All About Beer Magazine

Beer Talk

Chocolate Stout

Fort Collins Brewing Co.

Available: CO, IN, IA, NM, NC, WI, WY

• Charles Finkel

  I could have filled my fountain pen with it to write this review, but that would be a waste of a beautiful thing. Black with chocolate highlights, the contrasting head is tall dark and handsome. The nose is a bouquet of my favorite smells—dark chocolate and espresso, with a hint of burley tobacco. Earthy flavors are balanced with just enough bitter hops to make it a competitor to red wine at any dinner table. Superb with chicken in mole sauce and coffee-infused tiramisu.

• Michael Jackson

  The color of a warm sun reflected in the compacted, crystalline, snow of the Idaho ski slopes. Slightly piney, resiny, leafy, hop aroma. The palate? I begin to imagine an intensely bittersweet dessert; A trio of sharp lemon sorbet, Curaçao orange ice-cream, and vanilla--pod cheesecake (chilled), all on a base of crushed Graham crackers. You reckon that's not a tasting note? It is what the beer planted in my mind. It is hw the beer spoke to me.

• Stan Hieronymus

  Advertises itself as “an old favorite you’ll remember” because the recipe comes from the former H.C. Berger (also Fort Collins) brewery, which distributed one of the first microbrewed chocolate beers. It has a traditional feel, taking its chocolate aroma and flavor only from malts, leaving a cocoa impression (or maybe that of chocolate cake batter) rather than that of a milk chocolate bar. Almost black, with a roasty/slightly burnt nose leading to a palate that dances between bittersweet and sweetbitter. In the end substantial without being particularly big.