Stout - Fruited Or Flavored
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Copyright 2019, 2020, 2021. Laurence C. Hatch. All Rights Resevered. STOUT - FRUITED OR FLAVORED Stouts are widely augmented with oatmeal and lactose or milk sugar. That's traditional and regular stuff. This section includes fruit, spices, herbs, candy, chocolate, coffee, and other flavored items. Barrel-aged stouts are a separate file in the encyclopedia but for convenience but those are basic, unflavored stouts except adding flavor from the wood. This file has those flavored fruit the forementioned fruit, spices, herbs, chocolate, coffee, and sometimes wood too. There are even some Oktobefest or O-fest beers with pumpkin and spices which have affectionately been named O-Stouts. Those we review in the Marzen/Fest file. There are spiced, holiday or Christmas stouts and they go into our Christmas/Winter Warmer file. Richardson's 1798 Philosophical Principles of the Science of Brewing recommended the use of Aloe succotrina to improve flavor and give a retentive head. Quassia could replace the Aloe. Copper and sulphate of iron could also darker then brew and color it according to name and price! He said among the choices of brown, amber, and pale malts, he preferred two parts of brown, one of pale, and no amber in the making of a good porter. The history of flavoring stouts and porters is an old one. It was not always a means to increase the pleasure by simple spicing or augmentation. Friedrich Accum in his Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons (1822) wrote about the practices of his time. Good strong beer was often watered down by use of so called table beer or small beer and in some cases stale conditions of the same. He and other authors confirm the use of Capsicum (peppers), coriander, alum, marsh trefoil (bittering to replace hops), Gentian (bittering), tobacco, black resin (origin unclear, probably a conifer), caraway seeds, honey, molasses, orange peels, and licorice to flavor beer and today we accept all of these as expensive and worthy additives when clearly stated on the label. He mentions the practice of using cheap and stale beer in the three threads process as well as the later abuse of the pre-blended entire ale which came to be called porter in some circles. The price of hops trippled in the UK after 1812 and by 1818 they were up to 6x what they could sell for in 1812. Bittering spices and herbs were needed to maintain profits. Between 1812 and 1819 a number of brewers were charged and convicted for adding adulterants to their brews including Cocculus indicus (a bean), ginger, wormwood (an herb relative of Absinthe for bittering to replace hops), licorice, pepper, Quassia root, grains of paradise, vitriol, and Guinea opium! One should be so lucky! Licorice was popular for it was not only important a rich flavor to a porter-stout but it colored up the brew like expensive malting. Burnt sugar was banned in 1817 as a replacement for the normal quanity of roasted, caramel type malts. So widespread were these offenses that three druggists were fined for "making liquor for darkening of the colour of beer", given that a darker beer brought more money. I wonder if he could fine graphic artists today for "making a crappy stout look like it's worth $15 a bottle when it tastes like a $5 bargain stout? The British Parliment acted and a chemist, grocer, or druggist would forfeit 500 pounds for contributing to the corruption of a good double brown stout. All of this did not stand in the way of these flavorings or adulterations being called best practices and in 1822 John Tuck wrote in The Private Brewer's Guide to the Art of Brewing Ale and Porter recommending the use of leghorn juice (also called Spanish juice or licorice extract) and Cocculus indicus berry. Today we called this later vine Anamirta cocculus and it adds to the intoxicating effect - a good move for lazy brewers whose waters down crap has very little ethanol in it. Even the great Charles Dickens commented on the used of this plant by "brewers and beer-sellers of low degree". A newer creation with so many American breweries doing fruited saisons is the Fruited Saison-Stout (FSS) which is a fruited stout made with a souring yeast or other souring agents yet still having stout-like characters. Since many of the fruits of choice (cherry, orange, lemon, strawberry, blackberry) are tart and sour by nature, this souring yeast or other fungal additive can easily harmonize with the real fruit's own tart acids. For example, citric acid from a member of the Citrus Family could be matching the lactic acid