The Swill: Stone Bitter Chocolate Oatmeal Stout
The Still: Stone Brewing Company
Escondido, California
http://www.stonebrew.com
The Drill: American-style Oatmeal Stout Brewed with bitter chocolate, 22oz bottle, 9.2% ABV, no longer available
The Spill: The most recent installment of Stone Brewing Company's line of commemorative anniversary ales, this beer was released in the summer of 2008, and is made along the same lines of extreme bigness that Stone has become reknowned for. The bouquet is every bit as dusty and bitter as powdered cocoa, the intense, unsweetened kind you'd use for baking. The color is as black and opaque as beer gets. The head is a tawny brown, darker than many beers themselves dare to be. The consistency is thick, making suds a scarcity and leaving legs on the glass. While many stouts feature a wonderful, roasted, coffee-like quality in the body of the beer, this one goes to the extreme, tasting almost burnt. The oatmeal, which normally lends a milk chocolately sweetness to stouts, yields under the brute force of the dark bitter chocolates, with a mouthfeel that's more creamy than syrupy as the only evidence of its inclusion. Finishing the glass, you find sediment at the bottom, testimony to the curiosity that such a thick liquid almost seems to have some part of it that's actually solid.
Says Bill: This is an incredibly well-done beer, provided that the drinker truly understands what they're in for. Many beers advertise the word chocolate in their names, often misleading the uneducated into thinking that they're trying something that's going to taste like Hershey's or NesQuik. Instead, they get something about one third as potent as this, and the bitterness is still a shock to their systems. Beer lover beware: the folks at Stone love to overhop their beers for maximum bitterness, and while oatmeal stouts are generally low-hop brews, the same practice still applies to the taste of this monster. Hops or no hops, this is a bitter beer you need to be ready for.
Refill?: Stone's beers aren't for everybody, but what they do, they do better than almost anyone else: 4 taps out of 5.