Serious pastry

When DOT went to Larkins, strong sweet stout was on the agenda. Three collaborative ones arrived simultaneously in cans last month.

They're all 8.5% ABV which made it tricky to pick a running order, so let's start with breakfast, specifically American Breakfast Stout, made with oats, coffee, lactose, maple syrup and vanilla. That sounds like a lot of sweet and by golly it smells it too, an instantly nerve-jangling amount of processed sugar triggers a deep-seated warning system behind my nostrils. Humans were not meant to ingest this concentration of liquid sugar in one go. There is a little bit of dry coffee roast too, but balance left the building as soon as the tab was popped. Pleasingly, however, that roast is the main feature in the flavour, drying the foretaste and bringing a certain burnt crispness to the finish. In the middle it's all about the maple syrup. That tends to disappear from beers once the yeast get to work on it, but here there's a definite woody quality suggesting they haven't managed to digest it completely. It's a big sticky stout but it's not a mess. You're promised coffee and maple syrup and that's exactly what it delivers. It's hard to argue with what's advertised on the label.

Judge Fudge isn't the first Irish beer to feature some sort of non-proprietary futuristic policeman on it, only the first to pass my way. The description in full says it's "A spiced salted maple fudge brownie imperial stout", while the ingredients list fills us in that "spiced" means nutmeg. Once again the maple is bringing those charred wood vibes at the centre of the flavour. Salt? Chocolate? A little, but not so much. The coffee is a big absence here: without its drying influence it gets a bit sticky and cloying. The nutmeg is not sufficient compensation, being barely detectable. This promises a lot but doesn't pull it off and ends up as an amorphous sugary lump. Dial back the chocolate, drop the maple and up the spices, is my recommendation for the next batch.

The finale is Chocolate Passion, a chocolate stout with lactose, vanilla and... passionfruit? OK then. The aroma is pure passionfruit: the sort of thing you get as a between-course palate cleanser in fancy restaurants. Not a stout. That's still there in the flavour but it's drowned out by the big and unsubtle chocolate: the very sweet and creamy milk variety (hello lactose!) and it doesn't blend well. I've tasted dark chocolate with passionfruit jam in it, and the contrast there is superb, but that's not what they've done with this beer. Two kinds of sweetness rub up against each other and it almost works but doesn't. I blame the lactose. The passionfruit syrup gives it enough of a sweet side without needing to embellish it further. This needs more edge, in my opinion, but if sweet and smooth and tropical is your thing, here's your beer. Full marks for the daring recipe.

I would not recommend these three in a single sitting. They're very much built for occasional drinking and can be fun to close a session, or a meal, with. Dropping three on me in one go was unkind.