Irish Stout
Lovely Valley Beverage Factory

 

Pours a pretty damn dark-brown, mahogany up to the light. Head is quite impressive. Sinking in the middle but leaving some beautiful foamy sheets of lacing. Am impressed, for the first time, with an aspect of a Myponga beer.

Smell is fairly weak and oddly dark. Slight chocolatey notes and weird vegemitey character. Really quite sour and something off about it. Don't like it very much, actually.

Taste is sickly sweet, with a huge molasses flavour to it. Some hints maybe of some dark notes, but it comes across as vegemitey, and apart from that it's just dirty-sweet, with rotting fruit. Just very artificial-tasting and nasty. Quite off-putting and very simple otherwise.

A bit of texture, but mostly just thick, actually goes down very flat. Pretty blah.

No. Myponga, you've failed yet again, this time at the one beer I thought you might not totally fuck up. Just give up brewing. I can't finish this.

Pours a deeep opaque black-brown colour, with a full and foamy head of chocolate-cocoa brown. Good lacing, and the head retains to about half a centimetre throughout. Not bad.

Dark notes smacked together with an odd fragrance like banana skin on the nose. Slight sweetness, but the odd fruity-but-wrong characters really skew this towards something rather unpleasant.

Taste is very similar. Very thin body, with a whack of odd, off-fruit sweetness that tends towards the rank. Slight darkness tries to clear up the tart unpleasantness, but fails. Not very pleasant at all.

OK, this is better than most of the Myponga beers I've had from the Lovely Valley Beverage Company, but given that they have included some of the very, very worst beers I've ever tried, that's not much of a compliment.