Chimay Cinq Cents

Christmas is over for another year. My sister and brother-in-law gave me one of the best presents a beer fanatic (aficionado?) (addict?) could ever want: Two wine boxes stuffed full of beers from around the world. So I'll be trying to drink it as fast as I can and blogging my thoughts. Some of the bottles/cans are ones which I've tried before, some I've never heard of before, and some are beers from breweries that I was desperate to try but could never find.

 I've been drinking too many tripels lately.  And it's a style that I'm starting to not enjoy terribly much.  So, I thought I should try another. :)  This time it's a tripel from the brewery of one of my favourite beers (Chimay Premiere).  I managed to pick up this bottle in Phoenix (thanks BevMo!), so little chance of finding it in Manitoba.  It comes in a 750mL brown bottle with a cork top.  At 8% alcohol/vol, it's no slouch.

When opened, it began to foam up.  I barely had a chance to give the bottle a whiff (it had a spicy aroma) before I had to start pouring.  It formed a ridiculously huge head.  I'm talking 80% head, 20% beer.  I'm not sure if that meant the bottle was bad, or just because the bottle had been shaken in transit from Phoenix to Winnipeg (although it had rested in my basement for over a month since).  The head took a while to go down, leaving behind the typical Belgian lacing on the glass.  There was a lot of sediment in the beer, so much that you couldn't see through it.  Despite the sediment, the beer had a golden colour (darker in the middle due to clouding).  The bubbles were unevenly dispersed in the beer, with some parts bubbling up with ridiculous amounts of tiny bubbles and other parts of the beer flat.  It was a very interesting phenomenon.

The first sip was spicy.  The beer started off very smooth, but then the warmth kicked in.  There was a bit of a sharp feel in the mouth from the carbonation.  There was very little bitter aftertaste.  Overall, I would say this beer was neither sweet nor bitter.  It was certainly one of the easiest to drink tripels I've tried.  As far as tripels go, I think this one is my favourite, but I still haven't changed my mind on the beer style.