I saw this Guinness Extra Stout a few months ago and wanted to try it but they were only selling it in six packs. Unless I am fridge stocking I only buy singles because truth be told, if it’s the dregs I don’t have enough friends that I don’t like enough to foist 5 lousy beers on them. A four pack maybe.
Liquor Store etiquette dictates that you don’t break down a six pack for a single, it just isn’t done. To do so could possibly throw the beer drinking world as we know it into a downward spiral of chaos and despair. Beer snobs drinking out of cans, shandies, Corona’s with no limes, Sours at tail gate parties, who knows what would come of it.
But I’m in the store the other day and lo and behold a few Guinness Extra Stout singles are on the shelf beckoning me, an extra stout siren’s call so to speak. But at the check-out I get the side-eye from the cashier and I want to tell her that they were singles on the shelf but I decide just to silently pay the bill, emulating the Dude and abiding.*
Ironically this extra only has 330ml. I guess the extra is a little extra ABV in the mix versus the classic 4.2% Guinness. Black as the pit from pole to pole, and as headless as Goliath after Daniel is done with him. ** Roast malt and lager sweet on the nose, I didn’t detect any coffee in the crisp. Just like the aroma, this is a full roast malt and cocoa sweet, not a nitro smoothy like the draft but still smooth enough. No bitter reminders or remainders to start with but an edge starts to evolve with some coffee bitters to ground it. Nice full flavour, more like most stouts rather than a creamy light Guinness.
A very good stout, not a nitro Guinness smoothy and not an Imperial storm trooper either. No magic here, just a good solid full flavoured, well balanced and quite tasty stout.
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