🍻Mazzle Reviews Beer - It's Cold Enough for Stout Again!🍻

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Cold Weather Means We're Back on the Heavy Beers Again!

Brr... it's cold in Melbourne all of a sudden. This means my craving for pale ales and IPAs goes out the door and I'm back thinking of the heavy beers. I decided a while ago to start getting to know stouts better, so while feeling chilled in my gym uniform last night I decided to stop by my local bottle shop that stocks an impressive range of local craft beers to grab a stout.

Watt's River Brewing Dry Roasty Stout

Watts River Brewing are based in Healesville, which is north east from Melbourne. It's a lovely spot to visit, and they have a great reputation as a craft brewer. I tried their Pale Ale a while ago (in the video I thought it was a Saison that I tried... oops) and found the beer to be quite watery and boring.

The guy that sold me this Stout claimed that the beer was lovely and roasty, nutty and full of great flavours. Given my past experience with Watts River, I had some doubts but thought I'd give them another try anyway.

Watt's River describe this beer as:

A dark, dry, roasty stout built on flavours of coffee and dark chocolate as well as a tiny hint of smoke drifting around in the background. Perfect to savour by yourself or share with an old mate.
_Source

So I'm immediately wondering if the chap who sold me this beer had actually tried it before selling it to me.

So what's it like?

This stout certainly looks like a stout. It's dark, light barely passes through it, but it pours with almost no head. It has very little in the way of aroma, which I found very strange. I could detect malts, some hoppy notes and not much else. I don't know if my nose wasn't functioning or not, but it was really strange that I couldn't detect much in the way of aroma from this beer.

Carbonation was low to mild, which is reasonable for a stout I think. In terms of flavours, I was immediately hit with malts and a reasonably high level of bitterness. I didn't really find much in the way of chocolate or coffee flavours on the palate, and definitely nothing smokey.

So I guess my second experience of Watts River Brewing is much like the first. The beer is decent, but lacks in anything interesting or exciting. I didn't get any complexity from this beer which made it lacking adventure or anything really creative.

It's a decent beer, but not exciting at all. So I suppose I'll head on out and try to find a much more exciting stout for next week's #BeerSaturday.