First review: St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout

Alright here it goes the first of hopefully many reviews to come.  St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout is brewed by McAuslan in Montreal Quebec and is an excellent beer for all you stout lovers out there.


         Pours jet black. There's no light getting through this beer at all. Leaves about 2 fingers of thick creamy head in a light tan colour that leaves awesome lacing all down the glass as it dissipates down to about a half finger that sticks around for the whole beer.  The smell is full of burnt and roasted malts up front backed by a healthy dose of coffee with some lighter notes of chocolate. There seems to be a little bit of vanilla just barely making itself known.  The taste is very similar to the smell with all those burnt and roasted malts dominating up front followed by coffee and chocolate.  The finish is bitterness from the burnt malts mixing nicely with a faint hop bitterness that lingers just a little.  Despite the colour and flavour profile of this beer it's not overbearingly heavy in body.  A perfect amount of carbonation mixed with the velvet like feel imparted by the oats help to give the beer a slightly heavy/medium body.

       Overall this is an awesome beer, a great representation of the style and one of my all time favourite beers.  The lighter than expected body makes this beer more than capable of being both a session beer or a nice sipping beer too.  If you like stouts and other dark beer and have a chance to pick this one up I'd highly recommend giving it a try.

We're gonna do final grades according both to the style and to our personal preference. For the style grade the beer will be graded on appearance, smell, taste, mouth feel/body, and drinkability; it will also get an overall grade. For our preference the beer will only be assessed an overall grade.


Final grades:
According to style:
Appearance  5/5
Smell         4.5/5
Taste            5/5
Mouth feel 4.5/5
Drinkability   4/5
Overall    92/100

According to my preference:
Overall    98/100
-The Bear