O’clock Amic Ale at La Robe & La Mousse, Paris
Date: Sept. 18 , 2018
The Story— La Robe & La Mousse is one of Paris’s newest and best beer bars and also one of the most central — a short if slightly confusing walk from Odeon metro. It’s a celebration of local with a good selection of wines and spirits to go along with the brews. We were there for the beers, of course, and were not disappointed. We were impressed not only with the number of beers on tap –multi taps aren’t hard to find in Paris any more– but by the remarkable quality of the beers they offered. In one evening at La Robe & La Mousse, we tasted four of the 60 best beers of our entire 6 week European beer hunt.
>> We just missed Paris beer week, but were lucky enough to benefit from it nonetheless. One of the gems at La Robe & La Mousse was O’Clock’s Amic Ale, which had been brewed in collaboration with a posse of local brewers for the week. O’clock is an excellent brewery, but it appears that even they were helped by the power of collaboration. It was a wonderful sipping beer in a wonderful place in which to sip beer.
The Beer- The Amic Ale is a 12.2% monster that purrs like a pussy cat. It opens by recalling a hugely creamy French vanilla ice cream with extra vanilla beans. A bit of coconut, clotted cream and some herbs and fruits add to its breadth as it drinks. Overall it was chewy, nutty and silly good. Ellie’s note just said “wow” until I prodded her for a bit more and she struggled not to salivate too much in describing its clotted cream caramels with whiskey.
Value — good to very good. It’s hard to think of $14 for a half liter as a bargain, but you certainly get what you pay for in this work of liquid art.
ALL THIS WEEK– HIGHLIGHTS OF EUROPE 2018– Surprisingly good beer in “bad beer cities.” Prizes and surprises that we’ve found in researching our next book – a guide to great beer in European tourist cities, which we plan on publishing in 2019.
About these posts: We taste and evaluate over a thousand beers every year. The beers posted here rank in the top quarter of those tastings. Values: “fair” is a good beer at an above market price, “good” is worth the money, “very good” is a bargain, and “excellent” is a steal.
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