Cajun Breakfast Stout
Bayou Teche Brewing

From 12 oz bottle to tulip. Fridge cold. Aggressive pour, produced 2 finger head. Dark brown color. Not transparent in light. The first notes to hit my nose were notes of boudin (no coffee). Slightly sweet, ricey, boudiny No malt whatsoever. I think they used a lot of rice to make it. Slightly creamy, carbonated. Bubbles still rising.
This beer is lacking. Even the name doesn't describe the taste (empty, watery). I think I'm dissapointed in this company's beers. Boozy at the end (slightly) AND I think they forgot to put the coffee. What the heck, worth a try, but won't be buying again.

BOTTLE: $2.99 USD for a 12 fl oz brown glass bottle with a green pry-off crown cap in New Orleans, LA. No bottled on or best before date appears on the label. 2020 vintage.

APPEARANCE: Dark brown-black body. Khaki colour head. ~4 minute head retention.

AROMA: Caramel. Brown malt. Chocolate malt. Malt extract. Subdued nuts.

Lacks any noticeable coffee aromatics or roasted barley, to its detriment. Apparently, this *is* brewed with coffee but you wouldn't know it going off the aroma. Apparently, it's also brewed with boudin and cane syrup (neither of which seems like a good idea) but neither is detectable aromatically.

Suggests a dull malty ale more like a brown ale than anything else...hardly seems like a breakfast stout or even really a stout at all.

TASTE: Shallow yet convoluted, with odd flavours in there alongside the basic caramel/nutty malt/malt syrup base. It isn't meaty like a rauchbier and I don't taste any overt boudin, but there's certainly an odd borderline smokiness to it.

Lacks any coffee whatsoever...this has one of the poorest attempts at a coffee flavour I've tried in the past few years and is a sad excuse for a coffee stout/breakfast stout (not that I'd recognize it as such in a blind taste test - it's more like a mediocre brown ale).

Cane syrup? I guess it's in there alongside the generic malt sweetness and unwelcome lactose sugar sweetness.

Not better for having utilized gimmicky ingredients, not that it commits to them anyway.

TEXTURE: Smooth, thick, wet, well-carbonated, full-bodied. Not hot alcohol-wise, but it doesn't hide its ABV that well either.

OVERALL: The criminal absence of coffee and roasted barley alongside the more forgivable absence of chocolate malt makes this attempt at a stout fall flat, leaving it in a sort of purgatorial brown ale territory until the lactose sugar and oddball boudin flavours hit and just tank it. A gimmick beer with a poor flavour profile that doesn't succeed as an execution of the breakfast stout premise, let alone in giving that substyle a cajun twist. Just mediocre across the board.

C- / BELOW AVERAGE