Flavours

The other week I had an extraordinary beer (picture above) it was an Imperial Stout from one of my favourite breweries (Verdant, Cornwall) This style of beer is quite popular in the Winter months, it's basically a very strong (usually 10%+) dark beer made with a multitude of dark and roasted malts and made with a quite bitter but very unctuous profile, sometimes adjuncts like coffee, chocolate, vanilla and coconut are used to achieve a certain "vibe" but this one was simply complex due to the 13 or so different kinds of malt used in the grist. This particular beer was called "The Lightening of the Mock", a new series from Verdant, and weighed in at 11.5% ABV.

I've tried many of this style of brew before but I'd never tried one that tasted so distinct, it was like eating a chunk of liquorice! Clearly for those that don't like liquorice this would be hideous, but I love it! The more I drank the more I liked it and the more flavours it revealed, chocolate, coffee and vanilla, but the interesting thing was that these flavours came from the malts alone, the beer had none of these actual ingredients added. Somehow I feel that this is more of an achievement than brewers who rely on adjuncts for flavour, I guess my logic is that anyone can add liquorice to a beer and have it taste of liquorice, but this one had none and yet was still incredibly licoricey. I'm not sure why I'm impressed with this but in my defence it strikes me that the brewer must have incredible skill to blend 13 different grains in order to achieve a particular flavour profile, along the same lines as the people who blend perfumes or wines and achieve that magic 1+1 = 3 effect.