Almost Heaven, Almost Luxurious

If the world were a perfect place some brewer would put real chocolate in their chocolate stout.  Well, we may be closer to utopia than the world thinks.  Wells and Youngs Luxurious Double Chocolate Stout is brewed with chocolate malt and real dark chocolate. 

The folks at W&Y explain it thusly: "Pale Ale and Crystal malt, Chocolate Malt, a special blend of sugars, Fuggle and Golding hops, real dark chocolate and chocolate essence are combined to deliver a stout of with real credentials."  Fuggle is just a great word.

This is consistently a chocolate stout meaning you get the chocolate from the aroma through the taste and in the finish.  When pouring you might think you picked the wrong beer for mid-summer inside the beltway but the tasting tells you otherwise.  Though the head is not particularly creamy it has a Guinness feel as you watch it wind down.  The aroma is chocolate and nutty.   It's not a particularly heavy stout and the finish is even a bit thin.  You might expect this to be an overly sweet beer but it's really not.  The beer does not have the greatest balance to it as we were looking for a more bitter-sweet concoction. The carbonation is in the mid-range, which is fine despite our preference for lower carbonation.

Overall, this is a fine brew but hardly luxurious.  For our tastes, luxury should be plush and have more depth.  Maybe we didn't know what to expect and maybe we just didn't know what we were looking for.  It's the wrong time of year for heavy, meaty beers but that's what we thought we had before opening the bottle.  So, drop the term "luxurious" and you'll have a fine chocolate stout that's brewed with real chocolate.