Cake Monster
Bandit Brewery

Appearance: Poured black as night with a single finger of head that did not lace very much nor stick around.

Smell: It reminds me of those McCain double chocolate cakes, as the malt offers a rich almost black forest like cake (no cherry though) but it also has a sweet sugary icing small with chocolate blended in. A little warming is needed for it to reach good potency, and that's where I am getting a hint of chili powder on the nose.

Taste & Mouthfeel: I'm breaking from my norm and combining these categories in my text review here, because the taste and aftertaste on this one are inseparable, because the spicier and bitter notes linger far more then with any beer I've encountered, and thus dramatically link the two together. The beer itself is really sweet...I'd say too sweet to be honest. I think the problem is weirdly at the start, where you get this creamy icing note which seems to pair with the milder chocolate malt leaving you to think...ok that's the sweet note, now it's going to lean into stout, but that doesn't happen. Instead the malt expands and seems to take on sweetness and amplifies the icing to a cloying level. Initially you don't even seem to encounter a bitter or spicy note, but as you keep drinking eventually a strong burnt malt/dark choclate note comes forward with the spicy habanero. It kind of reveals a weird truth here, that those notes are invisible, until they've attached themselves to your palate and then keep getting stronger and stronger. Unfortunately, while the seem to have a mild restraining effect on the start of the beer (because they do linger fiercely), they vanish in the middle and smack you at the end of the experience. How hard the smack you seems to depend on how long you've waited between sips, but I feel you'd have to wait 2 minutes between sips to get back into pleasant territory, because that bitter/spicy combo lingers in the aftertaste. The spice more then the bitterness, (which is good if heat is your thing) but it doesn't really leave you. Anyways, the carbonation is low, but does lean towards a creaminess for that icing note which makes sense. If it were more aggressive this would be unbearable. The transitioning of this beer is a bit lost because it starts at 8 sweetness, goes up to 11 and then hits you with two 7 hits of bitter and spice at once.

Drinkability: Well, it's thick, which I firmly believe a good stout should be, and it does hide it's 10% ABV very well. That said, it's a case of it's easy to hide a crack in the road under a 10 car pile up. Surprisingly despite all it has going on, it's easy on the gut, probably due to the low carbonation.

Final Thoughts: I feel like I'm engaging in a bit of hyperbole in this review. It's not that bad, and the concept I think makes sense. Spicy, chocolate, cake stout. I think the problem is the beer is overdone. I was going to say, maybe dial back the initial sweet note, but I think if you did that, it might make the hyper sweet note seem jarring. I think the spiciness is also too high for a beer with such sweetness. Something milder than Habanero I think it called for here too. That also being said, it struggles to cut through without having established a strong spiciness in the aftertaste so it might get lost. I don't honestly know how I would fix this, except maybe dial everything back to normal pastry stout level. More importantly then that, I don't know when I would want to drink this. I mean, I like Mexican hot chocolate, but even it's not this sweet or spicy. If I want something this sweet for desert high spice is probably not something I want to pair with it, and if I want something this spicy, I would either want the sweetness present be more tempered or abandoned entirely for something like a summer lime chili beer.