Tonight's holiday beer tasting is another seasonal release from Great Divide, the Chai Yeti, which Great Divide calls their "Himalayan-inspired variation" with "traditional Chai spices of cinnamon, green cardamom, black pepper, ginger, nutmeg and vanilla." I love Chai iced tea so let's see how this plays out in a Yeti beer.

Color

The Chai Yeti has the same deep brown-black appearance of the Chocolate Raspberry Yeti Imperial Stout, maybe a bit heavier on the brown tones in comparison. It has a medium-dark tan head that sticks around pretty well.

Aroma

The Chai spices are prominent, mostly cardamom and ginger, finishing with faint vanilla. On the nose I don't pick up a lot of the cinnamon, nutmeg, or pepper that are supposedly in the mix, but you definitely smell this beer and think "Chai." Pretty inviting.

Flavor

The initial flavor is again all about the Chai spices, followed quickly by that rich chocolate maltiness of the Yeti family of beers. The finish is creamy vanilla but then ... there's a bitter aftertaste. And this is where it starts not working for me. So it's clear, I love a good hoppy beer so I'm definitely not averse to bitterness at all, and the finishing flavors here aren't even super identifiable as hops per se, it's more just a general bitterness and almost an astringency that I find disappointing.

It doesn't totally wreck the beer but for me if you're going to start with that Chai flavor and have a full chocolate middle, the end should just be smooth vanilla and that's it. I get that you don't want to venture over into cloying sweetness, which I can see would be a danger here, but dialing back the bitterness by at least 50% would have made this a much more successful beer for me.

Overall

This one's a bit of a mixed bag. I enjoyed it much less than the Chocolate Raspberry Yeti, but it wasn't terrible. I really appreciated the mix of Chai spices against the amazing Yeti base, but I can't get around the fact that for my palate the bitter finish was a disappointment in what otherwise would have been a pretty amazing beer.

Glad I tried it though. Cheers!