A Pig In A Cage
Proclamation Ale Company

The look, the smell, the mouth feel....all good. Even the underlying flavor of it was nice maple, malty flavor up front with a bitter cocoa and a little smoke in the finish but too sweet. WAY too sweet. That's kind of the trend for these guys with their stouts and barley wines especially. If you like sweet then you might be into this.

 

Popped into my local good beer store yesterday afternoon to find a veritable trove of high ABV stouts from a bunch of good breweries, so I figured I'd start my reviews for these brutal dark beers with Proclamation's new 10%er. I was just going to write that I don't think I've had a stout by Proclamation yet, and then I remembered that I have, and that it was extremely fine and not special whatsoever, so it makes sense that it didn't stand out to me. This was brewed with maple, chocolate, and bacon, which sounds like it could be pretty good, but also could be a mess, or could just be nothing special. Only one way to find out.

The pour here is an interesting one, but it's not spectacular at the end of the day. First off, it's really not as intense or as dark as I expected; it's definitely closer to an unfiltered brown porter in color, and the head is a khaki color that is a lot lighter than most imperial stout collars I've seen. Some decent wisps of lace form as the finger-and-a-half of head slowly sinks to a thin ring. Don't think this is one of the best stout pours I've seen lately, but it definitely threw me for a loop right off the bat.

The nose is kind of metallic immediately, with some light maple sugar candy sweetness and notes of chocolate, roasted espresso beans, and a hint of smokiness. I've had a couple other stouts with actual bacon in them in my time, and they tend to be a little gimmicky. I'd usually just prefer smoked malt be added to give off the "breakfast-esque" element that putting bacon in a beer is probably supposed to achieve, but this doesn't smell bad, especially as it warms up a bit (makes sense; it's a stout, after all). Like most maple beers I've poured, though, this does have a bit of a stiff tannic quality that I don't think adds much of value to the finished product.

Not really sold by the flavor profile or feel here, either. Perhaps it's the wealth of excellently-flavored imperial stouts available in my distribution area (MA) and because I'm a combination of spoiled and picky, but this feels just "good enough" to me. I get some flavors of dry, dusty cocoa powder, light smokiness, roasted malts, and woodiness from the maple. A touch of anonymous herbal hops as it warms, too. Maple is super hard to utilize in beer to give off the kind of flavor that brewers are usually seeking out because, well, it's sugar, so the yeast easily converts it to alcohol (and carbon dioxide). Setting aside the science lesson that most beer nerds already get the gist of, I feel like they probably just pitched some syrup into the beer pre-boil and hoped it'd work out. I'm here to say that, no, it kind of doesn't. This is sweet in a sense, but it doesn't feel "maple"-sweet. The smoky aspect also fades out as this warms, so that's disappointing. The feel, too, is kind of average. It oscillates between heavy/sweet-leaning and too dry for its own good.

I actually feel similarly about this beer as I did with their Black Hexes stout that I mentioned earlier: it's... serviceable. In 2021, however, a 10% stout with adjuncts added should not really be serviceable; it should kick my ass and impress me. I think I hold stuff like this to a higher standard than a lot of other types of beer because my alcohol/caloric investment (and, a lot of the time, monetary investment, honestly) is greater when compared to other styles, as well. I want to like this, but it's not superb.