St. Sebastiaan Grand Reserve is Grand Indeed

The first thing I noticed about St. Sebastiaan Grand Reserve is the kickass bottle. It's earthenware with one of those nifty little stoppers built in for resealing, though if you can stop yourself from draining all 16 ounces in one sitting you probably don't like beer anyway and really shouldn't be reading this.

The second thing I noticed was the impressive lineage written on the label: "A single batch of St. Sebastiaan Grand Reserve is brewed each year.  This limited edition release from Brewery Sterkens is brewed with utmost care to be one of the finest beers in the world."  We'll see about that.

For the sake of science, it's important to note that this bottle has been sitting in my aging rack (aka cardboard box) for a few months. Upon opening the bottle, there was quite a lot of foam-over and I made a bit of a mess.  Hopefully the cats will lick this up, because I've got beer to drink.

The Grand Reserve pours a beautiful golden color, a little cloudy with visible sediment suspended perfectly.  It's a really good looking beer, with little to no head and some champagne-like bubbling. It smells good too, very rich, with a hint of fruit, a little 'barnyard' sourness, and a bit of alcohol. Very promising. I start salivating.

The promises made by the smell come through in the flavor, though it is surprisingly mild.  Really, the way this beer smelled made me expect a much more in-your-face experience, but there's nothing wrong with a bit of subtlety. There is a delicate sweetness beneath the flavors present in the nose, adding a nice layer of complexity. It is pleasantly smooth and easy to drink.  This beer is living up to the lofty promises made on the label, which totally contradicts everything Americans know about how marketing works.

A little deeper into the glass and I'm picking up the definite smell of apples, and an apple tartness to the flavor as well.  Really interesting.  This is the point where I decide that there's no way the stopper on this bottle is getting any use unless it gets recycled in a home brew attempt. This is really one of the best beers I've ever had, and I am quite glad that it doesn't have the ridiculous hype of something like Pliny the Jackass so I could actually buy a bottle.  Now I just wish that I'd bought two.

*Note - I did go back and buy two more bottles of this stuff, but one of them had turned bad on me by the time I opened it. I think the cap was bad. It was probably the saddest moment of my life.  On the upside, I've stopped having to have therapy about the time I watched my twin brother drown while trying to save our new puppy, who also drowned, all while listening to the Cure's Seventeen Seconds album. I guess there is such a thing as a silver lining, even when it comes to a perfectly good beer being ruined.