Tag Archives: Porters and Stouts

18. Young’s Double Chocolate Stout

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Oh cripes, here we go again. From Wells & Young’s, the incorrigible beer-botherers who took a bitter and turned it into the lamentable Wells Banana Bread Beer comes another flavoured concoction. This time they’ve taken a stout and flavoured it with chocolate.

The thing is, there is actually a valid style of beer known as Chocolate Stout, but the term comes from the use of chocolate malts (named for the colour, more than anything). Young’s have apparently taken one of those and made it “double” by the addition of “natural chocolate flavour”, which doesn’t fill me with optimism.

Now, I do love a good stout. Enough to know that a good stout or porter should not really need any extra help to give out chocolatey, coffee notes. That this one does need a leg up has me fearing the worst.

Still, it’s in The Book, so I think we all know what comes next.

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Sniffing the brew with some trepidation, I’m almost relieved that I’m not actually getting a lot of chocolate. In fact this smells a lot like a decent, normal stout with a faint whiff of something extra, yet subtle.

That carries through to the taste. Again, there are no strongly discernable chocolate notes beyond what might be expected from a stout. In fact Young’s Double Chocolate ticks all the stouty boxes: it’s full-bodied and smooth with a good long bitter finish. If anything the chocolate addition just helps to take away a little of the rougher smokiness that many stouts have.

To my surprise, the result is really quite a nice beer, and I soon find myself settling in and enjoying it.

This perhaps doesn’t attain the level of “pure luxury/pur luxe” that the label aspires to, and it’s not a patch on, say, the Guinness Foreign Extra we saw recently, or my current favourite, The Redchurch Brewery’s Hoxton Stout, but it’s really OK.

Whether by luck or by judgment, this time Wells & Young’s haven’t created a monster by ruining a perfectly good beer. This is, on its own merits, a perfectly good, enjoyable beer.

Facts and Figures

Brewery: Wells and Young’s, Bedford, England
Style: Porters and Stouts
ABV: 5.2%
Found at: Jolly Good News, Rosendale Road, London SE24
Dispense: 500ml Bottle

14. Guinness Foreign Extra

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It’s March the 17th and so, predictably enough, it’s time for a Guinness.

Yet this is no ordinary Guinness. Bear in mind that there are countless incarnations of this most famous of beers, many of them quite different and most of them pretty ropey.

But this. Now this is the real deal. This is the 7.5% Foreign Extra version brewed right where it all began: St. James’s Gate, Dublin, Ireland, and it’s a bit of a stunner.

Bottle of Guinness Foreign Extra Stour

Foreign Extra was originally brewed in 1801 for export to places such as the Caribbean and Africa—I guess all those Catholic missionaries enjoyed a beer or two—and was made with extra hops as a preservative, and brewed to double the usual strength, presumably in the fear that some of the alcohol would evaporate on the way over.

It didn’t, and so the lucky recipients got rather used to the heady black stuff, and so it is still brewed to that strength both in Ireland and in Nigeria to this day.

It’s almost ironic now that by virtue of South London’s dynamic social demographics, the absolutely rough Nigerian-brewed Foreign Extra is far easier to get hold of around here than the original Irish version.

And yet, hold of it I did get.

So what does it taste like? Well, it is rich, dark, toasty, smoky and smooth, with a huge hop bitterness (60 units—more than many IPAs) offset by a lovely, subtle caramel sweetness.

It’s deeply complex, not least due to its production methods, which see beer being matured in wooden tuns for up to three months, and then blended with younger, fresh stout before being aged in the bottle for a further month. There’s a lot of work goes into this stuff.

In short, Guinness Foreign Extra is a quite different beer to the bland, artificial draught imitation that so many people will be drinking too much of tonight. My recommendation is steer clear of the phony Irish chain pubs and the drunken English people in silly hats, then grab a bottle of this, find somewhere quiet, and take your time over it.

Facts and Figures

Brewery: Guinness & Co, Dublin, Ireland
Style: Porters and Stouts
ABV: 7.5%
Found at: Costcutter, Norwood Road, London SE24
Dispense: 330ml Bottle