Courage Russian Imperial Stout

1992 vintage. Black colour with very little head or carbonation (great, no need to remove it): leather, black chocolate, plum, cherry, sherry, liquorice, toffee, roast and coffee aroma; sweet/bitterish taste with chocolate, caramel, liquorice, cream, roast, smoke, dates, aloroso sherry, plum aromas; bitter finish with smoke, chicory, espresso, burnt, liquorice, black toffee, caramel and dates. Seamlessly complex with every dark malt and fruit flavour imaginable. Sweet up front, yet ending as burnt as a spent match. Everything melds so smoothly - never rough nor coarse. Wonderful. Only 50 bottles left. Just enough for every remaining birthday. On my scale, 131 out of 100. In my all-time top three. The other two were also Courage Russian Stout. In the 1980’s this stuff could be found in working-class East-end pubs. Sic transit (I don’t mean puke in a van). Tasted 19.10.2006.

Bottle at Kulminator, 1983 vintage, march 07. Spicy, cinamon, chocolate, tobacco and some dried fruits aroma. Phenomenal. Gorgeous, sexy black, opaque, dark as night color wiht a medium, just right size, compact, dense, creamy yellow head. Outstanding. Full chocolate, bitter chocolate flavor. Some chocolate mousse and a port finnish. Heavenly. Medium to full MF, feels amazingly fresh and vivid. Heaven in a bottle. A great beer, but I fell a little sad, since it´s only downwards from here...

1983 vintage bottle in Kulminator Dirk you r a legend. Pors a delicious deep chocolate colour with plenty of yeast spwirling in the glass and a tight beige head. Rich roasted malts, chocolate, coffee, figs, dates, plum cake golden syrup and hearty red wine bombard my nostrils. I could nose this beer alll day! Tatse is similar with dominant malt and dark chocolate character ending on a warm port/mulled wine finish as it trickles down your throat. This is my idea of heaven in a bottle and why i keep coming back to belgium for more. Complex and comforting. My favourite beer and the best most rounded and well balanced stout i have ever tasted. Excellently matured and exceptionally cheap for fantastic quality.

Cask, GBBF 2003 Nuffield, Duff and I queued up early for the opening of the trade session of GBBF 2003. We were right at the front of the queue about an hour before opening time. Spiesy phoned, and we were all giggling like school kids, shouting at him to get down here quick or we'd drink all the Courage Stout. England's most acclaimed beer, not commercially available since a special brewing for the GBBF in 1994, was behind the steel shutters. A rarity. An extreme rarity. And, just to make this even more special, it would be available in the cask for the first time in its long history! I had arranged with rauchbier that we would share our 1,000th beer together with a glass of this famous and rare beverage. There were anxious moments as we waited. I had looked on the CAMRA website, and that had given a confusing and worrying description of the beer, which did not include the word Russian, and which made it sound as though it wouldn't be the real thing. To make our anxiety even higher, the doors were late in being opened. We banged on the steel shutters and demanded they let us in. Slowly the steel gate was lifted! We had already made our plan. One of us would get the glasses, one of us would get a table (already mapped out as being placed between the American cask ales and the Imperial Stout) and one of us would go straight to the Courage stand and get the order in. But plans, as they do, fall apart. Our bags needed to be searched, and we needed name tags to be filled in, placed in little plastic holders and then pinned to our chests. Impatience! Frustration! Confusion! We got separated. But I stuck to the mission. I grabbed my glass and ran down to the table, slammed my bag on the table and went straight up to the Courage bar. O joy of joys! The pump clip read: Courage Russian Imperial Stout. The barman pulled off the first of the cask. And I asked the important question. Is this the real thing? I was then surrounded by various members of Courage, including Neil Woodward the Brewing Development Manager for Courage, who assured me this was the real deal. They had gone to great lengths to ensure that every detail was correct. They had used information from the Edinburgh special brew for the 1990's GBBF, and trial data from Courage Brewing (Eastern), and a 1989 production trial at Tadcaster. I was given the recipe: Premium malt, Amber malt, Black Malt, VHM syrup and 100% target hops added to the copper. Fermentation started at 18oC and rose to 23oC - the fermentation lasting for 7 days. It was conditioned in a maturation vessel starting at 23oC and cooled to 3oC over a 4 week period. Prior to racking the yeast rate was checked and confirmed to be in specification. The casks were then racked directly from the maturation vessel. I asked if it would be bottled and sold, but was told that they had no plans to make the beer available outside of the festival. This was a special one off event. When it was gone it would be gone! I took my glass carefully back to the table where Nuffield and Duff were waiting. We had before us the first beer to be pulled at the GBBF 2003 - we had got our beer before anyone else. And it was the Courage Russian Imperial Stout! My notes read: "Simply wow! The experience in the mouth has to be lived to understand the power and deep luscious beauty of this beer. the mouthfeel and smooth waves of chocolate are simply orgasmic. I've been 5'd!" Nuffield, Duff and I had had the Stout from the bottle a couple of weeks earlier at my house. We'd been impressed then, but we were blown away by the experience of a fresh sample from the cask. My notes from the drinking of that 1985 bottle were: "Musty aroma. Mature and distinguished like walking into a gentleman's club. Rancid bacon. Morrello cherries. Marmite. Smoked mackerel. Balsamic vinegar. Beaujolais Neuvo. Opal fruits burst. Starts oily and smokey, then moves into a thinner, more refreshing fruity red wine finish with no bitterness. 9/4/9/4/17 - 4.3" At various points in the day we were joined by other drinkers, some ratebeerians, others not, and we sampled the Russian Stout at various points in the cask. It degraded toward the end of the cask to the point where it became undrinkable. When I sampled a glass that the brewer from Flagship had I spat it out - it had small oily lumps in it. A little while later the barman from the Wenlock Arms had a glass which I sampled, and that was heavenly - it was from a fresh cask. When rauchbier caught up with us he had a glass of the Stout in his hand - from about midway through the cask, and it was a damn fine drink, worthy of a 4.5, but it wasn't the 5 that the front of the cask produced. However, rauchbier and I finally managed to get together to share our 1,000th ratebeer rating with the greatest drink that Britain has ever produced.

1983 bottle. Pours a brilliant, light brown half-inch head atop a beautiful, black body and thick, black bottle conditioning. An amazing aroma that is simply mind-blowing. Raisins, anise, chocolate, lightly roasted coffee and a healthy dose of alcohol. The mouthfeel is soft and velvety smooth (probably 20 years of bottle conditioning). Sweet, lightly roasted, vinous, and extremely tasty. There may be a significant bit of hype surrounding this beer, but I was still not let down. Just a fantastic beer and an amazing experience. I wish my feeble mind could produce adequate words to describe it.