Stagger Homeward
Great Raft Brewing

 

16oz can, tulip, canned 11/9/20.

Very dark with dark brown crude oil edges. There’s no head, but some minuscule bubbles at the extreme edges.

Black strap molasses, intense oily sweetness, black olives, pennies.

Thick, unrefined sweet beer. It’s a bit like someone mixed molasses and coke. And maybe rum. It has a bitter, alcoholic finish that goes some way towards balancing it.

Thick and slippery, it has a luxurious feel. Even though the bubbles are tiny, they’re pricking.

The aroma has come nice complexity, the flavor is solid, and the feel is super smooth.

 

 

L: black
S: nearly absent. Just a hint of roast and sweetness.
T: milk sugar, cream, chocolate cake, vanilla, figs
F: decent body you'd expect in a milk stout
O: pretty simple sweet stout; not a lot of depth and not much aroma at all. But the hint of figs on the finish and full mouthfeel are enough to elevate it to "decent"

16 fl oz pull-tab ran me $4.29 USD at a Total Wine & More in Metairie, LA. Canned 11.09.20.

10% ABV. "Imperial milk stout." 41 IBUs.

MALTS
Munich, Crystal Malt Oats, Roasted Barley

HOPS
Bravo

"brewed with milk sugar." -Great Raft's website.

TASTE: Sweet up front but charred on the back end, finishing on a note of lingering acrid roast. Hints of chocolate cherries and dark fruit (yeast-derived esters) do emerge late in the beer's structure, but ultimately it's painfully simple and shallow for an imperial (milk) stout, lacking basic balance and missing needed complexity. The milk sugar's sweetness is wholly unnecessary, but as noted above it doesn't quell the misguided bitterness of the roasted barley anyway - why use it at all?

It's not the additive-laden pastry stout every other brewery seems to be putting out these days - and normally I'm on the side of not riddling a beer with all kinds of artificial crap - but this is so simple it would actually benefit from something like coffee bean, cacao, or vanilla bean.

I guess my issue is it's worse for being imperial...if they stripped away the unnecessary milk sugar and toned down the roasty bitterness it'd be more balanced and its simplicity would be easier to accept with a concomitantly lower ABV.

Hints of Whoppers/malted milk balls surface as it warms, but it doesn't improve as it comes to temperature, remaining an unbalanced yet appallingly simplistic ale given its premise.

OVERALL: I can't imagine who'd prefer this to Mackeson's XXX, Left Hand's Milk Stout, Lakewood's Temptress, et al., and last I checked there were also far better locally/regionally brewed milk stouts available at or below this beer's price competing with it in the same market. I don't know who this is for, but it's not the discerning milk stout fan nor is it the discerning imperial stout fan. Drinks like the kind of beer they decided to brew after noticing consumers were buying the style and 4x16 fl oz format instead of a truly inspired idea/recipe.

Lazily ticks the boxes necessary to qualify as an imperial milk stout, but is ultimately a very forgettable, prosaic, and pedestrian attempt at the style. Why brew this?

C- / BELOW AVERAGE

 

 

Pours an effervescent mahogany with a sliver of mocha colored head. Average lacing & lesser head retention

S: Cocoa, not much else

T: Dryness, cocoa, vanilla & a little roastyness up front. Vanilla, chocolate, & dryness as this warms along a little molasses & dark cherry, plus a little coffee. Finishes dry with sweet vanilla & chocolate, plus coffee

MF: Medium body, smooth carbonation, warming

Great flavor & drinkablity, nose could be better