Black is Beautiful
Ethereal Brewing

12oz can from brewery. Near black pour with a small tan head. Roasty, chocolate aroma. Taste is fairly rich, dark, roasty, light bitterness, dark chocolate. Pretty solid Stout.

12oz can from the brewery.
Pours pitch black in color with a finger thick brown head.
Distinctive espresso and black chocolate flavor with a lightly sweet and lingering bitter finish.
I enjoyed this one very much.

Equality comes in all shapes and colors. But the beer that represents such a movement is all black. Teaming up with Mirror Twin Brewing and donations to Black Soil Lives, Ethereal leads the Central Kentucky charge for equal rights with a national movement of a ten-percent stout with relatively few flavor distractions.

Black certainly is beautiful as the collaboration beer of that same namesake pours a beautiful shade of onyx, equipped with a nearly mirror-like sheen. As a roasty, toasty and deeply caramelized scent rolls off of the sepia stained froth, the nose is caught up in a brown sugar, light molasses and chocolate nuanced scent. But its those charred malt sweetnesses of brown sugar and molasses that slathers the early palate with firm but reasonable grain sugars.

Across the middle palate, the robust taste expands and saturates the tastebuds with a deeply savory espresso, bittersweet chocolate and wonderfully seared cream flavors. Light caramel and vanilla wash the tastebuds ahead of the nearly smoky char of grain and into a bittersweet finish of broad woodsiness, campfire and kahlua spice.

Full bodied and rich from sip to finish, Black Is Beautiful finishes spicy, warm and deeply soothing. While it may not exactly be stout season, sometimes things are more important than the rules. And this lavish and stern beer seems fitting for a mid-August evening, right down to its afterglow of sweet, smoky char.