Peak pastry

For reasons best known to itself, the normally sober and reliable brewery Thornbridge has chosen to try and recreate banoffee pie in imperial stout form. The result is Pardus Banoffee at 8% ABV. It has one of those annoying sneaky labels where you have to read the German to get a full list of ingredients, and that shows lactose to be the only adjunct. Where will the banana and toffee come from?

That it's intended as dessert is immediately apparent from the aroma: it is powerfully sweet, even from a distance, radiating honeycomb and, yes, foam banana sweets. There's nothing natural about the latter so I suspect the ingredients list isn't telling the whole story. The sweetness is dialled back a little in the flavour: it's not as gag-inducingly sickly as I had braced myself for. It is thick, however, seeming denser to me than the ABV suggests. There's no toffee in the taste to speak of, though it does have quite an assertive bitter roast, presumably an echo of the base beer which they were unable to dispel completely. On top of that, and outlasting any other feature, is that artificial banana essence thing, hanging around in a most unwelcome way.

This beer does not taste like banoffee, nor even give an impression of banoffee. It tastes like someone has compromised a perfectly decent imperial milk stout by adding an unnecessary chemical. It's not ruined, but it's definitely not improved. There is a series of these pastrified Pardi, as well as an original straight-up version. The latter I would be very interested in drinking if I can get hold of it.