All tastes are acquired, but some tastes take more acquiring than others. No child, mistaking a parent’s glass of dark bubbly stout for a cherry-cola, ever took a sip and thought: “Yes! This is the drink for me!” Liking stout takes practice, and the effort is its own reward.
A solid bottle of stout is a bit like a solid marriage. With any luck there will be sufficient notes of joyful liquorice, coffee and dark chocolate to prevent the undercurrent of bitterness from overwhelming.
What is it?
Stout is a dark beer brewed from barley that has been toasted until burnt. For purists, stout is traditionally made with unmalted barley and it is this that distinguishes it from the maltier-tasting porter. But in practice there is a lot of overlap between the two and mixing of malted and unmalted grains to get the desired flavour in the brew.
Guinness or Murphy's?
The stout with the best international marketing campaign is undoubtedly Guinness. I’ve worked many St Patrick’s Days in an Irish-owned bar, in a typical week we’d order 2-3 barrels of Guinness. For the 17th March we’d order (and sell) an extra 10. People would tell you how much they disliked the drink as they ordered another tray of 4 pints to get their hands on another Gunness-branded tall nylon hat (known unaffectionately in the trade as a wanker hat).
The stout with the best local marketing campaign is undoubtedly Murphy’s. I accidentally moved to County Cork briefly in the late 1990s (a story for another time). The town I lived and worked in - Youghal (pronounced like the American second person plural pronoun: “y’all”) - was the only town in Ireland where Murphy’s stout outsold the brand leader Guinness. As a reward, the brewery ran a loyalty card scheme where for every three pints you drank you got a fourth free. The stickers and cards were like a second currency in the town that summer.
When to drink stout
Back to Christmas day - veg prepped, turkey’s in the oven - you’ve got a couple of hours before the spuds need to go on. For me, this is the perfect time to pop down your local boozer for a pint or - if your luck’s in - a bottle of Guinness. Bottled Guinness (sold as Guinness Original in the UK) is a lovely bitter stout with a sharper effervescence than the nitrogen bubbles that give its draft cousin its famous creamy head. A delicious mid-winter warmer.
(Nearly*) Teetotal Alternative: Kvass
Did you ever take a bite of an Eastern European rye bread and think: “My god! If only this was available in drink form!”? Well then you need to get some Kvass - the drink that tastes like bread - in your drinks cabinet. You can even make your own Kvass.
*The minimal research that I do for this blog informs me that the fermentation process leads to trace amounts of alcohol in Kvass - but they give it to children in Russia - so you’ll probably be alright.
What do you drink in the pub at Christmas time? Let us know in the comments below or on the social media.
Photo by Gary Zhang on Unsplash
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