Happy New Year!

Longtime readers (can we say that after only a year?) of Beers and Ears know we have an affinity for Unibroue and have reviewed many of their beers. Le Cellier in the Canada pavilion is the unofficial home of Unibroue at Walt Disney World and we continue to lament its lack of availability in the rest of the Canada pavilion, especially after a few were temporarily freed from their Le Cellier bonds for the Food and Wine Festival.

Don-de-Dieu means "Gift of God" in French, and the ale is named after a sailing ship called the Don-de-Dieu. The explorer Samuel de Champlain sailed on the ship from France to Canada and founded Quebec upon his arrival in 1608.

The Unibroue website's section for Don-de-Dieu contains plenty of information on the beer as well as recipes to use the beer in. Personally, I think I'd rather just drink the beer, but if you'd like to cook with it, there you go.

Don-de-Dieu is a Belgian strong ale. It's a bright golden orange color with a white head. The primary scent is a wheat, but has a little spice in the nose as well. The first taste is a sweet one, but a spicy bitterness joins in soon afterward. It has an orange flavor in there also. The 9% ABV is hidden well, with just a hint of a bite. Carbonation is light, but refreshing.

With six Unibroue brews at Le Cellier, it would be possible to have a (somewhat expensive) tasting session of all six of these beers. Then again, $6.75 per beer doesn't seem that outrageous; a 750 ml bottle of Don-de-Dieu is about $8.50 at the local liquor store. A US pint is approximately 473 ml, so a pint costs $5.36 when purchased at the store. The Disney price is only $1.39 more. Of course, Disney probably gets the beer at a cheaper price and Disney has to recover all its costs and still make money, but it doesn't seem that Disney is ridiculously overcharging.

Something else I'd like to see is a sampler of all six beers (or two samplers of three beers each if that's not feasible). As far as I know, this doesn't exist at Le Cellier. If it does, feel free to tell me I'm an idiot for not knowing.