Flying Dog Kerberos Tripel

By on August 25, 2008 @ 9 PM (1 Comment)

Thursday Night Lights time here at The BeerFathers – meaning a Father and Son Beer Love review. For our prime time performance we’ve got the Flying Dog Kerberos Tripel in the spotlight. As you know Flying Dog makes a good variety of beers and we love just about every one of them. They’re consistently in the upper half of our ratings for good reason. The Kerberos Tripel, though good, misses the mark a bit.

For the Kerberos we decided to use a tulip glass and this 12 ounce bottle conditioned puppy came in with a temperature of 50.5 F and an ABV of 8.5%. Our initial pour gave us a small 3/4″ fizzy white head that dissipated so quickly we almost didn’t have time to figure out how it looked (we maybe should have used a different glass). There wasn’t any head lacing to speak of and the body clarity was a sparkling clear golden color, thanks to the lively carbonation. Towards the end when we got to the yeast we got a bit of haze on the pour.

The initial aromas came in with honey, straw, floral, grass, citrus (lemon mostly), alcohol, spices and some mild fruits – pear and a few other light ones we couldn’t put our finger on. It’s a really nice bouquet of smells – like a hefeweizen on steroids. The flavors come in with honey, straw, citrus (again mostly lemon), spices and pear, but also add a peach flavor to the fray. You get a slight alcohol in the taste as it warms up. You also get some nice fruit notes and a peach tartness is in the taste. They use some candy sugar in the brewing process from what we’ve read to give you some of the sweetness.

The initial flavor notes are a moderate sweet and a light bitter, which move in the finish to a light sweet, moderate bitter and a light saltiness. The finish is about average in duration and there’s no body lacing as we drink it down. The mouthfeel is a bit hard to discern – a bit oily but a bit dry on the finish. The tongue hit is on the back of the tongue. On our malt to hop scale it comes in 2 clicks to the right of balanced on the hoppy side.

For our bottom line notes we get a yes for drinkable and repeatable, a so-so on the balance and a no to harmony, memorable, wow factor and buy again. It’s really kind of light as trippels go. It’s definitely not as good as some of the other trippels we’ve done (forget the obvious ones from Belgium which are great, it’s not even as good as the New Belgium Trippel made in Fort Collins, Colorado). It’s a little too hoppy for our taste (even though the IBUs rate in at 27) and just doesn’t have the balance and harmony that we like in a trippel.

Our overall take – it’s an American imitation of a good Belgian trippel ale. It’s a bit off though and doesn’t quite pull it off. There’s better trippels on the market for both price and taste. Flying Dog puts out a lot of great beers, this one just misses the mark a bit. Maybe it’s the extra “P” they left out of Trippel? Who knows?

Flying Dog Kerberos Tripel Rating: 5 out of 10 (?)


1 Comment (Add Your Comments)

  1. barbara dwyer says:

    do u hae red dog beer for me to pyrchace from u barbara dwyer

Add Your Comments






(Note: You need to have both JavaScript and cookies enabled on your web browser to post a comment. Sorry, but it cuts way down on spam!)



«
»