Up all night

We don't get new beers from The Porterhouse very often. Since the last big rebrand a couple of years ago the only thing of note was their Around the Clock winter imperial stout, so it was a pleasant surprise to find another imperial one arriving mid-year: SLVRSKIN, a 13% ABV job with added coffee and aged in bourbon barrels. The description mentions that it gets a 24-hour boil so I suspect that the base recipe here is Around the Clock itself, or a close relation. No harm.

It pours as thickly as one might expect, a dense black colour with a dark tan topping. There's a lot of bourbon in the aroma, as well as a slightly off-putting autolytic umami tang. The predominant flavour is alcohol, showing all the heat of a spirit or fortified wine without really bringing much flavour complexity with it. Chocolate and coffee are mere traces, and there's surprisingly little sign of the bourbon, given how strongly it smells of it. 

A full day of boiling followed by 9 months of maturation means this wasn't a simple process to create but the effort hasn't really paid off, in my opinion. The fundamentals of imperial stout are missing, though I couldn't say whether that's the fault of the base recipe, the extra enhancements, or my palate. Either way, it was a disappointing experience. The beer improves a little as it warms but never quite makes it all the way to what I wanted it to be.