Speedway Stout - Barrel-Aged Vietnamese Coffee (2024)
(Batch of Speedway Stout - Barrel-Aged Vietnamese Coffee)
AleSmith Brewing Company in San Diego, California, United States 🇺🇸
Stout - Imperial Rotating|
Score
7.51
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Coffee, strong, rich
Lt
Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 7.5 | Flavor - 7.5 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 7.5
Canned, 473 ml, shared with Luka and MiroB. Black with tan head. Chocolate, cocoa, coffee, bourbon. Bit warming. Somewhat thin for the style and reputation.
Refrigerated pint can poured into a glass. Blank with medium brown head. Aroma is rich coffee, thick body, medium carbonation, and little lacing. Taste is rich coffee and decadent chocolate.
Appearance - 9 | Aroma - 8.5 | Flavor - 9 | Texture - 9 | Overall - 8
Tap @ Væskebalancen Bar, Aarhus. Black with a beige head. Aroma is sweet, roasted malt, heavy coffee and bourbon. Flavor is quite sweet and rather bitter. Dry and rather bitter finish with warming alcohol. Oily. 310125
Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 8 | Flavor - 8 | Texture - 7 | Overall - 7.5
Keg at Brewdog Paddington, London. A black coloured pour with a medium beige head on top. Rich, sweet, boozy, coffee, bourbon, chocolate, caramel, vanilla aroma and taste. A decent imperial stout but I expected more at the high price point.
Appearance - 8 | Aroma - 9 | Flavor - 9 | Texture - 9 | Overall - 8
One of the most popular and sought-after variants of AleSmith’s iconic Speedway Stout, departing from the regular recipe but adding ‘cà phê sa đá’, which is a blend of four Vietnamese coffee varieties. The basic beer has been in existence since 2012 and has gained a fixed position in this website’s global top 50; it is still made today, but this review concerns the even higher rated B.A. version. Can at Beerlovers Bar in Antwerp. Thin but stable, pale greyish beige, tiny-bubbled head, opening over a black beer with thin burgundy edges. Intense aroma of coffee – strong high quality espresso, coffee grounds and coffee liqueur – integrated into elements of black chocolate, mocha ice cream, cinnamon, vanilla (also oak wood), bourbon, fig compote, nougat, raisin bread, chocolate sauce made with cognac, blackberry coulis, roasted pecans, treacle, some background bayleaf, salmiak and wet leather. Equally dense and rich in the mouth, opening with sweet dried fig, candied date and raisin but nothing overly sweet, surrounded by a very thin umami edge (teriyaki), moderately carbonated with the expected very full, very oily, thick mouthfeel; fat ‘slabs’ of bitter chocolate, toffee, melting mocha ice cream, brown nut bread crust and toasted hazelnuts – bittersweet and beautifully ‘full’, moving on to full-fledged roasted bitterness, obviously coffee-like in nature but much more so in this variant due to the added coffee, which conveys a powerful, aromatic, spicy coffee aroma retronasally. Peppery hops and peppery bourbon booziness join in but do not clash with this coffee effect at all, instead everything is joined together in a very long, complex, bittersweet, harmonious finish. Both powerful and elegant like most of these Speedway variants, but most of all, lovely in its old-fashioned U.S. way: we are far removed from the exaggerated lactose- or otherwise added sticky sweetness one finds in way too many contemporary strong stouts (including coffee stouts), this is a potent coffee stout like they were indeed made a dozen years ago, so I suspect the 2024 edition I got does not differ much from earlier editions. Justly considered a masterpiece.