Smoked Stout
Hell's Basement

1L howler from Sherbrooke Liquor store, natch. Apparently made with 15 different grains (whether that's a total, or merely a broad selection, remains to be seen).

This beer pours a fairly solid black abyss, with the barest of amber basal edges, and four fingers of puffy, loosely foamy, and bubbly brown head, which leaves some stellar tightly packed web-ish lace around the glass as things slowly recede.

It smells of meaty caramel malt, acrid peat bogs, iodine, saline solution, bittersweet cocoa powder, burnt rubber, a hint of black licorice, and some very overwhelmed earthy, musty, and floral green hops. The taste is gritty and grainy caramel malt, some free-range Scottish Isles-tinged ashiness, salted white crackers, still rather dry chocolate and day-old coffee grounds notes, a minor medicinal character, and more rather timid earthy, leafy, and gently lit-up floral hoppiness.

The carbonation is fairly obtuse in its punch-clock frothiness, the body a solid medium-heavy weight, and sort of smooth, but not really - unless you like campfire smoke all up in your particular palate. It finishes quite dry, the Gaelic smokey essences not letting up for one hot second.

Overall - yeah, this was much more of a 'smoked' deal than one might have been expecting. It's not just yer general backyard firepit thing, but an apt approximation of those headiest of Scotch whisky offerings, blended into a dense, dark stout. Interesting, but my predilection towards the Irish side of the wet spirits world precludes me from really, truly, or actually digging this one.