Breckenridge Oatmeal Stout

12 oz bottle from The World Market. Aroma: Hints of rich chocolate and roasty mocha. More sweet than spicy. Pretty creamy malt smell. Appearance: Dark brown with a finger width dark, tan head that sticks around for quite awhile. Very lacy. Flavor: Initially a creamy sweet oatmeal flavor. Ends with a very bitter dark chocolate and roasted coffee. Some smokiness in the aftertaste as well. Palate: It feels as if its initially a medium body, but ends rather light. A rather bitter and smoky aftertaste although it doesn’t coat the mouth especially well. Overall: A pleasant tasting sweet oatmeal stout. A little dry and light for my liking. It would definitely taste pretty good in the cold and snow of winter.

Pours to a VERY dark brown. Flavor is a bitter malt taste, not unlike coffee. I am sampling this on a hot day, I truly believe this would be a great beer on the slopes in January. I may resample in the winter

The oatmeal stout is a hard beer to coax from its shell, but when you do, it makes for good winter drinking. This was my line of logic drinking the Breckenridge Oatmeal Stout, whose quarter-moon-in-pajamas logo is the most characteristic of Breckenridge’s beer bunch. True to the style, and maybe even a bit overboard, the beer pours a sludgy, black and almost gray with yeasty flotsam, like a mud slide. After this the aroma immediately strikes the drinker with the scents of mocha, cream, dark chocolate cake, tiramisu, cocoa powder and, in general, is very, very sweet. Now, normally with such a rich and detailed aroma I’d be going crazy to give the beer taste, but I’ve begun to catch on to the expected deviations between aroma and flavor. My caution was justified. Less than dark chocolate and oozing cocoa, the flavor is more bitter, pellucid and refreshing in its lightness, in the same way that water or even iced tea can be refreshing. Match this with a paired fizzy malts and chalky dark chocolate, in other words DRY, and you get a disappointing taste affixed to a wonderful aroma. I hate it when this happens.

Definite tones of roasted oats. Very bittter due to oatmeal content. Good odor and bitter, yet pleasent aftertaste. I enjoy stouts and bitter beers so this was a treat.

Bottle from Wine Warehouse in Charlottesville. Viscous chocolate brown pour with a one finger head. Aroma if faint and shows notes of bitter roasted malt and an oatmeal sweetness. Taste is roasted malt, oats and a little smokiness. Smooth, creamy and full bodied.