Green City 2019 Imperial Stout w/ Tolima Coffee & Madagascar Vanilla
Other Half Brewing - Center Street

 

This one pours a fairly dark black color, with a small head, and not much lacing.

This smells like roasted malt, cookie dough, spicy coffee, black licorice, and earthy vanilla.

This is decent, but there's a bit of an overriding black licorice flavor here, a sort of earthy and mildly sweet bitterness that just kind of plagues it for me. The coffee flavor is nice, though, rich and chocolatey, and slightly spicy. I don't get a ton of vanilla.

This is thick, and slightly syrupy, with no real booziness at all.

This is not one of the better OH stouts I've had. It had it's moments, but I just don't like licorice, and I don't know why I was getting that flavor here.

 

 

 

 

Dark brown pour with almost no head. Lots of rich coffee, exotic vanilla, and tropical banana in the nose as those were all detectable on the palate as well. Smooth taste.

 

Picked up this bottle at Other Half over the weekend, even though I did not attend the Green City beer festival at Industry City. Most of the bottles that I've had from these guys recently were quite good, sweet, and felt weaker than they were in actuality and that was the case with the one as well. I'm not one to drink American Imperial Stouts during the warmer weather months but if all of them were like this, that might not hold true for much longer!

The pour to this was pretty much what I expected as the liquid was a dark brown with just a hint of light seeping in around the edges. To my surprise, there was almost no head on top of this beer as the thin ring of mocha bubbles at the top of the liquid settled quite rapidly, leaving behind a viscous liquid that was more than enough to compensate for the lack of any proper topping. Scattered bit of bubbles stayed behind as I sipped this as the lacing was underwhelming as well, even with the lack of accompanying head. Lots of rich coffee, exotic vanilla, and tropical banana in the nose as those were all detectable on the palate as well. Smooth, slick, and rich, this had a nice feel to it with enough fruit and underlying grit to give it body and flavor without feeling too powdery, sweet, or gimmicky.

To be fair, this had tons of booze in it although I was hard-pressed to feel it. Even as this fully warmed up, it came across as something lesser than an American Imperial Stout as this went down so easily, with tons of sweetness and an overt coconut undertone that tied everything in together. For those of us like me that coudln't attend Green City, this would nearly make up for that as it was enjoyable in every way without having any apparent flaws or deficiencies. So glad I was able to get a bottle of this!