In business they always say “Know your customers”. Well, in the blogging world it can be tough to know your customers/readers because they can be miles upon miles away from you. Sure you can read through the comments and get a good feel, but this blog is still relatively small and I don’t get a ton of comments. So the best I get is tracking my hits and stats. These stats tell me where the person is viewing from, what posts they viewed, and what traffic source (i.e. google, blogspot, etc.) they found me by. That’s useful information.
Based on that information, something struck me as kind of cool. It would appear that I have an anonymous follower from somewhere in Russia. I’m not sure this is a single follower or a bunch of people, a man, a woman, I have no idea. I am leaning towards it being one person. This is my opinion because my stats tell me that I get traffic from yandex.ru. and the search words they are using are napsgetsbeer.blogspot. So I did a quick google search and found out that yandex is a Russian search engine. So someone over there is specifically searching for my blog. How awesome is that? I know, totally awesome.
Anyway, now that I have bored you with a long back story I decided it would be cool if I did a “shout out” beer review to this person. I wanted to go to Beers of the World to get an beer that was actually brewed in Russia, but well, that just didn’t pan out. So I did the next best thing I went to Wegmans and found North Coast Brewing and picked up their Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout. This one is for you, comrade!
Appearance: It pours very black with a generous light brown pillowy head. It is almost completely opaque, you can’t really see a light shone through it. As I drank it, it did produce some nice lacing down the sides of the glass.
Aroma: It has little to no hops present in the aroma. However, dark coffee notes come through instantly. I also smelled some roasted malt with some slight burnt notes. There was also some sort of funky, earthy note in the finish of the aroma. It wasn’t unpleasant, it was just different.
Taste: There are some strong coffee, espresso flavors. The mouthfeel is slightly creamy, but it is not too much. There are also some roasted malty notes. It is dry in the middle,its not too sweet. It is surprisingly smooth for being such an high alcohol beer.
Overall: I thought this was a good representative of a Russian Imperial Stout. This beer could also be pretty dangerous because it is so smooth, you don’t realize how much alcohol it has in it. If you like stouts or just dark beer this beer is well worth picking up.
Enjoy! Keep ‘em tippin’!
No comments:
Post a Comment