by:: Eric Asimov
PEOPLE get stuck on the word stout. It confuses, the way it connotes size and fleshiness. And the color, too — inky, impenetrable black — suggests mass and power. As a result, many people think stout is a formidable blockbuster of an ale, heavy and alcoholic, just the way they assume darker roasts of coffee have more caffeine than lighter roasts. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Stout in its classic form is one of the lighter ales, paradoxically full-bodied yet delicate. For years, my go-to midday brew was draft Guinness Stout, a once-rare beer that has become easier and easier to find in New York in the years since the city’s beer consciousness was raised. Aside from the enticing flavors of roasted barley and coffee, a properly pulled pint is low in alcohol, around 4 percent, fractionally less even than Bud Light. It’s probably wishful thinking, but I like to think a midday stout aids the digestion. I know it improves the imagination.
Where 20 years ago I might have scoured the city looking for the few places that served draft Guinness (the canned and bottled versions never achieve the same lightness of texture), nowadays fine stout is everywhere, courtesy of the craft beer revolution. As they have with so many other genres of ale, American brewers have seized on the myriad styles of stout and made them their own. At a shop with a good selection of beers, one might easily see Irish stout, English stout, oatmeal stout, extra stout, milk stout, cream stout, chocolate stout, Russian imperial stout, even blueberry or vanilla stout.
These styles may vary greatly in their flavors, and they may range from dry to quite sweet. Some require an added element, like lactose for the milk and cream stouts, or oatmeal for the oatmeal stouts. Other flavors like coffee or chocolate may be achieved by roasting barley, though occasionally coffee or chocolate may actually be added. Yet they all retain the combination of full-body richness, lightness of texture and relatively low alcohol that is characteristic of stout. All, that is, except Russian imperial stout, the anti-stout, embodying so much that stout is not. Imperial stout was brewed especially, the story goes, to appeal to Russian royalty. It is high in alcohol, massive, powerful and sometimes powerfully sweet.
Look where imperial stout got the czars. The classic stouts are what fascinate me, so when it came time for the tasting panel to survey the beer scene again, we decided to sample dry American stouts. Our tasting coordinator, Bernard Kirsch, had quite a bit of leeway, so we ended up with a group of beers that included conventional stouts, oatmeal stouts, milk and cream stouts and even a Canadian stout. In the end, we tasted 19 bottles of what we’ll agree to call North American stout. Florence Fabricant and I were joined for the tasting by Tony Forder, a publisher and editor of Ale Street News, a consumer publication, and Richard Scholz, an owner of Bierkraft in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
