7.5

Appearance - 7 | Aroma - 7.5 | Flavor - 7.5 | Texture - 8 | Overall - 7.5

Draft @ Misery TTO, Le Barboteur.
Certain de l'avoir déjà goutée en cannette, je tente ici la version pression.
Couleur noire/frune foncée, col crémeux blanc-cassé.
Arôme est chargé en malts, caramel chocolaté noire, fruité noirs rappelant la prune, raisins secs. Rétro-nasal propose une petite pointe épicée.
Palais est épais avec une belle couche de malts - caramel, chocolaté, grillé, toffee, fruits noirs avec un côté prune. En retrait, petite note de citronné vert. Le fini est 'boozy' avec un léger apport réchauffatn en bouche, chocolaté, note pâle, dark chocolate. Douceur latente, épaisse en bouche sans tomber dans le surfait de faux adouci.

7.3

Appearance - 7 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 7.5 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 7.5

Pours black, small to no tanned head. Smell is roasty, dark chocolate. Taste is full, roasty, fairly thick. mild sweetness. Roasty, burnt, ashy finish. Decent.

7.2

Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 7 | Flavor - 8 | Texture - 8 | Overall - 7

The first big stout from this new Walloon brewery located in a fancy manor deep in the Aywaille region south of Liège – and a brewery clearly dedicated to the originally American but now global style of craft brewing, rather than sticking to local traditions like so many other of these new Walloon brewers do, explaining why this Misery project got a lot more attention than those others even before the brewery had actually materialized. Anyway: creamy, yellow-beige, mousy, opening and eventually dissolving head on a black beer with mahogany edges. Aroma of liquorice candy and indeed strong ‘drop’, toffee, milk powder, chewing gum, milk chocolate, cappuccino, iced latté, elderberry jam, cream, vague nutmeg accent. Sweet onset, fig and date with a blueberry jelly-like aspect, smooth and full, very rounded body with soft carbonation; creamy, syrupy caramel character under an even more dominant Ersatz chocolate aspect, but maintaining this bubblegummy side effect as well. Lots of said ‘drop’ and liquorice at the back, with side effects of bayleaf and clove, before a warming, brown rum-tinged alcohol glow scoops it up and takes it down the throat, where it lingers for a bit along with residual sweetness. Sweet, syrupy stout, pastry-ish without being an actual pastry stout: this is clearly one for the young craft beer geeks, some of which are probably even unaware that once, imperial stout contained a lot of roasted bitterness – an aspect very understated here for my personal taste. The liquorice and bubblegum effects also bothered me a bit, but I must admit that this is a quite daring creation for a beginning Walloon brewery – I’m sure something like this can generate enough revenue from the craft beer crowd if marketed properly. Seen in context, this is a very interesting beer even if it is not my personal taste in terms of strong stouts, interesting enough to keep track of this brewery.

7

--- Beer merged from original tick of La Faux on 29 Aug 2020 at 19:08 - Score: 7