Appearance - 6 | Aroma - 8 | Flavor - 7 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 7.5

Ambitious new Spacelord variant by Malterfakker in Breisem, a village southeast of Leuven; brewed with peated malt and flavoured with both lactose and pilipili, a seemingly incompatible combo of flavours, if you ask me. Anyway: medium thick, very dense and creamy, mocha-beige, sparsely lacing, stable head, only slowly thinning and eventually opening in the middle, over a clear, very dark bronze beer - in fact as good as black, with a ruby red hue still visible under bright light. Aroma of coffee cream, dry chili flakes, hard caramel, mocha ice cream, dry tea bags, damp earth, old beechnuts on a dry forest floor, almond, dry peat for sure but surprisingly not overly dominant, dried blackberries, hints of milk powder, blended whisky, manure (when warming up), cola, fresh bayleaf, leather, blood. Sweet onset with a sourish undertone, the combined effect of which reminds me of blackberry coulis and ripe blueberries, hints of pear and medlar too, fizzy carbonation but in a refined, non-numbing way, full but smooth mouthfeel - a tad oily, but perhaps not quite oily enough for the intended style. Creaminess and sweetness are maintained by the added lactose but relatively subtly so (oof!), over a slick caramelly and Ersatz-chocolatey, 'internally' walnutty core, with 'blood'-like iron effects at its edges. The peat shows up soon enough and gets a firm grasp on the final act, but still it does not overpower everything else - instead adding a dried tobacco leaf- and pepper corn-like 'ashiness' and earthiness to it all. The sweetness from the lactose does clash a bit with this peat effect in the end - in line with my expectations - but then there is the pilipili, trying to tie all flavours together with a pleasantly spicy heat (which kept lingering long after swallowing, by the way), in itself also highlighted by whisky-like alcohol, which remains fairly well in place. Some ashy and earthy effects in the tail betray its 'Belgianness', but otherwise this is a modern flavoured imperial stout, albeit not a pastry stout whatsoever; I personally think this brew would have been much better off without that lactose - an ingredient originally only used in English milk stout for semi-medicinal reasons but now sadly overused and overexposed, even beyond the realm of stout - but this beer is, to even present-day Belgian standards, a very bold and daring one without a doubt. Enjoyed it quite a lot.