Gingerbread Stout
Totem in Evergem, East Flanders, Belgium 🇧🇪
Stout - Pastry / Flavoured - Imperial Regular|
Score
6.99
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Hop: Columbus.
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Alengrin (11609) reviewed Gingerbread Stout from Totem 5 months ago
Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 7.5 | Flavor - 7.5 | Texture - 8 | Overall - 7
One of Totem's latest beers to date, a stout intending to evoke gingerbread, but Totem would not be Totem if there was not some kind of special twist involved: instead of 'plainly' flavouring the beer with gingerbread spices (in itself a practice that would even predate the great craft beer movement, at least its arrival in Europe), gingerbread infused malt was used. This means malt which was 'treated' with gingerbread flavours, i.e. cinnamon, ginger and hazelnut and sometimes others, so that this spice effect is already deeply 'etched' in the very raw material itself and does not need to be added afterwards in the brewing process anymore. This technique is only a few years old and has so far been most famously applied by Wooden Robot in North Carolina; there is a Dutch precedent apparently (by Huttenkloas) but this one surely is the first in Belgium, like several other of Totem's long list of fascinating creations so far had a pioneering position in this country. Many thanks to the brewer himself for the cans! Thin and loosely knit, immediately open, pale beige ring of bubbles on a black beer with hazy burgundy edges. Aroma of black peppercorns, raw cinnamon, young bayleaf, black chocolate, crumbled blue cheese, ground hazelnuts, cold pasta, dry caramel, ginger powder, candle wax, coffee, burnt toast. Sweetish onset but restrainedly so for a postmodern flavoured stout, dried medlar and fig perhaps, with a faint soy sauce umami on top; softish carb, thick dry-caramelly and black-chocolatey core, very toasty and deeply bittering with a large part of that bitterness not coming from the roasted grains, but from the spicing infused in the gingerbread malt. Cinnamon, pepper, clove and ginger flavours all act in harmony by providing a very tangy, or to quote the brewer himself, "assertive" spiciness, amplified by spicy hops, roasted bitterness and warming gin-like alcohol. Very intense due to this gingerbread malt - perhaps even a bit too intense, but such is the boldness and innovative avant-garde approach we all know and love from this brewery. Not one for the masses, and frankly I am unsure whether this peppery, almost wry 'assertiveness' will mellow down just by ageing... A must try for sure, if only for the daring novelty character it boasts - Totem is back, that much is clear.
Sebletitje (15877) reviewed Gingerbread Stout from Totem 5 months ago
Appearance - 7 | Aroma - 7.5 | Flavor - 7.5 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 7.5
33cl can, BB 12/2029. Merci Klaas.
Brune foncée quais noire, col épais crémeux café au lait.
Arôme sur un bouquet malté, grillé-toasté, pâle, petite note de chocolat avec un effet 'winter warmer' en retrait. Le tout garde une bonne présence ce côté 'cookie' tout en étant agrémenté de qcq épices plutôt hivernales voire rappelant le speculoos.
Palais sur une belle base malté - pâle, grillé avec un apport de malt Vienna assez plaisant et qui confère ce côté plus crystalisé-toasté. Petite touche d'épice de cookie versant sur la muscade, girofle et cannelle.