Stone 12th Anniversary Bitter Chocolate Oatmeal Stout
October 6th, 2008Brewery: Stone Brewing
Style: Oatmeal Stout
BeerAdvocate.com Rating: A- (Community)
RateBeer.com Rating: 3.83 (97th percentile)
Serving: 22oz Bottle
Stone by and large is one of my favorite breweries. Their Russian Imperial Stout is in a league of its own, I look forward to Old Guardian every year, and I can even get Arrogant Bastard on tap. To say I was excited to see that they brewed a chocolate stout would be an understatement. Long time readers know that I’m a sucker for chocolate stouts.
“Our Anniversary Ale this year stems from 2 pilot beers that were brewed by members of Team Stone. The first was Jeremy Moynier’s incredibly delicious Oatmeal Stout, and the second was Jake Ratzke’s amazing homebrewed Imperial Stout that had authentic Oaxacan chocolate added to the boil. We loved both beers so much that we decided to combine the recipes to make this year’s Anniversary offering: Stone 12th Anniversary Bitter Chocolate Oatmeal Stout.”
I have high hopes for this one considering both that its’ from Stone and it’s price tag, so let’s see what we have:
Appearance: Jet black with the thinnest lace of brown head I have ever poured. No light gets through this one.
Smell: Surprisingly, I don’t smell any chocolate. Standard oatmeal stout aromas come though as well as some extra alcohol, which has a hint of bourbon behind it. If anything, coffee comes through as a dominant smell.
Taste: Whoa! Not a fan of this. It tastes like a coffee stout spiked with vodka. Maybe I just got a bad bottle, but this his horrible. There’s no hint of chocolate whatsoever and it’s not even that great of an attempt at an oatmeal stout. I’ll give it a shot again if I can find a bottle (to verify if mine was just bad or not), but my advice would be to pick up Rogue’s or Bison’s chocolate stouts before this one.
What a disappointment, I love stone, and generally like Chocolate Stouts. I’d love to try Bison’s sometime. But I would have thought this would have been good. I’m not a big fan of beers with a heavy amount of alc. presence.
Comment by Eric — October 8, 2008 @ 5:32 pm