Non-fungible tinny

I'm a longtime fan of Wild Beer's Millionaire salted caramel stout, so when a brand extension passed my way I grabbed it. That's how brand extensions are meant to work. Trillionaire isn't merely an extra-strength version, however. This imperial stout is brewed with apricots and spices, so the experience is necessarily going to be different.

It certainly looks like a 10.3% ABV stout, and more. It pours thickly and the head is almost as dark as the very very dark body. Burning oil and rotting fruit gives it a post-apocalyptic aroma. This would be no smooth ride. The texture is as dense as it looked, to the point of feeling like drinking chocolate sauce rather than beer: syrupy, slick, and almost without fizz. The flavour proved gentler than expected. What I'm guessing is the advertised apricot comes across as black cherry to me: a slightly tart sort of sweetness. The spices feel tacked on, being a cinnamon and ginger effect that sits separate from everything else and doesn't contribute anything positive. They bring the dryness to the finish, which I suppose is balance of a sort, but who drinks something like this in the hope of balance?

Overall, I liked it. It delivers the basics of a big imperial stout with no clangers dropped. As usual, though, I don't think the brewery's attempts to make it more interesting by adding extra ingredients have improved it any. The chocolate yes, and they got lucky with the fruit, but not those spices. I would still like to try the beer I imagined: the chocolate salted caramel imperial stout. In my imagination it's delicious.