Celebrating darkness

Following July's Boxtravaganza virtual festival, The White Hag followed up last month with an online festival of stout and oysters. I bought one of the packs, separated out the beers that were new to me and, eventually, drank and reviewed them. Here's what I found.

I'll begin with White Hag's own contributions to the selection, starting on a stickered variant of their Cauldron of Plenty oatmeal porter, brewed with Brazilian Serra do Cigano coffee. The coffee is very apparent in the aroma, not roasty or oily, but like a luxury chocolate biscuit: rich and buttery. You get more of a straight coffee effect from the flavour, though still lots of chocolate: a mocha or macchiato, with a caramel wafer biscuit on the side. There's a hint of fruit too: strawberry jam or maraschino cherry adds a fun complexity. The mouthfeel is slight so the flavour doesn't last long: normally beers like this luxuriate on the palate a bit longer; this one finishes quickly and unobtrusively. I can't decide if that's a good thing or not. It seems like they've avoided making something cloying, but at the same time it's unavoidably thin, and that causes a dissonance against the decadent foretaste. On balance, it gets a pass. Drink it slowly, let it sit on the palate a while, and you'll have a good time.

Mexican Hot Chocolate Pastry Stout seems to be in vogue this winter: there are a few floating around from Irish breweries, including this one in White Hag's The Dark Druid series. Cacao, cinnamon, chillies, lactose and vanilla all feature, for anyone not familiar with the concept. It smells first like cheap and artificial hot chocolate powder, the nasty sort you got in the 1980s which probably no longer exists and which never had anything to do with real chocolate. There's a little extra vanilla and cinnamon if you inhale deeply enough. I like the texture, it's creamy: warming and wintery. And the spice kick is very pleasant, bringing a different sort of happy warmth. The rest of it I'm not so sure about. Vanilla combined with lactose is extremely sweet, and it gets a little cloying after a few mouthfuls. The chocolate stays artificial and delivers more of a plasticky twang than actual chocolate flavour. I sat on the fence for most of the glass before deciding that, all things considered, I liked it. I'm a sucker for chilli and this offers a pleasingly hefty dose.

The fifth Dark Druid is Black Forest Pastry Stout. The brewery may have given up proof-reading their labels because, although the blurb says it's made with cherries, cream and chocolate, the ingredients listing is the same as the Mexican one above. The chocolate is very present in the aroma, as is a strange cyanide or solvent thing which I hope is only the cherries. That resolves into something altogether more cherry-like on tasting, though there's an artificiality about it, more Cherry Coke than Black Forest gateau. I like Cherry Coke so I don't mind, and actively enjoyed this beer all the way through. There's plenty of creamy substance but it's not cloying. The novelty flavours, while weird and wild, are mannerly too: in harmony with one another and not too loud. I think this fully meets the specs of something badged as a Black Forest Pastry Stout: you know what to expect, and it delivers. Can't say fairer than.

First of the guest beers in the bundle is a Welsh icon, but one I've never tasted before: Tiny Rebel's "marshmallow porter" Stay Puft. I've never known marshmallow flavour to improve a beer, which has a lot to do with why I've never tried this. Thank you, White Hag, for holding my nose and forcing it down me. The aroma is off-puttingly bitter, which was a surprise. It smells dark and herbal, like Fisherman's Friends or Fernet Stock liqueur.  And that's how it tastes too. The marshmallow effect arrives late, just a sticky pink tang on the roof of the mouth. Before that it's a mix of aniseed, cola nut and dry acrid tar vapours. Tiny Rebel has landed itself in trouble previously for its branding being allegedly attractive to children. This very grown-up beer is sure to put any of them off if they ever got as far as opening it. This particular grown-up, meanwhile, is unsure if he likes it or not. I appreciate the boldness, the extremeness, and the way it's not a sugary mess. At the same time, however, it's hard work to drink and impossible to relax with. I have no plans to repeat the experience and doubt I'll be rushing to try any of the variants.

It's into double figures with DOT's Imperial Liquorice Milk Stout Blend at 10.3% ABV. We're not allowed know what has been blended to produce it. The liquorice is very prominent in the aroma, in quite a medicinal, herbal way, rather than candy. The candy comes on tasting. It is powerfully sweet, with fluffy white marshmallow being the first effect I got. There's only a hint of liquorice in the flavour, and it's more dry than bitter, bringing a sense of highly tannic, extremely sugared, milky tea. Liquorice and lactose are not flavours one finds together in other products and this beer demonstrates why that is. While there's a decent imperial stout at its base, the novelty factor doesn't improve matters any.

Our finisher is Lambrate's Tiramisù Imperial Stout, stronger again at 11.5% ABV. I'm sceptical about the possibility of making stout taste like tiramisu, having had plenty of unconvincing ones over the years, but if anyone can be trusted to get it right it's the Italians. The can goes into great detail about how they made it: 4% lactose, 1% cocoa beans, 0.5% coffee and 0.05% vanilla flavouring -- nonna's own recipe, I'm sure. The coffee smells like more than half a per cent of it: rich and mocha-sweet. Then the flavour concentrates that into Tia Maria to begin with, before the chocolate side emerges half way through. There's a boozy kick on the end which again says liqueur more than cake to me. My favourite feature, and the one which does lend it some sense of tiramisu, is the creaminess: it genuinely does taste and feel a little like mascarpone. Whatever about its success as a simulacrum, it's a gorgeous beer, one which makes excellent use of its novelty ingredients while remaining every bit a cuddly warming stout. In last week's run-up to Christmas it left me feeling quite festive indeed.

The lesson from this lot, if there is one, is that pastry stout is a very broad church, with some sublime examples and plenty of total clunkers. I wish I could say what the secret to getting it right is, because I'd be sure to tell every brewer I know.

And with that conclusion I hit Publish, and then discovered there was another beer from the box that I had completely forgotten about. Praise be! It's not a pastry stout.

Mills & Hills is a collaboration by Fyne Ales with input from imperial stout wizards De Molen. It's 10.5% ABV and pours extremely viscous, taking its time forming a head and not really putting much effort into it. The aroma is a bitter mix of coffee and tar, indicating from the start that this is very much a beer for grown-up palates. The flavour is a little sweeter than the aroma suggests, however. I get a certain cherry-chocolate effect in the middle, and a sprinkling of muscovado. Then it's back to bitterness again for the finish: a pinch of fresh tobacco lingers as the rest fades. It's a gorgeous beer, hitting exactly the correct points for imperial stout the way I like it: big and bitter, yet smooth and warming. More breweries should have this sort of thing in their core range. I'm glad White Hag does.