Tasting Notes: Brewdog: Alpha Dog

Brewdog: Alpha Dog (Scotland: Bitter : 4.5% ABV)

Visual: Black cherry red with a small toffee hued bubbled head.

Nose: Dry maltiness and raisins. Slight flour dust.

Body: Good bitterness. Malt chocolate. Fig rolls. Pineapple, black cherry, – stones and all. Mixes in a touch of glacier cherries at times. Toffee.

Finish: Figs and dry bitter hoppiness. Slight fresh pink grapefruit. Malt chocolate. White grape sweetness. Mandarin orange.

Conclusion:  I’ve become quite partial to this beer over the past few nights. It’s not a showy little number, but it still has a lot going for it.

The base seems quite dark fruit and malt chocolate with moderate bitterness. Smoothing but simple. Then comes the decision to layer over it some fresh citrus hops. It created quite the taste bud conundrum between soothing and freshness. Combined with the comparatively restrained abv and it seems to be a good beer to while away the hours with.

I’m surprised this hasn’t had a wider release. The hop prickle isn’t overpowering but puts a nice capstone to the malt base. It does seem to be a beer of balance in all things. In fact, it feels like the more restrained cousin of Pink Elephants Mammoth which I tried recently. It has the same soothing to power mash up.

In fact, the restrained nature may be why Brewdog haven’t gone bigger with this one for distribution. It goes pretty much against their standard shtick by being pretty easy going. It plays lots of flavour, cherries, figs or raisins, pineapple hops, but it is holding it all in. A very pleasant beer to relax with.

Background: Normally only available in the Norwegian market , got a chance to grab this recently so picked up a chunk of bottles. There was a cask version at 3.8% in the UK but Brewdog moving away from cask seems to have killed that one. A pity. As always I am not an unbiased actor on Brewdog beers.