Goose Island Brewery's Matilda

People who either think Belgian style beers all taste the same or that they are as bland and boring as most hefeweizens need to drink this beer. My brew sipping days are only about a year long now, but as of this moment, this Matilda brew is the most interesting, the most dynamic, and simply one of the most delicious beers I have tried in my life. It combines a strange mixture of flavors that, when described, might not seem to be anything but another fruity beer that most beer drinkers would want to avoid. But avoiding this Belgian would be like avoiding seafood at a crab shack.

Matilda comes from Good Island Brewery out of Chicago, Illinois, and it smells of a yeasty perfume. If you took a woman who just smelled gorgeous, and then sort of flicked yeast juice on her like holy water during Advent, you'd get this smell: a sort of yeasty fruitiness that makes the nose take notice.

Drinking starts off with a light yeasty bite, and then transforms into a sort of light orange syrup. By light, I mean the flavor texture is reminiscent of syrup, but the liquid texture is firmly beer-ish. Does that make sense? It's a hard beer to describe. I'll try a different way of saying it:  It. Is. Awesome.

At the swallow, the syrup taste vanishes completely and is simply replaced by a orange crispness that ends the experience like a real tight lager. Just fantastic.

This beer is robust. This beer is a dancer. This beer defies my attempts to accurately describe it. If you want something new in your beer life, this is one to try as soon as possible.