Black Chocolate Stout

This is the first beer anyone totally geeked out on me over. It was a fellow faculty member at a middle school I was teaching at a decade ago, and he was positively giddy over finding Black Chocolate Stout in stores again (it's generally only available October through March).

Being an impressionable young lad, I went out and purchased a four-pack, and was impressed immediately by the full on flavor of flavor. See, up until then, I had been in college, and had been exposed only to the very finest light and chuggable "getcha drunk" lagers that New Jersey could offer. By contrast, the Black Chocolate Stout is a sipping beer.

My camera sucks. In actuality, this beer devours light.

First off, it pours an absolute ink black: a quality not well-captured by the camera on my iPhone, nor by the light-colored things that are reflected in the glass. I mean it - I got the sense I could write on parchment with this beer. In previous pours, I have also managed to cultivate a nice creamy head (with a color not unlike that of the head of a Guinness, but much more flavorful). Somehow, that wasn't happening for me today.

I smelled a lot of cherry and roasted coffee in this beer. Unlike many of the beers I've had of late, both of those aromas were present in the flavor beer too. But wait, as they say, there's more. I ended up getting that namesake bitter chocolate, also some lovely toasted bread and a lot of caramel. This is a beer with a flavor that lasts.

At 10% above, it's not a multiple-bottle kind of a beer (at least, not for me), and there's a considerable alcohol presence as well. I do find that as it warms up (inevitable, given how long this beer kind of insists I wait in between sips), some nice vanilla flavors peek out as well, and the heat in the alcohol makes a winter evening a little bit warmer.