Review of Monk's Cafe Flemish Sour Red Ale
Posted By Ken Sunday, 10 May 2009 11:58
At the 30th birthday party last night of our new review Jason, my boss brought this little number for me to try with him. Apparently the back story is that his dad purchased it and hated it, so my boss thought it would be fun to bring it and offload it on me. Since the name and the opinion of his dad pointed in the direction of nasty, and because we've just had too damn many good reviews lately, I was all for trying this. Read on and see what I thought.
Ken's Review
Taste: D Flemish Sour Ale, without putting too fine of a point on it, tastes like dank ass! The aroma of this shit comes off with a lot of vinegar to it, and I knew then I was going to be in trouble. When I took the drink of it, the initial taste lashed out at you with vinegar and a slight cherry taste and then seemed to compound on itself exponentially until it finally faded away. This one, whether from the sour or vinegar or both, actually caused me to tense and start jumping around to try to distract myself from the awfulness I had just consumed, and to wait it out until the taste finally disappeared. Holy shit this stuff sucked!
Packaging: B- The Monk's Cafe Sour Ale doesn't have a lot in the way of packaging. Monk's Cafe is written in kind of old school lettering, with Flemish Sour Ale underneath in smaller letters. A barrel sitting on its side with a monk pictured on the top of it is encircled by a wreath of leaves on one side and wheat on the other. A subtle packaging for such a raw beer.
Value: D I honestly don't know how much this stuff costs, and my sample was free. I'm still grading it because unless you are just a fan of sour ales, then don't even look at this stuff when it is on the shelf.
Drunkeness: B Flemish Sour Ale comes in at a modest 5.5%, but who gives a fuck? Even if you got plastered on this stuff the follow-up scenario would be so horrible and vile that you would probably wonder what the hell you were thinking even taking the cap off this stuff. If you can stomach this type of swill then more power to you, and if you can go to the point of getting drunk on it then you deserve an award.
Overall: D Man it feels good to have a bad beer I can rant about again. It has been way too long! Sorry to those at Monk's Cafe that your beer had to be the one, but we didn't start this site to beat around the bush on how we felt about beverages. Like I said, I'm sure there are people out there that like sour ales, otherwise they wouldn't still be making it. But for me, the fact that this was free was about the only positive thing I could find in it.