A Year of Craft Beer, Vol. 90, Makeson XXX Stout

Happy Easter for those of you who celebrate it.  For me it was a weekend of brewing, working for the man, and cooking dinner for my parents.  I got a lot done and feel good about it.  I'm way too stuffed to drink this beer, but I will make the best of it!

This is my first go at a milk/sweet stout.  At first sip I didn't like it, but it's growing on me.  Here is a pic:

I got burned on my report about Bass last night thinking that is was an independent brewer.  I have no idea about Carib brewery who makes this.  They may be owned by ABImbev as well.  I am not sure.  Either way, this beer is different than any other that I have had.  I have had stouts with lactose added to sweeten them, but not this much lactose.  This beer seems on the extreme of sweet, but that is supposedly the style.  Still, it's too much.

The bottle however is good to reuse for homebrewing!  Good looking out Carib!

The beer pours pitch black with a one finger brown head that lasts throughout the drink and leaves a Mothra looking lacing pattern on the glass with antennae and all!  Cool!

The beer has a roasted malt aroma evenly mixed with a milky sweet smell and maybe some caramel and vanilla going on.

The flavor is sickening sweet lactose and corn sugar with a caramel malt and a hint of roasted malts and perhaps some bread to it.  At the end there is only a tiny hint of bitter dryness from some hops and for me, that is the most enjoyable part of this beer.

The mouthfeel is over the top sweet and extremely full with low to moderate carbonation.  It leaves a film on my tongue.

Overall, this may be a good beer for the style, but I doubt it.  It's my only sweet/milk stout so I can't really judge it to the others and going by the description on here it fills all the criteria, but I think more than necessary so I am going to give it an average score of 3 overall.  Will I seek this out again?  No.  Only if I want to compare it with another one, but I don't like this beer.

Hey it's worth a shot, right?  You aught to try it too!  You might like it.  Life is too short not to take chances, especially with beer!  I rarely meet one that I didn't like enough to not drink, but I do.  This would be one of them, but I just bought a Blichmann burner so I need to not waste money!

-Wiss