Bottle sample courtesy of Grumbo, cheers Graham! Pale golden colour, short-lived fizzy white foam head and aroma of lemonade, pale malt, citrus. Taste is sweet, pale malty, toffee, caramel with sugary lemonade notes and some cardboard. Light bodied, medium carbonation, sweet pop finish. Kind of OK

1/3/2020. Bottle from The Savanna, Liverpool Street Station. Pours clear pale gold with a bubbly white head. Aroma of sweet lemon, caramel, sugar water, light malt. Quite sweet and sugary. Nice bit of lemon comes through. Not the worst of its kind.

Probably Africa’s most famous stout, a remnant from the original South African Breweries (established 1895 in Johannesburg) which later became part of SAB Miller (now as a whole owned by AB InBev). This milk stout originated around 1912 so it is one of those classics in the genre, having remained close to what milk stouts were originally – so I was eager to try this one for its ‘historical’ relevance alone, and for having heard about it for years without ever having had the chance to taste it. Thanks again Ruben for the 50 cl bottle, not brewed in South Africa, but under contract by the Accra Brewery in Ghana in western Africa (as is custom in African beer), so I just put my rating here rather than creating a new entry for it which will eventually be aliased with this one anyway... Creamy and very regular, remarkably dense, thinnish but very stable (closed for a long time), yellowish mocha-beige head; very dark robe, as good as black, clear with a ruddy-red hue. Aroma of Nutroma coffee cream, old brown bread crust, ground and toasted walnuts, nutmeg, hard caramel candy, some iron but not too strongly so, hints of dry black tea and coffee powder. Sweetish onset, low in fruitiness and going straight to malt sweetness under softish carbonation; caramelly and nut bread-like, sprinkled with dusty old cocoa powder and the expected milk powder, but in a way more subtle than all those lactose-filled ‘new’ interpretations of milk stout the craft beer movement churns out all the time. A light metallic ‘zing’ lingers behind, but so does a pleasant coffee-like roasted bitterness, quite pronounced even for a milk stout, leading to – again – a coffee cream-like effect in combination with the lactose but the bitterness is gently pushed forward a bit by a herbal hop bitter touch as well. This is indeed more or less what I expected from a traditional and industrial milk stout, albeit with more roasted bitterness than I was imagining; not bad at all for a macro beer, I’d happily drink this again. Restrained, ‘quiet’ and straightforwardly enjoyable, it brings back memories from before the craft beer storm hit us, so AB InBev or not: have an extra point for triggering the nostalgia factor…