Beer review No.4 - Berentsen's Sorte Får Stout

Good day. Beer time again. I'm quite enjoying these beer reviews, I hope you are too. This is the third one in the series on Berentsen's beers. I'm starting to write this just a few hours after posting the review of Rav. I hope you appreciate how hard I'm working for you. Apparently someone does, I got more blog hits in October than in any month before that. Exciting stuff. It would be awesome if they let me have adverts on here, but apparently this is adult content so no adverts allowed. Probably a good thing, if I had adverts on here you'd all be spending your money on weird stuff. Let's get on with it now.

Bit of an intro
Sorte Får means Black Sheep. I think I've heard that before somewhere. It's from Berentsen's in Egersund, the 120 year old brewery who brought us Rav amber ale and Skumring brown ale. Again it's a Norwegian beer so I couldn't find out so much about it from the internet because of the restrictions on advertising alcohol. I've bought this before, but never drunk it before. I've only ever used it in beef and ale stew and I think I made some cornish pasties with it once.

It's a stout, which is usually a fairly strong dark beer and was originally the name given to the stronger porters, porter being a kind of dark beer developed in London. Stouts are made using at least some malt that's been roasted dark. I'm not sure of much beyond that since the choice of dark roasted malts ranges from the amber malt, through brown and chocolate, to black malt which is roasted to the point of carbonizing. This one is made with crystal malt, roasted barley (not malted, just roasted) and chocolate malt so I'm expecting some deep rich flavours, which is just my kind of thing.

Not much more I can say about it, but here's the basic information. It cost me 29.9kr, which translates to £2.28, $3.49, €3.20 or roughly 0.0036 ounces of platinum. Again it seems a lot for an Englishman to be paying for a small bottle of beer, but that's what I get for moving to Norway. This is a 33cl bottle and it has 4.7% alcohol by volume. I bought it in the supermarket. It seems only Skumring, Rav and Sorte Får are in the supermarkets. I've tasted a couple of others too, but had to get them from the beer supermarket or vinmonopolet, the government beer distribution centre.

Packaging
Like the other Berentsen's beers I've reviewed so far this one came in a plain brown bottle. It's available in six packs, but I only wanted one bottle. Here it is.

A lot like the others

Not much to say about it really. It's just a typical brown glass bottle with beer in it. It seems unusual for a stout to be in this size of bottle, but then I'm from England where the standard unit of measurement for beer is the pint. Apparently the EU tried to make us use half liters instead a decade or two ago and we said no. Not a surprise when you realize a British pint is 68.26ml more than half a liter. Here's the six pack.

Six is a big number.

The sheep on the label is quite striking. You can see it nicely on the end of the six pack there. It looks quite annoyed about something. I think the sheep might be my favourite of the labels, but the owl is good as well. I wasn't too taken with the lady on the Rav label. Nothing wrong with her, just nothing special either. Let's have a better look at the sheep.

"P*ss off out of my field"

He does look annoyed doesn't he? Probably feeling territorial because of the mating season or something, or maybe he was bullied as a lamb and has issues. He needs to calm down a bit. They've actually changed the label since the first time I bought this for the beef and ale stew four or five years ago. It used to be a more realistic picture of a sheep and had a bit more of a classic beer feel to it, but I think this one looks better. The label design now is a lot more eye catching than it was. The grey and black stripes look pretty good I reckon. Still a little on the bold side perhaps, but the boldness of the design is growing on me even more now and I'm thinking of giving it a slightly higher mark on the standard one to ten scale. Going up from "not bad" to "actually quite good". Can you see the little dots around the bottom of the bottle? I assume it's braille and I assume it means "open other end". Not sure, I can't actually read braille.

Speaking of reading, there's a bit of a blurb on the back. I'll translate the Norwegian again like a linguistic wizard:

"Berentsen's Sorte Får er et overgjæret øl som består av blant annet crystal malt, roasted barley og skjokolademalt som sammen gir en karakterfull opplevelse."

That was the Norwegian, not the translation. I hope you realized that. This is the translation:

"Berentsen's Sorte Får is a top fermented beer that consists of a mixture of crystal malt, roasted barley and chocolate malt, which together gives a characterful experience."

So from the information they've given me I'm expecting to taste at least a hint of chocolate from the chocolate malt, some toffee or caramel sweetness from the crystal malt and something like an ashy bitterness or possibly smokiness from the roasted barley. I have no idea what hops are used, so we'll just have to taste it and see what happens.

Appearance

It's not black, but it's not far off. See for yourself.

You can see my fingers in the reflection

It looks pretty black, but it's not. If you look down at the bottom left of the glass you can see a bit of brown. That little line. If you hold it up to the light it looks very dark brown, but really doesn't let much light through at all. Not opaque though, it's definitely not Guinness.

Aroma

Initially fruity

Nutty

Chocolate

Hint of a burnt smell

A smell like quite well done toast made from whole grain bread.

