Smooth Ascent
Athletic Brewing Co.

Pours black with two fingers of khaki-beige foam. Smells burnt. Coffee with mild acidity and a bold profile leads roasty, toasty, and bready malts. Flavor profile is heavy coffee up front. Mild acidity and bold, with expansive flavor. Roasty, bready, toasty malts and toffee. Feels dense up front, but breaks down to a mild fizz and fuzz at the end. Overall, texture and notes are great, but coffee leaves something to be desired.

Reviewed from notes.

L - 1.5 finger beige head craters in from the middle, leaving no lacing. Body is an opaque deep brown.

S - Dunkin cold brew coffee, smoke, nutty, dark chocolate. I love the nose on this.

T - coffee to start, then strong molasses, caramel, dark chocolate, and a wave of wort. The finish is all coffee. Moderate bitterness. Low sweetness.

F - medium-light body with appropropriate carb.

O - I really dig this. The nose is amazing and it tastes like a coffee porter. The wort taste is there but subsides as it warms. Next batch I hope they use oats, since the body really sucks. For an na though, this is going to thrill some of you’se when you try it. And you know it’s just gonna get better in the future. Go Athletic!

Appearance: Dark brown color with a generous-sized foamy dark beige head that slowly faded. A good looking Stout.

Smell: Sweet unfermented malts and a hint roasted malts.

Taste: The taste profile features mildly sweet malt notes, and some mild coffee/roasted malt notes. The finish is fairly dry featuring lingering roast malts and coffee notes. As it warms the roasted malts and coffee notes become more pronounced.

Mouth-feel: On the light side of medium bodied with a fairly generous level of carbonation.

Overall: The unfermented wort flavor is at odds with the stout flavors and likely mask them. As it warmed I cold pick out the stout elements more but as a huge stout fan the masking is a bit disconcerting for me. That being said, not a bad non-alcoholic beverage.

Pours opaque, dark brown in color with minimal head. Taste is deep roast coffee and chocolate cordial. Medium-heavy bodied, roasty, with moderate carbonation. Makes for a solid coffee beer. I do get more coffee than beer but there is enough stout action going on.

 

Having been very pleased with some of the other offerings from Athletic, I decided to give their "stouty" NA brew a try. The beer presents a very dark pour with a stout-like head. Aroma is COFFEE (caps intentional), and a very roasty one at that ... I imagined taking a whiff of some freshly-ground coffee or unground coffee beans. Flavor mostly follows the initial aroma, picking up maybe a few minor cocoa notes, but not a whole lot. On the dry side, definitely not sweet. Smooth mouthfeel, also not thin.

I'm a bit on the fence as to exactly how to rate Smooth Ascent. Compared to the other Athletic offerings that I have tried, this one IMO plays the least like a beer. I get the impression that stout kinda "needs" some alcohol to achieve its desired end result, perhaps more so than other styles of beer that translate more gracefully to an NA form. Although it definitely has some attributes that mimic what you would expect from a stout, to me, this feels more like a carbonated coffee drink. It had even crossed my mind that I could probably get away with adding some sugar and half-and-half to it, which would not occur to me to do with any other beer that I know of.

Overall, I would say that if you are a fan of stouts and are looking for a decent NA version of one, you probably won't be too disappointed here (as long as you are also a fan of stronger coffee flavors). Rated as a coffee beverage, it is very good. Rated an as NA beer, it is good.

This is billed as a Non-alcoholic "stouty brew" - I presume they cannot call it "stout" because it is NA?

Appearance:
Muddy dark brown and dark tan head that falls to a permanent ring.

Aroma:
Coffee and toasted oats and wheaties cereal (?)

Flavor:
Coffee dominant. With the trace alcohol content insufficient to glue the flavors together It is sort of a grain-flavored coffee beverage. Moderate earthy hop notes. Tastes similar to a coffee oatmeal stout but not quite. Different but not all that bad. Nice mocha finish.

Mouthfeel:
Nominal CO2 and medium thickness thanks to the oats. Not bad!

Overall:
This is coming off about as good as a low alcohol stout could hope to. No strongly off-putting flavors, is more of a coffee cocktail than an actual pure beer, but strangely satisfies in the way a 3.5 to 4% ABV session dry Irish stout would. A tasty, highly palatable stout substitute.