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After nearly a year long abstinence from Boozereviewing, I have been feeling the pressure to post up something. Consider the rust that builds up after a year of drinking without thinking. That’s the difference right? I have become complacent in my drunken stupor, not willing to use my brain while attempting to diminish its capacity. Hopefully I can shake the atrophy as I warm up. I probably could have chosen a simpler beer to ramble about in my return. Label description: “Extreme ale converging San Diego style imperial pale ale and Belgian style trippel.”

While ignoring the mirrored text resulting from the laptop cam snapshot, you can see the deep orange hue to Le Freak in the pic. Fairly cloudy, the “Freaker”, as I have dubbed it, had a creamy, frothy head that dissipated slowly.

The smell of this beer confirms its zymurgical transsexuality. Is it hoppy, or Belgian? Is that sweet yeast and biscuity bread; or fruity, piney hoppiness? Both I guess. Bats for both teams? A beer with an existential dilemma? At 9.2% abv, there is a little booze on the nose too.

The taste of the Freaker reinforces its tranny nature. Initially tasting like a well made Belgian Trippel in the St. Bernardus vein with its sweet, yeasty fruitiness, the Freaker then morphs into a bitterness bomb on the finish. The bitter finish reminds me of the bitterness level on Green Flash West Coast that is not achieved in many other beers. The warmer the beer became, the better these distinct components melded into a cohesive whole.

The texture of the Freaker improved considerably as it warmed too, becoming creamier and more feminine after initially being masculine and austere (I don’t even need another tranny reference here).

The only thing keeping me from throwing this cross-dresser back was the fact that I could sense improvement as it warmed. Not poundable, but not difficult to get through either.

In closing on a serious note, I want to share a conversation I had with the brewer of this beer, Chuck Silva of Green Flash. At the Lightning Brewery Anniversary Party about six months go, Chuck indicated that he thought this beer would be best with a minimum of a few months age on it to allow the hop characteristics to fade into the background a little more. The only problem with that suggestion is that I have no idea how old my bottle was.

92/100 on the Boozereviews scale.

(5 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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