ownership at Rodenbach changed, but the house yeast at De Dolle still contains some lactobacillus and pediococcus, and these microbes add acidity and other flavor elements that you find in Flanders Reds and Oud Bruins, which also come from this region of Belgium.

My Review

The beer pours golden amber in color, hazy enough to be translucent, topped with a cap of white head approximately 2 cm high. The head recedes over the course of a few minutes, but never disappears entirely. The aroma has a lot going on and is not easy to describe. My first thought was bubblegum, but that doesn’t really capture the uniqueness of the nose. A more apt description would be fruits that have ripened almost to the point of going bad and then candied. On the first sip my palate is met with a flavor profile that is both intense and unique. The yeasty beasties have been hard at work. Fruity esters demand attention up front and somewhat more restrained notes of black pepper and spice from the phenols appear at the finish. The caramelization that occurs during the long boil produces flavors that express themselves more like honey than caramel. The sensory experience is like a bowl of stone fruits (apricots and peaches) drizzled in honey and accented with a background note of vanilla. There’s also a subtle acidic twang that I think is at least partially responsible for the impression of overripe fruits. The booziness that comes with a 12% beer cannot be ignored, but it doesn’t overwhelm the beer either. The mouthfeel is full bodied but not overly viscous. The relatively high level of carbonation keeps it from being too thick but stops short of being prickly. The finish is clean with no lingering sweetness. The last impression is a warming sensation from the alcohol that wells up in your midsection.

Summary

Wow! I can honestly say I’ve never tasted a beer quite like Stille Nacht. The honeyed character of the malts and the stone fruit esters from the yeast really complement one aother. The phenols are not overpowering, which is not something to be taken lightly for such a yeast-forward beer. It somehow manages to combine the intense sweetness that you might expect from a barleywine with a clean almost dry finish. On top of this already full palate of flavors, the mad brewers throw in subtle but unmistakable acidity that takes the beer in an entirely different direction than any Christmas Ale I’ve tried. For some people that last addition may be a step too far. Speaking for myself, I found the flavors to be too much for my uninitiated palate at the beginning of the glass, but by the end I was really getting into it. This is a truly unique beer, one worth treating yourself to around the holidays. Merry Christmas everyone. Rating: 8 Rating scale: 10 = perfection, 9 = excellent, one of the top beers in the world, 8 = very good, one of the top beers in its style category, 7 = good, a solid beer I’m happy to be drinking, 6 = average, not bad but not something I’m likely to buy again, 5 = below average, 3-4 = poor, should be avoided, 1-2 drainpour.