Black Perle by Weird Beard @ Home with Helen

Evening approached and the last beer of the day was calling like a siren song to rocks I’d hit too many times before. It was our last orders, and a big Black Perle reflected my shipwrecked image – gold tooth, eye patch and black beard – reminding me of the lengths I’d sailed in search of brews…

“Are you going to pour that or just stare at it?” Helen asked, her question snapping me out of a Pirate fantasy and back to beer reviewing with all the subtlety of a cannon blast or a parrot caw. “My wine’s getting warm.”

Although it was her first day on the job my patience was wearing thin. If only we had been on that boat together, I’d have her walking on that plank, and for such an insult, I’d have her walking off it too – let the sharks write their blogs about and…

“You’re doing it again!”

Surrendering to reality, and all its problems, I opened Weird Beard’s Black Perle, a Coffee Milk Stout made in partnership with Has Bean coffee, and poured the whole bottle into a single pint glass. As its thick black clouds swirled, I uttered a prayer to Cambrinus and Johnny Depp, and we got started. (Finally. Ed.)

A thin, off-white head sits on top of the Perle, and its body is as black as a Guinness. The beer is bottle fermented, but you can’t see any of the sediment because it’s all black. Failing the hand test with absolutely no colours, flying or otherwise, my overly dramatic girlfriend said “No light escapes the Perle.” in an accent which can only be described as unique.

Unsurprisingly the aroma was that of coffee. But perhaps the special thing after tasting a number of coffee beers was that coffee was all we got. In both taste and smell, this is a mild, sweet coffee, very drinkable and enjoyable. No distractions, no hidden chocolate tastes or quadruple espresso blasts, it’s like a cappuccino with one sugar.

Weird Beard are one of my favourite breweries, coming up with very interesting flavours and takes on established formats, but always creating a very enjoyable, drinkable product. Compared to others I have tried, there was little mystery, rather just a straight up, does what it says, solid flavour, and this in itself was refreshing.

A year ago I had the pleasure of trying this beer in a different guise, calling itself the Black Perle Quadruple, at a beer festival. Out of all the beers I tasted that day it stood out the furthest. Called Quadruple, it was 4x the strength of the regular 3.8 which gave it a helluva kick. None the less it’s more mild mannered relation was a very satisfying, clean tasting stout with a single, strong characteristic of coffee.

An exciting new piece of kit we have here at Change from a Tenner, the flavour wheel!

COMPLEXION: Black body with an off-white/tan head. Opaque.

FLAVOUR: Coffee with milk and sugar.

INTOXICATION: 3.8%, taste is solid but not overwhelming.

CHANGE FROM A TENNER: Part of a box set from Honest Brew

Hoptart @ Home via Honest Brew

After the surprisingly satisfying Hook Island Red, we stay in the island chain of uncertainty in the sea of strange brews, just off the coast of the craft beer peninsula. Helen and I, sailing on the good ship Change from a Tenner, on holiday from blog HQ, finished up our postcard to Penfold and decided to plunder the Honest Brew chest once more and came up with a Hoptart, which describes itself as a dry hopped sour ale.

Originating from Fourpure Brewery Co. of London, this type of beer is apparently known as Berliner Weisse; a wheaty, sour style from Berlin. Characterful, intense, and sharp, these types of beers can be served with syrups to sweeten them or, as we had it, neat.

Pouring from the can into two glasses, Hoptart had a light amber colour and cloudy appearance, failing my newly created HandTest© (complex instructions: place hand behind glass, if you cannot see your hand through the glass the beer has failed). Interestingly the recommended glass for a Berliner Weisse is a Bowl, and much like its name suggests it is a low, wide glass bowl that you may otherwise choose to eat cereal from, designed to compliment the additional syrup (as if such a thing were possible).

Like two giant shots of “apple and “red” someone thought it would be “fun” to get, these are Berliner Weisse in full bloom.

Sweetener free, we continued to the aroma. I was getting sweet floral fragrances matched with orange, nothing particularly complex. Even a hand covered vigorous swirl could bring no more discernible flavours through our hooters (that’s noses to our American friends, you can check out beer ratings via breasts at our sister site, changefromatitter.com), so we got on with tasting.

Helen’s reaction was not so keen, finding its taste like a pretzel and unripe fruit, and not enjoying the savoury-sour taste. Being someone with less of a sweet tooth (or, as Mary Berry put it after knocking her batenburg, the most bitter man who ever lived) I found the taste very palatable, not to mention quaffable. If you play with the beer in your mouth, as is sometimes the way when tasting beers, the sourness becomes less pleasant, but if you just drink it as you would a more familiar beer it is very enjoyable. The sourness is by no means overwhelming, almost subtle, with the fruit flavours comfortably alongside, and no acidic or unpleasant aftertaste.

Overall this is a savoury, sour beer which would certainly be an acquired taste. If I had of known about the syrup suggestion at the time, we could have also tried this and I think Helen may have preferred it. I have never tasted anything quite like it and look forward to trying this again and other Berliner Weisse beers in the future.

COMPLEXION: Light amber, cloudy, large head.

FLAVOUR: Perfumed sweet orange on the nose, sour and savoury like a pretzel with unripe fruit alongside on the tongue, clean aftertaste. Sessionable.

INTOXICATION: A free and easy 3.7%

CHANGE FROM A TENNER: Part of a box set from Honest Brew