It is not humanly possible to leave Amsterdam without bringing with you something that you bought in De Bierkoning but, considering the city was just my first of a handful of ports of call I limited my buying to a couple of American cans for the road.
The first of those made it as far as Vienna; Caldera's Ashland Amber pours like a clear red beer making a valiant effort to appear amber and immediately smells of toffee with an underlying orange spritz. This is pretty faithfully carried through to the palate with chocolate orange toffee and bittersweet lemon zest making the lead impression. Thereafter, a sweeter juicy ripe orange and chewy malt thing develops, the whole effect being rather simple but quite enjoyable; one has to assume the workhorse here is, as usual with this kind of beer from this kind of place, the Crystal malt that props the whole beer up and provides a nice contrasting background for some fun, fruity and restrained citrus hop goodness. If this beer was around I'd have it in the fridge.
The other can made it all the way back to Cork before it was unceremoniously dumped into a shaker - alas, no amount of dumping, chucking or sloshing could inspire a proper head. The beer is a gose, or, more specifically, The Kimmie, the Yink and the Holy Gose from Anderson Valley, and it doesn't have much of an aroma to speak of either. What it does have is a refreshing salty tang on a rather plain and simple canvas, but this is oddly and uncomfortably skewed by a strange, soft and creamy apparition at the end and follow-through of the taste. On top of this, the tang that was so promising earlier on pairs with the bizarre creamy texture to come across as syrupy and rude later on. I finished it, but not without plenty of brow-furrowing and quiet 'hmm'-ing.
There was one other Bierkoning stowaway - you simply can't ignore a dedicated free-standing bookcase of De Molen - but that won't see a glass until the days are darker, colder and shorter.
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