Last week, we tasted four strong stouts from our local cornershop.
We know Guinness Foreign Extra is good and wanted to see how the others on the market compared.
So, we got a bottles of:
- Dublin-made Guinness FES (7.5%)
- Nigerian-made Guinness FES (7.5%)
- Dragon Stout (7.5% )
- Lion Heart Stout. (7.6% )
To save you reading too much more, Dragon and Lion Heart were pretty horrid, both lying somewhere between cola and tramp’s brew. Neither had much body, both were fizzy, and both tasted overwhelmingly of caramel. Lion Heart boasts that it’s made with “the finest pilsner malt”, but that certainly didn’t come through. And here’s a choice quote from the Big City Brewing Company’s Lion Heart Stout web-page:
Lion Heart Stout makes the men Roar and ladies Purrr. 100 percent Jamaican stout which, being true to its brewing heritage, is smoother in taste, stronger in body and flavour and not too bitter providing the drinker with the increased ability for excitement, power, tenacity and vigor in the pursuit of life’s pleasures.
Hmmm. It’s like Viagra, then? Don’t think you’d get away with that in the UK.
We poured most of these two away.
Dublin FES was as good as we remembered, so it was only the Nigerian-made version that offered any hope of a taste revelation. We drank them side-by-side and noted a creamier, lighter head on the Irish version. The Nigerian version is much sweeter, but not overwhelmingly so, and certainly miles ahead of Dragon. It’s grainy and burnt tasting, with a lot of bitterness at the end to balance things out. Boak liked it; Bailey wasn’t so impressed.
Those in the know say that Belgian version of Guinness (“Special Export Stout”) is best. We think we’ve had it before, but are not sure. It would have been good to try it alongside the others.