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.

UK hun?

British craft beer is unavoidable these days. Most of the handful of talked-about producers have a presence here, though I can't help noticing prices have stayed buoyant as sterling tanks. Anyway, here's a few that I've tried recently.

London is the hub of the British new wave and Bermondsey's FourPure is one of the most solidly reliable of the capital's brewers. Its Southern Latitude, which showed up on the taps at 57 The Headline, is in the daring style of New England session IPA. It's 4.4% ABV and a not terribly sessionable €6 for a 400ml glass. It doesn't look very New Englandy either: quite dark and almost completely clear. The flavours are clear too: juicy peach and then a double dryness from high carbonation and a slightly aspirin tang. It's refreshing, though, which does meet the session IPA requirement of the spec. Not FourPure's best work, however.

Derbyshire's Buxton is a rare sighting in this part of the country and we owe the presence of Myrcia IPA to The Headline's management relentlessly pursuing it. This is another session IPA, 4% and claiming to be hop bursted. What's not to like? The aroma starts it off well, bright and lemony, but the flavour is very muted and consists predominantly of yeast. It ends up tasting as mucky and dreggy as it looks. Searching desperately for a lighter point I found a slight lemon buzz but no freshness and no real hop character. I guess the lesson is that you need a clean beer to get the benefit of loading all the hops into the end phase of brewing. As is, this was a huge disappointment.

Scotland is inevitably represented here by BrewDog. Their latest "India Pale Weizen" Nine To Five Wizard warranted a special daytime launch event in UnderDog. That was all quite jolly, and proof that BrewDog can still draw a crowd in this town. The beer itself wasn't all that impressive, offering little more than you'd get from a standard weissbier -- banana, cloves -- just given a little extra poke at 7.5% ABV. The lovely smooth texture is perhaps its best feature, coming with a very mild burn, hops or alcohol, at the end. I'm chalking it up as a definite positive that the extra hopping has not been allowed to interfere with the classic flavours as so often happens in poorly conceived hybrid styles like these.

Seemingly the only Welsh brewery that counts in craft circles these days (where did Otley disappear to?) is Newport's Tiny Rebel. Two of theirs came my way lately. One was a can I drank in Brewery Corner in Kilkenny: Clwb Tropicana. This is a fruited IPA, or "tropical" IPA, as the branding insists. It's pale yellow and smells of Lilt. The texture is sticky; the flavour is sickly, and there's no real beer character going on. I have now witnessed a pub customer working along the fruit IPA selections on a particular bar, so it seems beers like this are answering a market demand. This specific one, however, demonstrates clearly to me what's wrong with the whole segment.

Meanwhile, on draught, over at The Headline was Cali American Pale Ale. It's quite a severe beer: a chalky asparagus bitterness being the main feature, and all at the front. I waited for the middle to happen but it didn't really. It feels like there should be a sudden inrush of tangerine or something, but nope. I couldn't stay cross with it for long, however. That one punchy mineral feature is something I enjoyed coming back to sip after sip. This is a no-nonsense beer, take it or leave it, and I'd happily have another.

Dessert, then, and the dark side begins at Wild Beer's Millionaire stout. "Salted caramel" is your Brucie bonus in this one. And yes, it's a little bit sticky, though not overly so. Really it's just a typical, ungimmicky, sweet-ish stout, tarry of texture but with light easy-going flavours of vanilla and honey, as well as a proper hop bitterness. I was genuinely convinced it was a strong one so was very pleasantly surprised to discover it's only 4.7% ABV. I could have handled a pint of this no problem, though maybe just the one.

My nightcap is Eldon, an oak-aged imperial stout from Thornbridge. A modest one, though, at just 8% ABV. It smells enticingly of rich and thick churro sauce and lays on the cocoa heavily in the flavour too. The oak (chips, I assume) has been used previously for Bourbon but I wouldn't have guessed it: no sickly vanilla or heavy booze, a honeycomb sweetness being the only possible nod to the liquor. There is, however, a dry sawdust taste that doesn't add anything positive. With every sip I get the impression of a very well-made strong stout which would be a better beer with less done to it. It's still pretty good, though, getting rounder and smoother as it warms. Definitely a good one to finish on.

I'll have been in and out of London on a flying visit by the time this gets posted, so expect a report on further British craft experiences in the near future.