Beer Review: King Crunch (Manayunk Brewing Company)
Finding myself with some time to kill after work and getting the usual “beers” Batman alert from my friend, I decided to walk down and meet him at The Warwick Hotel in good old Hummelstown Pennsylvania.
Get there and he’s already polishing off his Lord Hobo Orange IPA and the place is slightly packed (ok… very packed for a Tuesday). Apparently now, The Warwick is doing trivia on Tuesday nights. (They’ve also started up having live music and even doing a happy hour, so, their making lots of changes and becoming more like a real bar – which is probably a plus.)
Running down the menu I select Manayunk Brewing Company’s “King Crunch” listed on the tap list as a “Imperial Double Chocolate Peanut Butter Banana Porter”. An impressive long name and description, so, lets see how it is.
Beer Name: King Crunch
Beer Style: Porter – Imperial/Double
ABV: 9.1%
IBU: 38
Untappd Write-Up:
Satisfy your most aggressive cravings with King Crunch, our peanut butter and banana Imperial Porter brewed in honor of The King’s favorite sandwich. Both robust and creamy, your senses will delight with notes of creamy peanut butter and fresh ripe bananas.
Immediately, first thing you take notice of is how beautiful the beer looks. Its dark, beautiful, heavy looking with a gorgeous rich creamy smooth head that floats on the top very nicely. Lovely bubbles on the surface, nice foam, and a lovely rich hue to the head.
The aroma is overwhelmingly peanut butter with a fair amount of chocolate. After a few whiffs you’ll start to pick up the bananas. A bit of a ripe banana smell but not ‘too ripe’ or ‘bad’ banana.
Moving on to taking our first sip and once again, immediate peanut butter. Bam a mouth full of it. Its extremely smooth and as you sip it more you begin to take note of the heavy chocolate. There is no real bitterness to it despite it showing a 38IBU and not even the chocolate bitterness that you sometimes get. As you begin to work your way to the bottom the bananas starting to make their presence known and you have a wonderful mixture of the three – peanut butter, chocolate, and banana all playing out together.
The mouthfeel is spot on. Its heavy like a porter (especially a “double porter”) should be. And one with something like peanut butter in it. There’s no astringency that sometimes pops up in some of the darker beers (the poorly made ones), and the flavors are all well balanced and come together to make a nice whole. With no cloying or bad aftertastes either this is certainly a delicious beer. The ABV is high-end moderate and is well hidden with the thickness of the beer and doesn’t make it boozy or over-pronounced.
All in all a nice wonderful sipping beer to spend a half hour or so enjoying with good company.
My Untappd Rating: ****
Global Untappd Rating: 3.95 (as of 6.25.19)
-B. Kline
