Bare Knuckle Stout

Brewed by Anheuser-Busch InBev
Style: Dry Stout
St. Louis, Missouri USA

Pours black with a creamy tan head and great creamy lacing. Dark coffee aroma with a hop nose. Mild creamy dark coffee flavor with faint hops. Dark and creamy palate.

Almost zero aroma as you would expect from a nitro tap. Creamy white head. It’s a lot like a guinness from nitro only maybe a slightly more bitter finish. Easy to drink but hardly impressive at all. Looks like they tried to clone guinness.

Opaque tap, with a thin brownish/white head. Caramel, touch of smoke, touch of coffee. Mouthfeel was watery for the color and the style. Chalky body and aftertaste. I disagree with those who say that you can’t tell this from its Irish second cousin--although this is really not bad. Enjoyalbe but for the body.

Draft at TradeWinds. Nice dark brown appearance. And an aroma of smoke and carmel. But the aftertaste left me unhappy.

Nitro tap. Dark brown, nearly black, tan head. I don’t understand the light head with such a dark body. Very mild aroma, some touches of roast but that nitrogen kills the aroma. Fairly roasty flavor, notes of caramel. Medium bodied. I’m growing weary of everyone putting their stouts on nitro just because Guinness does.

Tap: Deep brown nearly opaque with creamy but small head and good lace. The arom is notes of chocolate and coffee, carmalized malts, aromatic hops, dusty yeast esters and a bit of vegetable off-nose. The taste is smooth and mild with a lot of malt character but little else outside some smoky tones on the finish. I wrote my notes not knowing this was an A-B product (I thought it was another brewery) and honestly, this is a drinkable dry stout. Arggh the pain ;-}

Tap. Black with a creamy brown head. Lightly roasted aroma. Flavor was light and clean of roasted malt. Too light but not a bad flavor. Thin, watery and silky. Shame because it could be pretty good if they just pumped the flavor up

This one is very much like Guinness, although the flavor does seem to be a bit thinner. The nitrous has the same ill effect on the flavor that it does on every other beer dispensed this way, and it ends up being pretty underwhelming. But then again, so is Guinness after you’ve had a few more robust stouts.