of the souring process. Sour cherries are most acidic by reason of malic and phosphoric acid, the more sour varieties coming it at a pH of 3.1 to 3.6. Sometimes sour cherry varieties merely have less sugars in them than than sweet variety cousins. Of late (2019-2021) firms are using the term pastry stout to denote sweet, well- flavored stouts that are rich like donuts, cookies, cakes, pancakes, and other pastries, often with a rich sweetness, vanilla, powerful fruit, sometimes maple syrup, true chocolate, oats like oatmeal cookies, graham crackers, biscuity malts (like a crust), and similar dessert dreams. The brewers seem to gain inspiration from popular pastries of their region if not the entire world. In March 2021 we came across a term new to us, the smoothie stout. It was used for the Tripleberry Hazelnut Smooth Stout by Untitled Art/Microphone and we suspect will come to mean more broadly a heavily fruited (hence smoothie-like) milk stout as opposed to those more lightly and meekly flavored with fruit. Being general dark (we have no blonde smoothie stouts yet) there is no milky or hyper cloudy look as with a smoothie IPA. Abita Macchiato Espresso Milk Stout RATING: 4.0 Abita Springs, Louisiana This six percenter with 21 IBU uses espresso dolce coffee from PJ's Coffee along with lactose and oats for additional sweetness. An American ale yeast is employed with a malt bill of pale, caramel, chocolate, and roasted. The only hop is Willamette, chosen to balance the malts. The pour is a very dark, opaque brown under a short- lived, medium-short head of beige to light tan, mostly fine in texture. First sip is slightly tart and the coffee springs to life right away. By mid passage that tartness reduced to sweetish, caramel and roasted malts and less coffee. The finish is slightly dry and not what we expected. Remember this does not have real chocolate in it as chocolate malts do not actually contain cocoa or cacao. As a straightforward coffee stout this is pleasant and rich enough in the coffee department. We wanted it to be sweeter though the lactose and oats do achieve a mellow quality - just not a very sweet, macchiato approach. There were a couple of thin spots, especially near the finish where the coffee ran out on ya and the malts were moderately strong at best. Abita is known to us at least for being mass market, low in ABV (except for specialty bottles) and on the weaker side of flavors. The coffee is not weak here but the malts are not as complex as desired. Abomination Santa's Black Blood Double Pastry Stout Brewed with Vanilla Beans, Milk Sugar, and Eggnog Spices RATING: 5.0 North Haven, Connecticut "Crafting liquid chaos". They are from North Haven not New Haven but pretty much the north part of the same city. Guess no blue blood Yale types are quite this cool and smart. Maybe if the Skull and Bones brewed beer? Similar art anyhow. At 13.3% ABV this is quite the turbo-charged holiday....nay Christmas brew. The pour is darkest, near-black under a head amongst the darkest available, low, mixed texture, lasting a few minutes. This is essentially a malty eggnog with those spices, lactose, and vanilla. First sip is slightly tart with ABV mostly hidden but the punch of wonderful, noggy spices hits you in 2-3 seconds, the finish more dry than expected and smooth from the milk sugar. I immediately was sure it was a perfect score as everything was going right, rich flavors in genuine quality, one of the best spice choices in any stout I've reviewed (and this page has them all), and just the right balance of ABV and sweetness. Spicing bear especially stuff with dark malts and high ethanol levels is tricky and they just nailed it. And the vanilla is well judged too. Just the perfect holiday treat with a touch of naughtiness and chaos. Naughty and good never co-existed so well and with passion as in these tall cans. Appalachian Mountain (AMB) C.R.E.A.M. Cappucino Milk Stout Brewed with Chocolate, Local Donuts, and Local Coffee RATING: 4.5 (original review), 4.0 (2020 Nitro version) Boone, North Carolina This 5.2 percenter (23 IBU) is from the original home of Dan-ell Boone (which is not Kentucky) and this noble crew are pioneering some really fine brews. That's not as hard these days when one is not battling bears, crazy hostile Cherokees who dislike white invaders (with much justification), something called hunger and starvation, and pretty much everything else ready to kill you at will. The pour is very dark brown but not quite opaque as some red light gets out from our LED test, the head dark cream to beige, short, lasting some. It's official C.R.E.A.M.