Northern Monk x Young Master x Tom J Newell – Ghost Venom
The first dark beer to enter my countdown and I have negligently breached my own countdown code by including a beer that has been brewed in collaboration with a non-UK brewery, in this case Young Master hailing from Hong Kong. As aforementioned, I will be doing my World 9 later on but this wasn’t in there anyway so no great shakes!
Before analysing the beer itself, I would start by saying I’m a considerable fan of Monk’s ‘Patrons Projects’ – I think the whole concept of collaboration with artists, musicians, athletes and creatives from the region and the level of detail that goes into each beer in the series is fantastic. I now keenly follow the works of artists such as Drew Millward and Tankpetrol as a direct result of their introduction via Northern Monk and without discounting the non-artistic Patrons, it has to be said that some of the can designs have been phenomenal ('Can of Whup Ass' by Fingathing was my personal fave!).
Whilst I haven’t loved every single Patrons beer I have had, which isn’t surprising as there are well over a 100 (not that I have had them all!), there have been real standouts, ‘3.07 Golden Whale, ’13.06 Gamma Vortex’ and ‘4.05 Jungle IPA’ to rattle off a few. The Tom J Newell series is proving itself to be one of the best to date and Ghost Venom is my pick of the bunch.
The artwork is dynamite on this one with, what I think is, a dragon at the top with Chinese symbols below and a voodoo skull beneath chomping down on the beer name ‘Ghost Venom Spooked Out Imperial Stout’, all captured in vivid and psychedelic swirls of magenta, chartreuse and pumpkin.
Contained within is a 12% stout aged in French Burgundy and Pinot Noir barrels for 6 months. The brewer chose to go adjunct-free, allowing the variety of malts and grains to bring warming winter flavours of cinder toffee, dark chocolate, black coffee and allspice and it really paid dividends. The barrelling imparted lavish afternotes of robust claret grapes, subtle oak and a hint of stewed cherry. Admittedly, I had been on the shelf about wine and port barrel-aged stouts before this beer but I will now be on hawkish look-out for them.
This was a perfect fire-side winter beer (surely Etsy sell smoking jackets....), especially for someone partial to a glass of red, and on reflection I wish I had purchased a second can as I can only imagine how well this would pair with a rib-eye!
We are closing in on the crunch with number 5 next up.
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