Great Divide Brewing Company

I picked up a bottle of Great Divide Dunkel Weiss this week mostly because I've never seen it on shelves before at my local liquor store. Hefeweizens are one of my favorite styles, the more weiss-ier the better. Dunkelweizens are an interesting take on the style, taking a richer and more savory approach to what is essentially a lighter summer wheat. The getting darker malt to play nicely with cloves and banana flavors can be a difficult task. Great Divide makes some awesome beers so I had faith in their ability to pull it off. What I found in the Dunkel Weiss was a bit disappointing, it turned out to be more Dunkel than Weiss.

Great Divide's Hades is a Belgian style Strong Ale that smells deceptively sour, less spicy than it should and generally just... swell. The Hades follows the long held Belgian tradition of naming beers after devils and the underworld. The flavor of this beer is a bit of a contradiction, being so light and fruity. There is less sour yeast flavor than I was expecting based on the name and style. Other Belgian Strong Ales tend to be a little... stronger all around. That's not to say the Hades is a bad beer, it's just a bit more mellow than you might be expecting.

Very first impressions of this beer was that it was just another heavy porter that promises chocolate or vanilla accents but ultimately fails to deliver. After a few sips though, my impressions changed a bit. After I'd gotten used to the oakiness of the Yeti I was able to better pick up on the chocolate flavor. The one word that comes to mind to describe this beer is bittersweet... The chocolate flavor is definitely more of a dark chocolate flavor, which isn't my preferred chocolate but it's probably the best choice for brewing - especially when there is oak involved. The bitter chocolate and the rich oak flavor go well together and have an interesting balance in this beer. Speaking of bittersweet, this dark chocolate and oak combination made me realize that while they weren't the flavors I was expecting, my expectations were probably unrealistic. I mean, would a milk chocolate oaked stout work? Probably not as well as you'd think...

I'll admit it, this beer was sitting in my fridge for quite a while. There aren't a whole lot of foods I like to pair with pale ales and given that this is a Double IPA I just didn't know what to do with it. Well, I've finally opened it up and I'm absolutely amazed at the flavors in this beer. Great Divide brewed this as their 15th anniversary so it comes with all of the typical commemorative perks like a special label and oak aging. The label is a bit of snoozer, not that I base my beer purchases off of looks but it just doesn't scream "special release" to me. Honestly though, it's all uphill from there. Everything else about this beer is absolutely amazing. This beer has many great aspects, you could almost call them contradictions. Contradictions of what the established India Pale Ale style is.