Beer- #509 – Garage Project – Cereal Milk Stout

As if it couldn’t get more strange I now have this – Garage Project – Cereal Milk Stout. So I’m picking early memories, early memories, early to the numbers and an early finish to the event?

Cereal Milk Stout evokes the familiar and comforting taste of the last few mouthfuls of a bowl of cereal. It’s a session-strength stout brewed with oats, chocolate wheat malt, a dose of lactose and actual cornflakes.

Brewed by Garage Project this on is in the style that is Sweet Stout and they are in Wellington, New Zealand

The brewery standard 650ml bottle ((22 fl oz), 1pt 6oz)), 4.7%ABV and 141 calories a serving size, this is 2.41 standard drink units.

Breakfast in the evening

Cereal Milk. Let’s be honest, it’s the best bit of breakfast in a bowl.

Here in this beer we’ve combined this creamy comfort food with the rich, roast character of the milk stout.

Brewed with corn flakes, oats, chocolate wheat and a generous dose of milk sugar, Cereal Milk Stout is rich, smooth and redolent of the sweet remnants of the breakfast bowl.

Grab a spoon and dig in.

What, I’m thinking, could go wrong?

Thick aroma, chocolate, , as you’d expect, and a decent pour giving a smallish and fizzing head which doesn’t last.

Bubbles of carbonation are the interesting mouthfeel in this. There is some chocolate but it’s low key.

Then a bitterness through the middle to a finish slightly sour.

This needs a bit of a lift int he body, but lets be objective here it is a lower ABV beer than many Stout beers that you might buy, and in that sense this is nice easy drinking, if you are prepared to give up a bit of the complexity.

On to the Vanilla. Something that I don’t taste in this, and it’s not the first beer where it is indicated and eluded me. Perhaps my expectation and the actual execution of vanilla differs.

I’ve managed to drink a fair bit of this without pause, which is both a good and bad thing. Good because it means that it’s sweet enough to quaff, bad because well you don’t need to quaff beer in general.

So, this is a beer that has sweetness about it, it’s lower ABV means that you might have a few, there is some bitterness, but the coffee/chocolate stuff isn’t strong enough to give this a bit of a lift that it seems to need, in my opinion.

The pdubyah-o-meter rates this as 7 a of its things from the thing. Can’t like all the beers all the time, and this is a case where I brought this on reputation rather than review, which honestly works more than it doesn’t. Garage Project usually mange to meet their brief on the more unusual beers. I read the label built myself up for some memories, and was left grasping for them.

To be fair, this does warm in the glass and attempt to gain some complexity and layers, it really does try, but it doesn’t have it in itself to lift and carry.

The double dip review

Am I enjoying it? Clearly it’s very easy drinking but not in a can’t get enough kind of way.
Would I have another? I’ll pass.
Would I share with a friend on a porch and set the world to rights? I think I’d be embarrassed to take this to share somewhere, it’s not even a gateway in to stronger, deeper stout type beers. It just isn’t.

Music to drink by for this. Well I found this, it’s the “Quiet Life” album by the British band Japan, Japan was an English new wave music group formed in 1974 in Catford, South London – which you’d be astounded to know is a few streets from where I was born.

SWEET STOUT

Dark brown to black in colour. Sweet stouts come in three main varieties – milk stout, oatmeal stout, and foreign stout. Milk stouts are made with the addition of lactose, and are sweet, low-alcohol brews. Oatmeal lends a smooth fullness of body to stouts, while foreign stouts are stronger (6.5-8% abv) and have a sweet malt profile and high esters. All of the sweet stouts are noted for their restrained roastiness in comparison with other stouts, and low hop levels.