A kind of deep savoury smell, almost like well browned beef. I mentioned I'd made beef stew with this before and it worked great for that.

Marmite made an appearance halfway through

A hint of treacley toffee. Not treacle toffee as such, but toffee that's quite treacley. Get it?

Taste

Initially a roasted nutty flavour

A caramel or toffee flavour which became more malt-like after a second in the mouth.

A bit of chocolate

A very noticeable carbonated taste, like the taste you get in sparkling spring water.

A bitter, well roasted grain type flavour near the end of the glass.

Aftertaste

Well roasted grains or seeds

Bitterness like you'd expect with any beer, but a kind of burnt bitterness with some sweetness. Quite like a burnt sugar kind of taste.

Not very long lasting

Mouthfeel

I haven't commented much on mouthfeel in my other beer reviews, just the odd note on body here or there, but I feel this one needs a bit more attention in this department. It was quite a lot fizzier than I would normally expect a stout to be, and that combined with the sparkling spring water taste makes me think it's force carbonated, that is the carbon dioxide that makes it fizzy is put there afterwards rather than being a product of the fermentation. Imagine putting it through an industrial soda stream. If this is the case I think they might have overdone it. I also think it's a bit light bodied for a stout. I think of stouts as quite full bodied, heavy beers, but this was surprisingly light. Not super light, just lighter than I would have liked it to be.

Balance

Not bad as far as I can make out. Not too sweet, not to bitter. Leaning to the bitter side if anything, which seems to be quite characteristic of Berentsen's beers. Although it's well balanced it's not quite as characterful (lots of flavour) as other stouts I've had. My old friend Mr. Tiffen made the best stout I've ever tasted. Hopefully he'll make some more when he's finished building his new brewery.

A few extra comments

It was interesting to read what malt and grain was used in this beer before tasting it. I like that they didn't tell me tastes, but told me malts. I googled the malts of course and found out the kind of flavours they bring to beers, and was quite satisfied to experience them all.

Crystal malt brings toffee like sweetness which I detected in the aroma and taste, and a hint of it in the aftertaste.

I don't expect you need me to tell you what flavours chocolate malt brings, but I should probably point out that it's usually more of a bitter cocoa type chocolate flavour and apparently can be more like coffee. I detected chocolate in the aroma and a little in the taste and it was proabably a contributing factor in the bitterness in the aftertaste.

The roasted barley gives a bitter, ashy and sometimes smoky flavour. This would be the faint burnt smell I detected and the bitter roasted grain flavour at the end of the glass. I suspect it also contributed the roasted grain flavour in the aftertaste and contributed to the bitterness there.

I didn't notice hop flavours in this beer at all, other than the initial fruity smell. The malt and roasted barley were definitely the main flavour contributors. The savoury notes of browned beef and Marmite would be from the yeast, either from letting the fermented beer have a little extra time with the dead yeast, or from a flavoursome strain of yeast. Nicely done.

The carbonated taste and the light body kind of spoiled the whole thing for me, which was kind of a shame. There were some great smells and flavours going on, but then cheap pop taste reared up, giving it a bit of a supermarket's own brand feel. I almost feel sorry for this beer because of it. It's like someone doing really well in their driving test and then hitting a pedestrian in the last two minutes. I think more body would have to come from more unfermetnable sugars which would make it sweeter and need to be balanced by some more bitter flavours from somewhere and then you'd change the whole thing. Having said that I reckon it could stand to be slightly sweeter, so maybe they could adjust it slightly and improve it. I'm not sure how, but if sweet toffee flavours come from the crystal malt then maybe the thing to do is just whack a bit more of that in. I'm no expert but I'd give it a shot.

Conclusion

It's ok. And I don't mean ok in a particularly positive way, more like it's not awful. It does have some pretty nice flavours, but for me the weird carbonated taste, fizziness and light body each brought it a point down on the one to ten scale.

Would I buy it again? I don't think so, at least not to drink. Like the other Berentsen's beers I'd be delighted to be offered one and would gladly accept it and enjoy it. But if I bought one I'd start drinking and find that sparkling mineral water quality and think "What a fool I am for buying this slightly substandard stout. Will I never learn?" Still, it's a decent effort for a nation that's quite new to stout, and if I'd brewed it myself I'd be pretty pleased. Final marks: Put it in the stew.

I hope we all learned something today. I'm not sure what's coming up next. I have tasting notes for two more Berentsen beers, but I was given the interesting idea to taste some Norwegian Julebrus. That's Christmas soda to English speakers. There are several brands available, which are all slightly different. Maybe I can have a taste at the weekend with my heroic fire fighting friend Mr. Nøkland, while Mrs. Nøkland is away in Oslo. You'll have to wait and see. It'll be like waiting for Christmas, but more disappointing. Don't forget to tell all your friends to read my blog, especially if you liked it.