Headbanger's Breakfast
New Level Brewing

 

473ml can - an Imperial stout, made with coffee, lactose, and maple sugar. A Tim Horton's morning in a beer, to be certain.

This beer pours a fairly solid black, with the barest of basal amber edges, and three fingers of puffy, rocky, and bubbly brown head, which leaves some stellar tacky snow rime pattern lace around the glass as it lazily seeps away.

It smells of gritty and grainy caramel malt, bittersweet cocoa powder, sort of acerbic artisan coffee grounds, melted vanilla ice cream, faint maple extract essences, and some very, very tame earthy, musty, and floral hoppiness. The taste is bready and doughy cereal malt, cream n' sugar heavy latte, still hard to discern plain maple notes, a hint of black licorice, and more zesty herbal, weedy, and musky floral hop bitters.

The carbonation is adequate in its palate-caressing frothiness, the body a decent medium weight, and fairly smooth, with a wee airy creaminess kind of sitting on the sidelines, as if to say, 'look at me!'. If finishes off-dry, but not by as much as one might have been expecting - that IBU reading on the label actually having some merit, for once.

Overall - this is one enjoyable and engaging version of the style, with the extraneous ingredients making for a pleasant enough ride. No sign of the elevated ABV, which seems like an appropriate send-off to the initialisms of the day. Gonna go crank up some Megadeth or Motorhead, in honour of my pissy AF downstairs 'neighbour'.