BrewDog Paradox Islay (Batch 001)

Formerly brewed at BrewDog
Style: Imperial Stout
Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, Scotland

Bottle. Black beer with a deep roasted and liquorice aroma. The flavour is deep, treacle and malty dry. Overall a reasonable strong beer.

Bottle, 10%. Batch 006. Vinous plastic aroma, some liquorice after a little while. Black colour, seems a little muddy and quite oily. Very small brown head. The flavour is quite powerful. Starts off rather smoky, then the whisky notes appear along with some peat. Very late high bitterness and harshly roasted coffee. There is also some sweetness, mostly associated with liquorice notes. Quite low carbonation, but nice. The mouthfeel is thick, but not quite as oily as it looks. Complex and very nice. Unfortunately, the flavour gets some of the same plastic notes as aroma when it warms.

Black colour with a beige head. Smokey, light roasted aroma with dark fruity and whiskey notes. malty, light roasted flavor with notes of smoke and fruit. Light fruity sweet finish with again some smoke notes.

March 2007Chris_o Shindig. Lots of hop bitterness introducing a smokey burn. Some cut grass left in the damp for a couple of days. Oaky with whiskey notes. Balsamic vinegar and imperial stout notes with savlon and dentists room. An interesting beer - though perhaps too much happening and not quite enough pleasantness. OK though. [3.4]
Feb 2008330ml bottle from Gretna Green. This is a filtered product, but not pasteurised. It tastes like what you’d expect from an Imperial Stout that had been left in a peaty whiskey cask for a while. The extra flavours and aromas the peat whiskey adds to the base beer certainly add interest and pleasure to what feels like a fairly run of the mill Imperial Stout. It’s like it needs the extra character of the whiskey to lift it out of the ordinary. However, full credit, it does lift it out of the ordinary. Not quite into the realm of something special like Harvey’s Imperial Stout or the Courage Russian Imperial Stout, but certainly higher than average. It’s a shame that the beer is filtered because the lack of living yeast character is noticeable - the beer itself is pleasant, but dull. The whole thing is certainly highly, highly enjoyable - and I feel I got a little more pleasure, flavour and satisfaction out of this sample than I did during the hurly burly of the sampling at the Chris_o Shindig. [3.6]

Bottle at PlanB. I don’t know which batch it is, but it’s definately good! Black with a light brown head, quickly gone. Aroma heavy malty (cask, burnt, smoke). Flavor light/moderate sweet, heavy bitter and spicy. Strong in alcohol, but not felt at first!

Bottle @ the wolf tasting. Deep black with a small creamy beige head. Aroma an flavour of sour oak, smoaked and a bit sythetic. Very nice looking, but not at beer for me... at all.

Paradox parallel tasting, as Batch 006
Black color; nice head, but not persistent; I expected a bottle conditioned beer, but this one is filtered. Aroma of Scottish Single Malt, smoked, but unfortunately there is also a presence of something chemical, that takes some time to disappear; this is the only one of the three to smell Scottish. The mouthfeel of this one is rounder than the #7 and #5, with some sweetness; in the front there is a sweetish caramel flavor, that turns into a stronger mix of dark chocolate and some roasted malt, all this with a light whisky smokeyness; the final has a rising roasted malt perception, with some rhubarb; luckily for me, when warmer, it gets way rounder and with less roasted malt, much better!

Been looking forward to tasting this beast for quite some time. Pours a burnt brown, some red glints, with hints of black along the base. The aroma is unmistakeable. Peat, smoke, iodine, sea salt, heather, leather, oak, toasted bread. The flavor is more intense than I imagined it would be. A full on attack of smoke, peat, ash and wood. Good God it is intense.