Duck Rabbit Baltic Porter

Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery – Farmville, N.C.

Style: Baltic porter

Serving temperature: 50Ë?F

Alcohol content: 9% abv

            The frigid Baltic Sea – that ice-covered habitat of grey seals and hearty Finnish sailors – is a fitting home to one of the world’s most warming beer styles. There’s nothing like a dark, high-alcohol porter to take the chill off of a bleak, wintry night.

            Welcome to Farmville, North Carolina, average summertime temperature 89° F (32°C), and, yes, home to this classic Baltic porter. Malty, strong and bracing, it’s not exactly the beer to gulp after a day in the hot sun.

            Duck-Rabbit Brewery owner Paul Philippon concedes “the conventional wisdom is that people in this part of the country will drink only light-bodied, fizzy yellow beer, ‘cause, yeah, it gets pretty hot down here.” But swimming against the mainstream is how his small, three-man brewery has quickly earned a reputation as a southern gem.

            Along with an outstanding barleywine and a ink-black Russian imperial stout, this Baltic porter is part of a trio of H-U-G-E beers that seem fit for a chilly night beside a roaring fireplace… or, during a North Carolina summer, in front of an air conditioner.

Velvety smooth with no acrid bitterness, it is clean, well-rounded and complex. It is a rich, contemplative ale with tantalizing traces of berries and cocoa mingle with the warmth of alcohol. Despite its forbidding roasted malt heft, the body is exceptionally smooth and easy on the palate.

-Joe Sixpack