All through the month of December, up to Christmas Eve, we will be doing a quick review of a seasonal beer for our own enjoyment. You might like them, too. Or maybe we can provide a quick guide to the winter or holiday beers that you haven’t tried yet.
You can see all of the Decembeer 2018 list here.
All Mixed Up Together
Deschutes Jubelale
Winter beers follow a general trend. They focus on dark flavors: coffee, chocolate, dried fruit, spices like cinnamon and cloves. They are usually warming and filling with higher alcohol and residual sugars, and less refreshing and crisp. These flavors are often manifested in imperial stouts, big IPAs or double IPAs, Belgian strong ales, or variations of British-style winter warmers. Sometimes examples are barrel-aged or spiced to add to the ‘specialness’ of the offer. And really, who’s complaining?
Put a few of these classic winter beer flavors together, we get very amazing results. Try them all at the same time and we get Deschutes Jubelale. I don’t know what the folks from Bend are after, but the result is a beer that smell Belgian and ends horribly wrong.
Jubelale pours a deep, dark mahogany with wispy white foam. Tantalizing whiffs of plums and cherries rise from the glass. It smells like a great Belgian quad. It tastes like something else. Sure, the dark fruit – plums and cherries – are there, but those flavors are quickly beaten down by a burnt coffee roastiness the ends in a bitter confusion of styles and flavors.
I wasn’t sure what to make of Jubelale. It’s not my favorite. It left me very confused. I like roast flavors. I like dark fruit flavors. I’m not sure that I want them together in one glass. Neither a coffee quad nor Jubelale is my mug of beer.
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