Aecht Schlenkerla Eiche - Doppelbock

Suggested as a definite purchase for the man who likes an interesting pint, a pint so interesting that the name of it is almost completely indecipherable to anyone who is not completely fluent in German. I had to cheat and actually do some research (yes, I consider research to be cheating. Where's the fun in it?) This pours like flat coke and smells like pig grease... And it's already intrigued me to the point that I'm salivating at the thought of chugging the living hell out of it.

This was described to me as the smokiest beer the sales person had had in a while and that was enough to get me hooked. I'm relatively new to smoked beer but I get the impression that the idea of them is to push you to the very edge of what you can perceive as pleasurable, which in turn creates a whole new level of pleasure through the sense that you've actually achieved something by drinking a beer. A nice thought, though I imagine the truth is a lot closer to 'farmers accidentally set fire to barn but still wanted to make beer with the fire damaged grains.'

As previously mentioned, this dark beauty smells like delicious, salty, pig grease and tastes like someone poured molasses into an ash tray and mixed it with a candy cane made out of ROCK SALT! You can eventually learn to ignore the pig grease smell but WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU WANT TO?! What on earth could be better than the aroma of hog death and thick, gooey, brown 8% alco-booze? It's an entire pub experience in a bottle, beer and pork scratchings. It tastes like a bag of good ideas that's been left out in the sun to fester. Beautiful!

Food suggestion: A bacon sarnie or a lovely chunk of pork knuckle. Something greasy and fatty to accompany the intoxicating smell and cut through the subtly sweet flavour.

Drink this if you like: Working in a tannery or if you like the idea of hunting for wild boar whilst wearing a pointed hat that has feathers in it from birds long extinct.

...I keep expecting to find greasy white lumps floating in my beer but as yet I remain disappointed.