Drinking It All: #31 Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout

Drinking It All is a document of my attempt to try every beer in circulation. It’s a Herculean and tragic attempt at best. But it’s the means, not the end that counts here.

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if it's an oatmeal stout, can it be considered a part of breakfast?

I had a birthday this past weekend and my good friends Ben and Selena got me a couple of four packs of fancy beer. Thanks, Ben and Selena. Also, they got me beers I haven’t had before. So today I’m trying Samuel Smith’s Oatmeal Stout.

I think this is the first stout I’ve posted about (aside from the one I made), which is a shame because I like stouts a lot. Although it seems like I never really like them much out of the bottle (e.g., Guinness and its little plastic widget). But I could drink Guinness on draft all night long.

This stout is, as it says, an oatmeal stout and is supposedly responsible for reviving the style, according to the label. It tastes similar to other stouts, such as Guinness, but I think it has a little more bitterness at the end. Also, it has a roasted coffee kind of taste to it, which makes sense because it’s made with malted barley and roasted barley (generally roasted barley isn’t malted, so it primarly gives flavor to the beer rather than fermentable sugars to be converted to alcohol). This stout is as smooth as any I’ve had save Guinness.

The color is dark black. Black as hell. And the head is the kind of tan color that many stouts have. The carbonation is heavier than a Guinness, and that’s my only real complaint–but wait, if you swirl the beer around in the glass (pretend you’re a fancy-pants wine drinker aerating your wine), you can get rid of a little more carbonation. Basically you’re making it a little flat. And for me drinking a stout, I’m more interested in flatness than fizzyness.

The four packs of this beer are somewhat pricey but not prohibitively so. I’d love to try this beer on draft, but the bottle seems like a good substitute until I can find it on tap.

Thumbs up or thumbs down? Thumbs up to Yorkshire’s oldest brewery and their ‘Celebrated Oatmeal Stout.’

I’m going out to L.A. tomorrow, and I’ll be keeping track of the good beers I have while in California. I’ll tell you about them when I get back.

Related Posts:

• Brewed Slowly: #2 Cherry Stout
• On Stouts: Don’t Judge A Beer By Its Color

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