7.3

Appearance - 5 | Aroma - 8 | Flavor - 7.5 | Texture - 6 | Overall - 8

Pastry stout from Colorado with peanut butter, banana (!) and marshmallow, can shared with Craftmember. Medium thick, pale mocha-beige, thinning and opening to eventually dissolving head; ink black robe with a weird and unpleasantly looking sludge in the end, a drab which I suppose is a leftover of the added ingredients (actual peanut butter, perhaps?) – proving that this thing is real and not just aromatized, as is all too often the case in these postmodern flavoured stouts, but ‘appetising’ it is not. Aroma of strong banana in an artificial way (like Pisang Ambon liqueur or banana candy), rotten banana flesh, peanut butter but less strong than usual in peanut butter flavoured stouts, milk chocolate with cognac, coffee liqueur, hints of pecan nut, Snickers, chocolate milk or indeed marshmallows, Parfait Amour, mocha ice cream – and a solventy effect like fresh paint or nail polish. Very sweet and sticky, creamy onset, very banana-forward but again more like Pisang Ambon than actual banana; notes of fig jam and evidently peanut butter, the latter thinly but persistently following a rounded, full, near-syrupy chocolate and toffee core, notably thinned by alcohol at an early stage. Deep chocolateyness fills the mouth, never acquiring anything roasty but still not becoming unbearably sweet, so in this respect this whole concoction remains relatively well proportioned; alas, the alcohol becomes a bit too scorching in the end, the Pisang Ambon flavour dominates all the way through and clashes with the peanut butter and the sludge of whatever-it-is in the end takes away the appetite. Interesting attempt, in all, but with very odd result, not free of flaws.