Day 14, amazing. It seems like every year the progress through this calendar goes fast. I always enjoy it and I am again this year. I hope that folks enjoy reading these write-ups. I find it interesting to learn about the various breweries and to remind myself about the styles. For the local beer scene, I’ve got some news I’ll be putting out tomorrow. Lots of things happening around town and great beers available from local breweries now!

Today’s beer comes to us from an Italian microbrewery called White Pony. It is a Belgian Strong Ale that has had a post fermentation addition of orange peel and coriander.

White Pony is in the Citta di Padova in Italy. This small town in the northern part of the country is only 92 square kilometres but boasts a population of 214,000. That gives a population density of 2300 people living on each square kilometer. That’s quite a packed town. White Pony is the project of the son of an Italian-Belgian family who has a passion for brewing beers in the Belgian style. Using Belgian yeasts, bottle fermentation, they make unpasteurized, unfiltered and bottle conditioned beers.

They brew a variety of different beers throughout the year to compliment their core beers. They focus on trying to be innovative while still sticking to some of the old brewing traditions. They even have a barrel aging program for some of their beers.

The style of beer we are trying today is a Belgian Dark Strong Ale. To compare, Belgian Darks are similar in strength to a Belgian Tripel but they don’t have quite the hop profile. They are more like a big dubbel and border on being called a Quadrupel. They are heavily malted, very sweet and bring dark fruit notes along with subtle spice elements. They are smooth, almost creamy, and bring a rich complexity of flavours that, when done right, can be dangerously easy to drink. Let’s get to it.

Appearance – Pours a dark amber with a thin, quickly fading, beige head.
Smell – Big caramel malt sweetness, candied sugar, plum, figs, and some real booze notes in there too.
Taste – That candied sweetness comes through right at the beginning before giving way to some of the more malt forward caramel sweetness and that dark fruit. The finish is smooth, sweet, and warming.
Mouth feel – Full bodied, smooth, sweet warm finish.
Overall – This is exactly what I’d expect from this style of beer. It brings big malt sweetness along with candied sugar, dark fruit notes and rich smooth and complex overall profile. There are subtle spice notes in there at the finish and this beer is rather easy to sip.
Do I like it? – I really did like this. I think that it represented exactly what it should and brought a beautifully complex and delicious beer. It’s dangerous, given that the nearly 12% of alcohol in it is hard to identify. I wouldn’t drink more than one of these.