The Sixth Glass, Boulevard Brewing Company

Okay!  So here I am, ready to conduct my first beer review!  Now I usually tend to prefer Reinheitsgebot beers, but my first post will be a foray into the low countries.  Well, kind of.  The beer today is The Sixth Glass Quadrupel by Boulevard Brewing Co.  Its birthplace in Kansas City, Missouri puts it quite far from the Trappist Monasteries in Belgium and The Netherlands, but it strives to pay homage.

Many people’s initial reaction to seeing this beer or hearing its name is, “What’s a quadrupel?”  Well, you can faintly think of it as falling into the pattern of the Trappist dubbel and tripel, but they don’t completely form a smooth arc.  It’s almost like the monks beefed up their beer to form the dubbel, mutated it into the tripel and then decided to go back to the original style for the quad.  No matter what its origin though, it’s a Belgian style abbey ale of some sort.  Lots of malt and sugar mixed with interesting yeasts to produce weird science beer.

Looks something like this.

“The eighties called.  They want their beer back!”  But we’re not going to give it to them because it actually looks more like this.

Malt is the big winner in this beer, but sugar definitely gets an assist.  I am reminded of a friend who always adds brown sugar to the pasta sauce when making spaghetti.  It adds a certain sweetness that you find mildly irresistible (is that even possible?), even though it may detract from the “purity” of the dish.  You really do taste the alcohol, but it doesn’t bite you.  I imagine tiny pockets of alcohol lining up and waiting their turns ever so patiently to enter your body so as not to be too much of a shock to your system.  How very politely Canadian of them!  The other thing that sticks out with this beer is the fruitiness.  I’ve read a lot about plums and dark fruits, but I detect a mysterious citrus.  This is probably the high alcohol content sharpening the fruity flavors of the yeast.  Finally, many reviews of this beer talk about how long the flavor lasts in your mouth.  The Sixth Glass does indeed linger, but I felt it more at the back of the tongue and in the throat.  Like rum... but better... because it’s beer... yum.

The name of this brew can be a bit mystifying at first, especially given that the twelve ounce bottles come in four packs.  However, after looking into it further, I am quite thankful they stopped at four.  The moniker comes from a Hans Christian Andersen story, “Taarnvægteren Ole.”  In it, a tower watchman uses the image of a New Year’s Eve party to explain what lives in each glass.  The first glass, which houses health, gives way to consecutive increases in the drunkenness until finally landing on the sixth glass, which incubates a small demon.  This demon looks good and is a smooth talker who somehow agrees with everything you say, but he leads you to do terrible things.  Once you’ve reached this demon, the only thing that can be done is destroy you and start all over.  Why is a four pack such a good place to stop?  Because the fourth glass harbors a pause for reason.  The last stand of sobriety on the pathway into the abyss of alcohol.  At 10.5% ABV, Hans Christian Andersen could have been anchronistically writing about this beer.