ROLL OVER, ST. BERNARDUS: SOUTHAMPTON “ABBOT 12”

This is a mighty fine quadrupel from a Long Island, New York brewer whom we’ve praised before on this site, most recently for a FRENCH COUNTRY CHRISTMAS ALE and something called CUVEE DES FLEURS, a flowery saison I had last New Year’s Eve. SOUTHAMPTON ABBOT 12 is a tribute, I guess you’d call it, to the fantastic ST. BERNARDUS ABT 12, one of the world’s most renown quadruples, and a permanent resident on the Hedonist Beer Jive 75. I got it in the mail from The Vice Blog’s Aaron G, and now I’ve downed the two beers I was most looking forward to in his “package” (the other being BROOKLYN BLACK OPS). Well, we still have the beer with the marginally sexist label “WAILING WENCH” that I can’t wait to show my wife (what’s wrong with being sexy?).

SOUTHAMPTON ABBOT 12 proves that they’re being well-taken care of beer-wise out on windswept Long Island. It’s a very sweet, malty beer, and you could swear it just arrived off the boat from Antwerp, or Ghent, or one of the other two cities in Belgium that I can name. It’s a beautiful, dark reddish/brown, loaded with intense tastes of raisins, caramel and molasses. Imagine dark fruits soaked in sugar for days, then balanced out with deep, rich malts until near-perfection is reached. No question it’s a “treat” beer, and a real pound-packin’ parcel at 10.5% ABV. St. Bernardus himself would be awfully proud of this one, and I’m going to hunt another bottle of it down for suitcase carriage next time I’m in New York. 8.5/10.