Oct
Review of Southern Tier Imperial Creme Brulee Stout
Southern Tier Creme Brulee Stout
My wife travels a lot for work and when she goes away, she has been stopping at liquor/beer/grocery stores and picking up random beers she thinks I might want to try. This was one of those beers. It’s from Southern Tier Brewing Company based in Lakewood New York. This beer is apparently part of their Blackwater Series. I only know that because it says it on the bottle 
The label is pretty nice and I really like that they put the important facts and figures right on the bottle. It tells you that the alcohol is 10% by volume which isn’t surprising but it also tells you that it is 25 degrees Plato and made with 2-row pale malt, dark caramel malt, vanilla bean, lactose sugar, kettle hops: columbus and aroma hops: horizon. I haven’t see that kind of information on a label before and I thought that was pretty cool.
I had a 650 ml bottle of this beer and poured it into a pint glass. On my initial pour I didn’t get much head but in subsequent pours I got a nice creamy light brown head. I don’t know if it’s because it had a chance to warm up a bit or I simply did a bad job of pouring it the first time around. The color of the beer is a nice dark chocolate brown
The aroma is strong and is mostly vanilla, I get a little bit of custard in addition to the vanilla but beyond that I don’t get any real beer smell.
It’s an Imperial style so I knew going into it that the flavors would be intense and much stronger than a typical stout. With such an overwhelmingly vanilla aroma I was a little worried that that was all I was going to taste but was pleasantly surprised to find the flavors to be more balanced than that. The vanilla and custard flavors are still there but you also get a roast malt and a little bit of coffee flavor. The main thing that stands out is how sweet it is. I know it’s supposed to be recreating the taste of a sweet desert but I found the beer to be too sweet for me. There is a real bitterness to it, especially after the swallow but it’s a nice bitterness. It offsets the sweetness of the desert taste a bit.
October 6th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
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