Super Vanilla Brew
Brasserie La Débauche

From the International Beer Collector Subscription in February 2022. Drunk in October 2022.

The beer pours jet black with a dirty white head and a thin covering of foam. If I look hard I can see bubbles in the glass. Overall a very pretty beer!

The nose has vanilla (duh!), and mild chocolatey and liquorice notes with some burnt sugar.

Tastewise, the overwhelming impression is malty vanilla. The are some milk coffee and tobacco notes at the back end. For such a sweet beer the finish is quite abrupt and tends to thin out quite a bit after the swallow - I certainly wasn't overwhelmed by a cloying sweetness, which is always a risk with this type of beer. That said, I doubt I could drink a second one.

Mouthfeel is as expected: the beer is quite velvety in the mouth, feeling similar to a nitro beer. But carbonation is very mild - almost non-existent - and I think that contributes to the thin finish mentioned earlier.

Overall, by the end of this review, nearly 80% through the beer, I'd begun to be put off by the mouthfeel of the beer and the abrupt end to each swallow. It made the beer become a little one-dimensional: there was the vanilla upfront and the chocolaty/tobacco vibe but then, bam, all was gone and there was nothing compelling me to take another sip. The fact that each aspect of the review was rated lower than the previous speaks to the fact that the longer I lingered over the beer, the less impressed I became with it, and with a stout I would normally expect the opposite.

Cheers!

Nice roasted, nearly burnt coffee notes beside the vanilla