Irish Oatmeal Stout
Snoqualmie Falls Brewing Company & Taproom

An Irish Oatmeal Stout...an oatmeal stout at the drier end and served on nitro-tap. It definitely straddles between two styles (oatmeal and dry stout) and succeeds with wonderful balance. Made with rolled oats, chocolate, and roasted malts and I'm guessing Kent Goldings for the hops. The most enjoyable dryish stout that I've ever had. Definitely try it if you get the chance to visit the brewery, which is full of other great offerings too.

The appearance is pretty much what you'd expect from the style, beautiful cascading pour with a creamy white head the width of a pinky and a black body. (The pour was decent enough, but it didn't come to the very top of the glass. Having spent a semester abroad in Ireland, this mildly annoyed me.) Roasted grain and coffee come through in the nose with plenty of bittersweet chocolate too. Tastes like a slightly sweet dry stout, with a rich coffee and chocolate balance that gives way to a very earthy and mellow tobacco-like aftertaste, which I thought complemented this interpretation far better than the slight sourness of the beers it's compared with. With nitro-tap and rolled oats, the mouthfeel is of course as smooth as silk. A real pleasure of a beer. Highly sessionable.

A very fine beer. Big, rich flavor and a luscious aroma.

But we’ll get to that in a moment. Right now I need to bitch about the pour. Snoqualmie’s menu boasts a comparison between their Irish Oatmeal Stout and Guinness, Beamish, and Murphy’s. Never mind that none of these three are oatmeal stouts. If the comparison means “stout served on nitro” then that’ll do. But pouring a Guinness takes – what? – about three minutes? And that includes spoon work. There’s a reason why it takes so long to pour and that is that all that insane nitrogenous turbulence takes at least a few minutes to settle out. Serve the beer in less time than this and you get a “pint” glass that holds about 12-ounces of actual beer plus a three-fingered dollop of nitro-duff, which is what I got from the good folks at Snoqualmie.

Now I like nitro beers a whole lot. But I don’t care for a glass that’s one-fourth foam. It defies proper beer service, so I’m docking this one for lack of visual appeal. Good visual appeal means my pint glass is holding a pint of beer.

As for Snoqualmie’s Irish Oatmeal Stout, my fleeting 12-ounce acquaintance was a charm. As I said, big rich flavor and luscious chocolate malt aromatics. Add to this a refined drinkability and you get a beer that’s not out of place beside Wildcat or Copperhead. And that’s saying a lot. The taste is clean and enticing and the head is so thick it clumps backwards where you sipped from it like some form-fitting spray. Very nice. I might like to try a pint sometime.