Avery Mephistopheles Stout

Brewed by Avery Brewing Company
Style: Imperial Stout
Boulder, Colorado USA

Bottle shared with Häki. Batch 2. Bottled in November 2006. Pours a nice pitch black colour with a light brown head leaving a good sticky lacing. Pleasant roasty aroma with chocolate, coffee, liquorice and some alcohol. The flavour is very nice with roasted malt, bitter chocolate and coffee, dark fruits, some liquorice and a good sweetness. The alcohol is present but very well hidden. Long lasting dry and bitter roasty finish. Very good brew indeed!

Bottle. Black colour with a brown head. Roasted, coffee, alcohollic, soya aroma and a very sweet, dark fruits, vanilla, chocolate alcoholic taste. Full body with a sweet light dry, alcoholic finish.

Bottle, jan ’06. Black and opague. Malt and raisin in the aroma, touches of ash. Malty sweet, sugary flavor with ash and alcohol. Loads of alcohol, in fact. Cigars. Flavorfull beer, but IMO not a prize winner.

A Mes rate: bottle from American Beer Distributors.
I’m taking a guess that the guy before me (gipsonc79) didn’t notice that his was rate number 666 for this beer. Part of me feels guilty for spoiling the current synchronicity, part of me feels glad I didn’t have to deal with the fear of the 666th being me.

:)

This reminds me a lot of the Mikkeller Black. As in it being madder than a bucket of frogs. Aroma of marzipan and thick chocolate malt. Bags of brown sugar in there too. MASSIVE alcohol. Way too much in all honesty. "Black as a priest’s sock" (thanks Haddonsman) with a thin but lasting tan head and this may come as some surprise but there are some quite serious legs too. Huge and plain silly in the flavour. Chocolate, a truckload of malt, slight roasted coffee but it is reapered big style by some hooliganistic alcohol. This is no cheeky young skinhead, this is large pie eating veteran who is going to go to work on you. It’s brute force all the way here. The malts are big, the hops add a welcome bitterness but the alcohol is ferocious. Where I usually like this type of thing, here I find it just a little too raw. What is underneath is good, what smacks you in the very pit of your stomach is a little disturbing. Good beer, too alcoholic.

Bottle @ Ølbaren. [thank you, BelJohansen]
Pours a deep black with a little creamy film head. Aroma is sweet, some coffee and lots of hops. Nice flavour, lots of hops and a clear alcohol presence mixing with chocolate, coffee and light vanilla. Okay balance considering it it quite extreme.

12oz bottle labeled bottled on Jan 2006, Batch 1. Poured a dark, dark, black color with an averaged sized than head. Aromas of strong chocolate, roasted malts, light coffee, anise, and molasses. Tastes of chocolate, licorice, coffee, anise, and some caramel. Stronger alcohol kick in the finish (but I wouldn’t have guessed it was over 15%). On the sweeter side.

Demonic charcoal black, syrupy look and with a quickly fading head. Hugely sweet and syrupy molasses, anise, chocolate, zinfandel plummyness and earthy nose. Explosive alcohol presence as it warms is accompanied by a lip smacking sweet kiss that is as sticky as any amaretto out there. I could make a list of the numerous flavors hinted at here, but I’d rather just state like many others before me that this is hugely concentrated, certainly a chemical feature and technical beauty, but not something I would want to drink a whole bottle of, not once every decade. It is certainly nourishing, but caricatures what many other fine drinks already do quite well, be they polish meads, ports or ice ciders, playing sweetness on the delicious level. It just doesn’t seem to work as well with the cerealic nature of malt as far as I’m concerned. The archetypal disagreement between ratebeer’s general opinion and mine. I don’t really get how this differs from every big Avery out there. I respect their pushing the boundaries philosophy, but their pull toward massive sweetness fails to seduce me. The claimed balance just seems to systematically miss the meeting with my tongue. The mouthfeel is immensely filtered and feels artificially sweet. Seems to try to be a darker JW Lees with added shot of alcohol.

(Botte, Batch 1) Pours an opaque black body with a small light brown head. Aroma of toasted malt, dried cherries, prunes, vinous, and cocoa. Flavor of roasted malt, chocolate, vinous, and caramel with some alcohol burn in the finish.