I Love You With My Stout
(has 2 batches)

Bottled. Quite much pitch black colour, mediumsized brown head. Aroma is liquorice, chocolate, burnt sugar, some toffee and fudge along with some slight spicy notes and alcohol sweetness too. Flavour is sweet burnt sugary with some liquorice, chocolate, mild toasted notes as well as some fudge and very sweet malts and a quite sharp alcoholic sweet bite to it. Quite nice, but I’d prefer this one if it was just a slight bit less sweet...

Bottle (from beergium). Pours dark brown. Aroma is sweet and bitter, roast, fruits, alcohol. Flavor is sweet and bitter, roast, cherry, malt, ash. Finish is sweet with dry bitterness and some booze. Overall: ok-ish, but too boozy and somewhat just not balanced.

Tap at Erzbierschof Zurich. Faint nose of boozy burnt malts, but really low. Strong taste though, some sweetness, healthy bitterness, still boozy and powerful. Charming palate, strong nuts and booze again. But all that booze actually works really well and is not off at all. Nice, but not overwhelming.

Recht süßer, dennoch halbwegs runder Malzantrunk. Brotig-süßer Mittelteil, Kakaonoten, etwas Kaffee. Unsüffig, dafür vollmundig und lecker. 8/10/7/10/10/9

Renowned imperial stout by Evil Twin, from an older bottle. Thin, pale greyish beige head, moussy on the edges but dissolving quickly anywhere else; very dark burgundy colour, blackish but still translucent on the edges, with purplish hue. Intense, heavy, condensed aroma of home made caramel, fondant chocolate, stewed beef, shoe polish, banana peel, vanilla, hint of heavily perfumed tropical flowers, burnt sugar, roses, candied ginger, liquorish candy, date, venison gravy and even beef stock cube, bourbon, mouldy cellar and fresh - not to say moist - porcini, cloves, supple leather, dried seaweed, chestnut, dried apricot, overripe pear. Intense taste of heavy candied sweetness (fig, date, raisin) paired with equally intense umami flavors (strong gravy and beef stock, seaweed even), soft carbo, thick and ’fatty’ but smooth mouthfeel, thick layers of malts upon malts ensuing, very caramelly and ’oily’ at first but quickly shifting to bittering toastedness and eventually coffeeish roasted bitterness coating the mouth cavity; finish adds retronasal vanilla flavors, ’deep’ peppery hops - strong but not overpowering the bittersweet maltiness - along with a big presence of wodka-like alcohol, peppery, warming and even burning a bit. I guess this type of over-the-top big stouts can be a bit much in terms of both alcohol astringency and ’beefy’ umami flavors, but against that kind of ’wry’ violence, it offers a whole array of soft, vanilla- and chocolate-like sweetness; it has the same depth as many hyped American impies, but it also shares the same exaggerated boldness, which makes it tipple a bit to the wry side. Too sharply boozy for me, in other words, but certainly a very complex example of the style, doubtlessly capable of surviving many a year in a cellar in good conditions - perhaps my sample is still too young and too edgy on the alcohol level. Complex and exciting for sure, but maybe just a little bit too harsh and unorganized to be truly great, in my opinion.