Steel Cut Oatmeal Raisin Stout
Big Rock Brewery

 

This is definitely one of Big Rock's best efforts in recent memory. It pours, smells, and tastes like an dry stout. For the life of me, I cannot detect any raisins or oatmeal aside from from some fruity notes in the aroma. This is a tasty beer, one worth seeking outside of the Barn Burner taster pack, but it excels in the roasted malt/coffee/cola department instead of the intended result.

 

 

 

 

 

330 ml bottle poured into an English pub glass. A very dark opaque brown with two or three fingers of frothy tan head. Looks enticing. Aroma is well toasted (slightly burnt) brown bread, black licorice, a semi-sour dark dried fruit note (nothing that screams raisins but its in the ballpark), day old coffee. Palate is rather dry and perhaps earthy/spicy (not in the sweet aromatic sense). Coffee and unsweetened chocolate predominate, although the burnt bread and faint raisin from the nose continue to assert themselves. Getting more smoke late. Does not have a characteristic oatmeal stout mouthfeel ... More like an Irish dry, perhaps: Chalky, dusty, with a lingering grainy bitterness. By the end one is rather struck by the desiccating astringent ashy dryness. Early billing described this as tasting like cookies, which it most assuredly does not. I notice that the label makes no such claim. This renders the special ingredient rather moot, truth be told. All in all, I detect some legitimate stout character although this one is rough around the edges.

 

 

 

330ml bottle, the other new offering in Big Rock's newest mixed-pack. Not quite grokking this one's name - are oatmeal raisin cookies typically cut out with steel implements, or something? Whatevs.

This beer pours a clear, very dark brown cola colour, with three fingers of puffy, rocky, and frothy beige head, which leaves some pretty attractive spooky cobwebbed lace around the glass as it lazily falls away.

It smells of toasted bready caramel malt, wet coffee grounds, bittersweet cocoa powder, faint dried black fruit, a suggestion of stale Nordic licorice, acerbic yeast, and somewhat bitter earthy, weedy hops. The taste is semi-sweet chocolate, day-old coffee, roasted crackery and grainy caramel malt, hollow, forgotten at the back of the pantry raisin notes, earthy yeast, and a plain, yet sort of dirty-seeming leafy hoppiness.

The bubbles are more or less laid-back and out of it, the body an adequate medium weight, and more informed by the overall roastiness, than by any particular influence of the purported oats. It finishes pretty dry, the roast and toast elbowing out the other myriad players for top billing.

While I can't comment on the 'steel cut' part of this one's denomination, I can aver that it is weak on the oatmeal, raisin, and even the stout side of things - so what does that leave? Not much, and nothing worth seeking out if you're looking for the proclaimed cozy cookie experience.