If nothing else, this gets the pretty bottle award. If I get drunk enough I might make it into a lamp or something.

This Belgian style golden ale by Avery Brewing features this inscription on the label: “Salvation is discovering your passion, purpose, meaning in life. We brew. What about you?”

That makes me smile. I like these people.

So here comes the moment of truth. I apply the opener to the cap and carefully pop it off. I take a long reverent sniff. It smells of yeast, strong hops, and a low sweet undertone of cereal.

Putting the bottle to my lips, I let the golden brew slide into my mouth. The bubbling liquid cascades and swirls around my tongue, crashing waves of flavor. This first sip is so good that my eyes go wide.

I think the technical term is “Wow!”

There’s strong fruit overtones with a clear flash of peach. The hops sing a loud and crystalline church chorus of Hallelujah, fading into the rich warm baritone harmonics of the malts. It’s all Gregorian chants from here, with overtones of an angelic woman’s choir. The fruitiness fades to the point where, a third the way through the bottle, it’s nothing but an echo.

I’m only early into it, but I’m almost tempted to out and out declare this the Beer of God right now.

It just goes to show that you don’t have to go to church to find salvation. I found it in a bottle at my local Beer Heaven. This is the key contention of the fantasy novel I’m working on — it was beer, not wine, served at the last supper.

Jesus didn’t turn water into wine. That’s an error in translation. He, like most of the priests at the time, turned water into beer. Brewing was considered a holy art.

As far as I’m concerned it still is.

As holy this beer might be, however, the long term satisfaction has slid a bit. It’s a big bottle and when sipping it takes a long time to finish. By the end it leaves you with a toasty, almost woody bitterness that is quite warm and pleasant, but not anywhere near as spectacular as the beginning.

Still, it made it easily as a Holy Beer contender, weighing in at a highly respectable 7.9 on the Holy Grail scale.

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