What they do to stout

It's a golden age for drinkers who like their stout with a little something extra in it. Everyone seems to be at it, and none more so than Wicklow Wolf. Their enthusiasm has even leached across to other breweries, as we'll see with today's pair of review candidates. 

Back in 2018, before Wicklow Wolf became the beast it is today, they brewed a coffee porter for their local roastery Java Republic. It was a triumph, and I was pleased to see the band back together for the latest in the hacked Apex series. Apex Espresso is based on their excellent core-range extra stout, with 6.5% ABV. An oily roast aroma starts us off: concentrated and sweet, reminding me of beans burning on Sambuca. It's gentler to taste. The coffee is largely in the finish, oily again and creating a long and slick aftertaste. Up front it's mostly classic Apex, big on roast of the grain variety with a pronounced green vegetal hopping. There's a creamy lactic side as well. As usual I don't think the "enhancing" of Apex enhanced it particularly, but nor did it ruin it. This is another high-end collaboration between the brewer and the coffee merchant.

The collaboration continues at Lough Gill, this time with Wicklow Wolf as the guest. The result is an "imperial pastry stout" with salted caramel and Oreos called, with more of a straight face than it deserves, Ocean of Storms. It smells of all the pastry: jam donuts, custard tarts and, yes, gooey chocolate biscuits. The palate gets treated to an extreme sugar rush, largely chocolate, but with a mushed mass of other candy, perfume and syrup goings-on. This is the other extreme from Apex Espresso: overdone, overblown, and while not actively horrible, hard going for this drinker at least. You need to be in the mood for something very silly, and the branding is inappropriately serious. I'm sure there's an audience for this, and it's convincingly Omnipollish, but it tired me out before I was a quarter of the way through.

As a grumpy old geezer, I prefer my big stouts, by and large, without the add-ons. Ocean of Storms is a headline example of how it goes wrong. I don't mind the occasional bit of mucking about à la Apex Espresso, and I'll readily accept chilli as an alternative or additional addition. That's about the height of it, though. If you want my advice on how to jazz up your stout, try hops.