Fuggled Beers of the Year: Dark

Given the inherent subjectivity of the BOAB category, it is always good to be back on more solid ground with dark beers, and I do love a good dark beer. That said, most of the dark beers I have drunk this year have been my own. In the spring I brewed my annual dry stout, imaginatively monikered "Virginia Stout", for Mrs V's fiddle teacher, who hosts a St Patrick's Day party every year, and it is just de rigueur to have a session stout at such events. In the summer I brewed a dark mild, again for a party, this time a birthday bash. Going through my records for non-VelkyAl brewed dark beers it is clear that the pickings are very slim...so I will pivot and just mention a single beer from each of the geographies, and name a winner.

Virginia

• Tweed Dunkel - Selvedge Brewing, Charlottesville

Back at Yuletide 2024, I rocked up to the bar at Selvedge - gasp, shock, horror - and was given a bottle of Tweed, kellerbier style, in that it had been bottled straight out of the lagering tank with still a few weeks to go before being ready for prime time. When I cracked it open during the interregnum between Christmas Day and New Year, I thoroughly enjoyed it and partly rejoiced that it would be coming on tap once I was done with January being a month off the booze. If memory serves, this is double decocted, and all those extra Maillard reactions pay off in the silky smooth, deeply toasty flavours and mouthfeel of what was a great start to the drinking year.

Rest of the USA

• Schwarzbier - Bierkeller Brewing, Columbia, SC

Among the various lager styles of the world, schwarzbier is the closest to my first beery love, dry stout. However, I think schwarzbier has an edge over stout in the wonderful effects of cold fermentation and long lagering giving the beer a crispness that showcases the roasty snap of dark malts. Anyway, it was summer, and we were in Columbia, en-route to Florida for beach week, when Bierkeller had their Schwarzbier on tap. It was probably obscenely hot in South Carolina, but this was a beer that simply worked because it is so damned tasty, roasty without being acrid, clean without being boring, and eminently drinkable, so I did, pretty often.

Rest of the World

• Aecht Schlenkerla Erle - Heller-Bräu Trum, Bamberg, DE

As I mentioned in the BOAB post, rauchbier is one of my favourite types of beer in the world, I love a good slap across the face of beechwood, so when I saw Schlenkerla Erle at Beer Run, I bought a few bottles. Erle is another schwarzbier, but this time made with malts kilned over alder wood. Alder couldn't be more different from beech, deeply earthy, yet delicately sweet as well, paired with the roastiness of a schwarzbier and what you have here is a beer that speaks to the rustic peasant in me. I can only imagine how revelatory it would be from a stichfaß in the Dominikanerklause.

While the pickings may be slim for this category, the quality is far from wanting. I could happily drink these three beers all year round, but one stands out just ahead of the others, by virtue of being the confluence of two of my favourite things in beer, dark lagers and rauchbier. Yes, the Fuggled Dark Beer of 2025 is the magnificent Aecht Schlenkerla Erle from Heller-Bräu Trum in Bamberg - a beer that thankfully is still in stock in several bottle shops round here and will be finding its way into my fridge again very soon.

Fuggled Review of the Year - Dark

I guess I probably drink more dark beers than anything else, whether they be milds, brown ales, stouts, porters or one of the various dark lagers, the only exception is Black IPA generally speaking. Of the many dark brews to have crossed my lips this year, the highlights are:

• Virginia - Champion Brewing Pacecar Porter
• Rest of US - Oliver Breweries Ape Must Never Kill Ape
• Rest of World - Sinebrychoff Porter

Champion have been open for a grand total of about 9 and half weeks, indeed their official grand opening was last Friday night. Mrs V and I popped over on the first night of the soft opening and I loved the Pacecar Porter at first taste. Roasty, nutty, chocolatey and deliciously smooth. The Charlottesville area has a seriously encouraging new brewery to add to the existing clutch doing great stuff. Pacecar is, in my opinion, Champion's best brew and I look forward to drinking a lot more of it.

In May I went to DC to attend a conference for my previous employer, when a colleague and I got bumped from the meet and greet networking dinner as more potential clients decided to come than expected. With a sudden free night, my colleague and I jumped into a taxi and headed to the legendary ChurchKey, positioned ourselves at the bar and I ordered the 3.3% abv 'Belgian' Mild they had on tap, polished it off and ordered another, and so on for a good 6 hours. That beer was Oliver Breweries' Ape Must Never Kill Ape Belgian Mild, described as:

"English pale malt, dark crystal, chocolate, carafa 3, Belgian biscuit and caramel vienna. Bittered with Kent Goldings and Czech Saaz, finished with Fuggles and German Tettnanger then fermented with Belgian DeKonick yeast and cold conditioned with vanilla beans"

Or as I put it, bloody marvellous.

The bottle had sat in my cellar for three years before I finally decided to open it and try the first warm fermented Baltic Porter I had ever tried. As I said about it on Ratebeer:

Pours an inky black with a steady schmeer of light brown foam. The aroma is rich dark chocolate, with traces of spice and a very faint sherry note. Tastewise, rich malty sweetness and a riot of chocolate and coffee fight it out and yet find balance with a subtle but firm hop bite.

As ever I have to pick just one of the lascivious dark beauties, and the winner is the one I want to spend another night with...

• Oliver Breweries' Ape Must Never Kill Ape

What more could you want from a beer than to spend an entire night drinking it, pulled through a beer engine, and then be able to function the next morning?

Picture credits: Ale Must Never Kill Ape label taken from Untappd, Sinebrychoff from this All About Beer article.