Borrowing adjectives from another recent entry to describe Mikkeller himself is useful: he’s the reigning rockstar of brewing, a mad roving Dane who probably never sleeps, and who is an absurdly multi-tricked pony — because you’d be damn hard-pressed to find any equally-universal descriptors for his beers. For every boundary-breaking piece of madness, there’s something like this: easy-going and relatively sedate.
But still delicious. I was a little nervous when the bubbles got away from me — my thoughts quickly turned to the parallel importing debate and the concerns about rough travel for ‘unofficial’ imports — but my fears subsided as the foam did, because the nose underneath was perfectly lovely with no worrying traces of funk. It was, instead, very much that lid-just-pulled-off Milo tin scent, all cocoa-y and dry and malty. Less rich and ‘big’ than the other recent Brown Ale of note, Rewired (from the oddly-also-Danish Søren Eriksen’s 8 Wired label), it treads a delightful line between easiness and fullness.
My sister’s daughter Izzy tried a little sip, too. It’s difficult to have an un-sampled glass of anything when she’s around, and she does have a pretty neat palate for a four-and-a-half year old — as a rather spooky party trick, she can usually tell you the grape variety in a random glass of wine. I can’t do that, and I’m nearly eight times her age, and am an actual bartender — albeit an evidently rubbish one, when things made of grapes are on the line. Anyway, she described this as “lemonade chocolate”, which I thought was pretty neat. I’ll have to see if I can teach her to add beer-style-picking to her repertoire.
Verbatim: Mikkeller ‘Jackie Brown’ 26/10/10 6.0% $8ish from Rumbles @ the Parents’ house. Mine was enthusiastically heady, which always makes a person nervous about a random import. It’s a gorgeous rich brown, with a nicely dry malty Milo-tin-ish nose peeping through the light tan head now it’s subsided. That dry cocoa flavour is in the face, certainly. Deftly skates between being quite light + quite rich; it’s full-flavoured without being stodgy. What with this and the similarly-Danish ‘Rewired’, let’s have more brown ales! To compare, though it’s been a while, this is less rich + massive, but focuses in tighter on that nice dry cocoa. But really, I should have another Rewired. You know, for science. Izzy said it’s like “lemonade chocolate” — which I think captures the taste + the feel quite nicely.
