The Brooklyn Brewery is dangerous, or at least its launch parties are. The first thing you’re told as you step up to the Brewery’s spacious wooden bar is, “Hold on to your glass – it’s yours for the night.” Whereupon the evening commences with a first glass of one of Brooklyn Brewery’s utterly drinkable drafts.
Every couple of months, Brooklyn Brewery celebrates the uncorking of a beer from the Brewmaster’s Reserve Series. This fall’s beer is Cuvée Noire, a Belgian strong ale made with a complex combination of malts (including German two-row pilsner malt, British chocolate malt, British black malt, and American black barley), German perle hops, and
Slovenian aurora hops. In addition, rum flavors from Mauritius raw sugar and a whiff of citrus from sweet orange peel round out under the fermentation of a spicy Belgian yeast. The result is a deceptively dark, smooth, sweet and malty beer with subtle hits of chocolate, coffee and citrus. And despite being at 8.7% ABV, it is sinfully easy to drink.
A selection of Brooklyn-based food purveyors, including The Meat Hook, Tom Cat Bakery, Coach Farms, Ovenly, and McClure’s Pickles were on hand at the launch to ease an empty stomach’s reception of Cuvée Noire. Hors d’oeuvres included sloppy joes, pretzel rolls, bread with fresh goat cheese, spicy, flash-cured pickles, and cheese sandwiches flambéed on the spot with a portable blowtorch.
The Brewery is currently in the process of expanding its facilities and in the future hopes to bottle such local, tap-only favorites as Blast and Detonation. Blast is a fresh and hoppy, but not bitter, double IPA with graceful grapefruit notes, while Detonation, which the brewery calls “Blast’s big brother,” is a veteran Brewmaster’s Reserve. It is a robust IPA whose eleven-plus hop content lends it the smell of crushed herbs and a citrus flavor.
While the Cuvée Noir might be hard to found outside the northeastern United States, many of the finest east coast restaurants offer the brew on tap. And if you do find it, this intricate ale deserves some attention. As the Brewery says, “Cuvée Noire is big enough to take a steak to dinner, roasty enough to love Mexican molé sauce and complex enough to enjoy with nothing more than a good conversation.”
Lyz Pfister is a freelance writer based out of New York City.
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