Brewery: The Duck Rabbit Craft Brewery, Farmville, NC

Brewery Description: “The Duck-Rabbit Baltic Porter is deep, rich and velvety soft. A full blooded roasty character is balanced by complex alcohol notes. Strong (9% alcohol by volume) yet unfailingly subtle, this special brew warrants sipping and savoring.”

Brew Style: Baltic Porter, 9.0% ABV

Recommended Glassware: English pint, Tulip, Stein

The Ugly Truth: Duck Rabbit is a local microbrewery in North Carolina, so you may not be able to get in the Boston area. So…Baltic Porter. I’m not going to lie, I wasn’t even aware of this brew stlye until I started researching how many styles there were. Its defined as (via BeerAvocate.com):

“Porters of the late 1700’s were quite strong compared to today’s standards, easily surpassing 7% alcohol by volume. Some brewers made a stronger, more robust version, to be shipped across the North Sea, dubbed a Baltic Porter. In general, the style’s dark brown colour covered up cloudiness and the smoky/roasted brown malts and bitter tastes masked brewing imperfections. The addition of stale ale also lent a pleasant acidic flavour to the style, which made it quite popular. These issues were quite important given that most breweries were getting away from pub brewing and opening up breweries that could ship beer across the world.”

So essentially a really strong porter with some extras kick added to mask brewing screwups. Fortunately, it doesn’t taste that way. Its taste can best be summed as wicked f’ing strong. I’ve had beers with much higher ABV’s before and they didn’t taste this strong. Color was an oily block, with a thin brown head on it. The aroma to me gave hints of coffee, some roasted hints and bread to be quite honest. The mouthfeel was heavy, with a bit of carbonation to it. The taste was bittersweet at first, and then it all of a sudden just assualts you. It seriously suddenly becomes chewy, but it still tasted damn good. The heavy alcohol flavors melded well. The aftertaste was almost stronger than the main body of the beer. It tasted like…Jesus, it honestly tasted like someone melted a bar of unsweetened chocolate into a pot of double strength coffee, used that to clean the inside of a half empty porter cask and decided to bottle it and sell it. Even with the possible horrible image that may have given you, this was still a really good beer. Not for the most people I think, but if you like porters with a higher ABV percentage, see if you can find some of this or if that fails a Baltic Porter from another brewery. Well worth it.

Verdict: I liked it, but I don’t think it would an all the time beer for me. I’ll be conservative and give it a 7 out of 10 bottlecaps.
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