Ale on lees indeed, beervolk. Don’t try this beer unless you like beer. If you like beer, try this beer. It’s pretty wild. Kolonel Tripel provided this Unibroue offering—along with about ten other kinds of brau, some of them homebrew, that he and General German had picked up as Sgt. Stout and I were trucking out to the Kolonel’s place for last weekend’s brewhaha—and it was… complex, excellent, and never again will I drink it at the end of a night of drinkin’.

A rich, sweet, malty beer with roasted notes, a lot of body and good head on its full body (HAHAHAHAHA huuugh HAHAHAA!*). See how it says (well maybe you can’t in my smallass picture) “Ale on Lees” on the bottle? Well, yeah, it’s on its lees, which is to say sedimentary yeast and other material is left in the bottle from the fermentation process. But wait! There’s more! The fermentation process actually ends IN the bottle, making this a “bottle conditioned” beer. Kabam! The thing about this specific bottle-conditioned baby, is that you gots ta pour it out pretty carefully… if said sediment/lees get stirred up too much and make their way into your glass, the beer will end up with sometimes overpowering sour notes. So be warned, asscrag!

Very tart, very roasty, quite carbonated and sweeter as it gets warmer, Chambly Noire is a great beer if you (like, say, The Kolonel) enjoy Abbey or Dubbel style beers. But I say again, it’s not a great beer to sip at 1 AM after 4 hours of sipping (or… slurping) a lot of beer. And it was all damn good, complex, mostly high-gravity beer too. Which didn’t help. Actually wait, it did. But I still appreciated the reprieve brought from a case of mixed Mexican beers we drank in the pool the next day. Hey! More on those later!**

*that’s supposed to be me taking a breath… the “huuuh.” Not sure if it worked, but… like… now you know.

**which can also be read: “Hey, Moron! Those later!”