Imperial stout by this famed and highly influential craft beer pioneer; launched in 2012, but from a brewery with roots in the eighties I expect old school style throughout. Thick and dense but quickly thinning and eventually dissolving, membrane-lacing, mocha-beige head on a jet black beer – so far so good. Aroma of melting ‘fondant’ chocolate, espresso, burnt blackcurrants, dried blueberries, sweet pipe tobacco, toasted walnut, dry leather, brown bread crust, peppercorns, dried grapefruit peel, whisky, blood-like iron faraway in the background. Dried-fruity onset, fig, old raisins, restrainedly sweetish with a very light black olive-like umami touch somewhere, full and deep from the start with that typical roasty sourishness running underneath, medium carbonation, full oily body. Caramelly malt core under additional layers of bitter black chocolate, toasted walnuts and eventually black coffee, with leathery and blood-like aspects on the sides; generally more bitter than sweet, an overall impression reinforced by old school dry citrus pith- and peppercorn-like hop bitterness joining the coffeeish roasted bitterness in the finish. Warming, whisky-like alcohol in the end too, but largely absorbed by those masses of malt, with a roasted bitterness lingering on for a long time. It seems I got what I was hoping for, and I’ll take this kind of old-fashioned, almost ‘English’ style imperial stouts – with a classic American twist of course – over all those pastry stouts anytime. After this one, I felt satisfied and comforted that this kind of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first century brewing style still exists.