Alta Mira Stout
Red Bison Brewery

 

 

650ml bottle - nice little history lesson about bison on the label.

This beer pours a fairly solid black, with not so subtle amber basal highlights, and three fingers of puffy, finely foamy, and somewhat bubbly beige head, which leaves some decent roiling sea-storm pattern lace around the glass as it slowly sinks out of sight.

It smells of lightly roasted, bready and doughy caramel malt, bittersweet cocoa powder, cafe-au-lait, a bit of licorice root, and some plain earthy, musty, and floral green hop bitters. The taste is gritty and grainy caramel malt, a lesser biscuity toffee sweetness, medium dark chocolate, a faint free-range ashiness, day-old coffee grounds, a bit of cold cream, and more well-understated leafy, herbal, and dead floral hoppiness.

The carbonation is quite laid-back in its palate-stultifying frothiness, the body an adequate middleweight, and fairly smooth, with a small airy creaminess evolving as things warm up a tad around these parts. It finishes off-dry, the caramel, cocoa, and coffee essences predominating.

Overall - this comes across as a pleasant enough version of the style. I see it listed as an Oatmeal stout elsewhere (not by the brewery), and I can kind of see that, actually. At any rate, full of flavour, and worth checking out, on a sunny and supposedly temperate Autumn day, but man, that bloody wind!