Epic/Thornbridge Stout

After sitting down with Master Dave and Master Rorz at Beer Deluxe on Showcase Wednesday, knocking back Thornbridge Brewery's latest international collaboration and being generally smitten by the black beauty contained before us, it was only a matter of time before I used all my Bear Grylls-style cunning and poise to hunt down their previous effort with New Zealand's Epic Brewery. Thankfully, before any of my own urine was consumed, I'd found exactly what I had been trying to track down, albeit at the first place I looked. (Slow Beer, if you must ask)

Spending $16 on a single bottle of beer does two things to me, it angers the tight-wallet student in me, the weedy geek who used to be able to justify drinking Hahn Ice because it was on special at $20 a cube (30 awful, awful cans). It also installs a need of occasion. To sit drink a beer of this cost by one's self, there needs to be an atmosphere, perhaps sitting on a leather couch in an evening robe, watching a roaring fire, some Bob Dylan on scratchy vinyl, singing about a man named Hurricane, perhaps even some star-gazing... Something to live up to the quality of the beer.

On this occasion, I chose the "lay on the unmade bed in my work clothes watching cat video's on youtube" option, mainly because I was too lazy to light a fire and wind up the gramophone. The beer though, as would have been expected, deserved much better. I love a beer that pours like velvet, filling the glass like melted chocolate from a fondue fountain. The aroma on the pour was quite a bitter burnt smell, but once it had settled, rich coffee and caramel remained as a teaser to the flavour. The first few sips were like that initial smell, almost a burnt toast taste (albeit, burnt toast made from the finest quality home-cooked bread) but as the beer warmed a little, I was met with a rich complexity of malty flavours, and a very subtle oak after-taste, like a good wine. Each successive sip opened up new doors of flavour until about halfway down the glass, then it seemed to just settle on bitter chocolate and coffee. It is definitely a beer for a better occasion than the one I had given it. Is it better than the Thorny Goat? tough to say, it certainly doesn't have the novelty, genius and flair of the Goat, but it feels like a much more solid and consistent competitor. Like a Luke Hodge to Thorny Goat's Buddy Franklin.