Day #1 of 365 Days of Beer - Cricket Hill's Cricket's Nocturne

Welcome to Day #1 of my 365 Days of Beer challenge. For those of you reading this, my hopes are that I can help expand the knowledge of craft / import beer and introduce it to a more widespre adaudience.

So with that I give you my first beer of 2010:

Beer Name - Cricket Hill's Cricket's Nocturne (Fairfield, NJ)

Serving Type - 22oz Bottle, Served in a pint glass

Style - Dark Lager

Availability - Winter Release

Upon initial reaction to the pour of this beer, the brewery certainly lived up to it's Cricket Hill name, as I waited for some type of head to form in the glass but alas was only treated to the chirping of crickets. The beer poured a very dark brown with no ability to see through the glass. As you can see by the picture there is a very very thin line of head at the top of the glass. There was no lacing to speak of on the glass throughout the drinking session.

On initial tasting of the beer, the taste was pretty much as flat as the pour. I got a little bit of toasty malt flavor as an aftertaste, but that was about it. Hoping that this beer had more characteristics than what I had experienced so far, I figured I would give it a chance to warm up a bit. This turned out to be a very good idea. About 10 mins of warming did nothing for the glass pour (still very flat) but the flavor changed considerably. The flavor now had a more prominent toasty malt flavor as well as chocolate undertones and finished with a decent crispness. As the session continued and the beer warmed even more, all the flavors continued to increase and by the end turned out to be a very enjoyable beer.

So what did we learn from this experience?

If you order this in a bar and the bottle is super cold, order another beer and let the bottle sit out for at least 15-20mins (I'd give it 30 for optimal flavoring). If you have this bottle at home, don't store it in the fridge. Keep it at room temp until about 5mins before you're going to drink it, toss it in the fridge for 5mins, and you should be good to go.

Final Thoughts - A very nice winter offering from Cricket Hill. Something I would definitely order again. Unfortunately I was unable to find out what the ABV (alcohol by volume) of the beer is so I'm not sure how the drinkability factor (how many you can drink in a sitting without getting smashed) is.