I stopped by Gails Hops & Grapes this afternoon to pick up a couple more nice beers to sample. When I go to Gail's, I'm like a kid in a candy store with fifty cents in his pocket. There is so much to choose from, and I can't have some of everything, so I'll spend 20 minutes looking in the cases to see what strikes me as interesting. Today, my eye was caught by Hook Norton Brewery's Double Stout.  If any of you are like me, England is not the first spot on the map that comes to mind when you think of the really good stouts.  I had to give it a try.

From the bottle:

A blend of malts gives Double Stout a character all of its own.  Black malt enriches the color and teases the palate with an umistakable 'toast' flavour.  Brown malt gives it the dryness. 

Black malt and brown malt are rather generic terms to describe the actual malts used to make beers.  More specifically, I believe this beer has a characteristic flavor of black patent malt and some crystal or caramel malts as well.  The dryness mentioned on the label definitely isn't dominant, and the beer is rather smooth on the tongue.  The hop character of this beer comes around nicely as the beer warms up just a little, which is always the case.  Overall, this is a nice and smooth stout that I really enjoyed.

When I mention drinking beers at temperatures between 55 and 60 degrees, some of my hardcore BudMillerCoors drinking buddies look at me with a raised brow.  They are all used to an ice-cold beer or twelve at quittin' time every day :)  The great thing about icing down the BudMillerCoors Yellow Fizzy Beers is that it will chill the flavor right out of them and give them drinkability. 

If you went to a fine bakery and ordered a tasty-looking strawberry and cream cheese danish, would you expect to have it served to you frozen?  I would hope not.  The flavors are quite subdued or non-existant as the temperature drops.  In these more complex beers, the flavors, in my humble opinion, are much more mature and pleasing at a cool temperature rather than a cold one...