Categories
beer reviews

New to us: Wilde Child Brownie Hunter

A theme is beginning to emerge: when we do find beer from a brewery we don’t already know, based on the available data, it will probably have lactose in it.

We came across this 4.9% chocolate fudge brownie stout from Leeds in a can at our local bottle shop, Bottles & Books, and paid (we think) £5.99 including a small drink-in surcharge.

It was neither flat nor a gusher — a good start — and produced two tidy, tiny glasses of transparent bear-brown.

For something billed as a dessert beer, it was fairly light-bodied, almost thin, with a touch of butterscotch, some vanilla, and a general milk chocolate easygoing nature.

We were reminded of:

  1. Meantime Chocolate Porter — a beer we used to love but which has undoubtedly been left behind in the fancy beer arms race.
  2. Cadbury’s drinking chocolate — the one you drank as a kid, before you realised you were meant to want something either darker or richer, or both.

Young’s Double Chocolate is perhaps in similar territory, but somehow has more heft.

This isn’t quite our thing these days but it certainly wasn’t flawed or faulty and we enjoyed drinking it.

So that’s another brewery through the first checkpoint and onto our drink-again list.

Categories
beer and food

Dark chocolate mousse and Sam Smith's imperial stout

samsmithis2

I often like to have a dark chocolatey beer for dessert, but I’d always been a bit sceptical about matching beer with sweet treats, particularly after some unsuccessful attempts.  For example, Young’s double chocolate stout just tastes like a watery bitter ale if you drink it with real chocolate.

However, having tried a dark chocolate orange mousse with Sam Smith’s Imperial Stout, I think it can work beautifully when you have a full-bodied and bitter beer. In this particular case, the mousse did bring out the bitterness in the beer, but in a fabulous way. It made the stout taste like really dark, unsweetened chocolate (not unlike Yeti by Great Divide). It certainly works better with chocolate than with cheese.

Recipe for mousse after the jump.