Troubadour Obscura Categorization

My guess is that the brewery calls it a stout:

"Troubadour Obscura is a dark red-brown colored beer, with a rich, malty body combined with different touches of a stout but in a very nice balanced way: roast, chocolate, coffee, vanilla. A mild stout with a Belgian body!"

http://www.troubadourbieren.be/en/troubadour-obscura

Cheers
Mike

 

Sounds like a Belgian stout

 

I tried this not too long ago and thought it to be an interesting take on a stout. I like the name too, not that that makes it any more of a stout.

 

Truthfully, I'm pretty sure that this is as simple a case as the person who added the Troubadour Obscura to the BeerAdvocate database selected "Foreign Export Stout" as the style because they thought it was a stout from Belgium and that made it Foreign.

Of course you're correct, by style definitions and taste profile, it's far closer to Belgian Strong Dark than it is to Foreign Export. But this type of thing happens so frequently that I don't really read the style assignments on BA anymore. Trust the label and the brewery's descriptions.

 

The Troubadour beers include many non-Belgian styled, IIPA’s, RIS, BIPA, smoked porter etc. However they are not meant to be imitations of how these beers are made abroad, they always have a twist to them. You can seem them as semi-Belgian hybrids.

Obscura is intended to be a stout, market, brewed etc. as such. It is not meant to be a stout in a strict American or British way. As such the style “Foreign / Export Stout” actually seems like a perfect fit to me.

All of the De Musketiers beers are contract brewed at De Proefbrouwerij who make quite a few non-Belgian style beers. A good example is the hundreds of Mikkeller beers which are made there including beers like Black & their hop series.

Fun fact: stout means naughty in Dutch. Or brave…