Monday, June 20, 2011

THE GENIUS & BEAUTY OF A LEFT HAND BREWING “MILK STOUT” ON NITRO

Are you a cask-conditioned nazi? A man of the old-school people who storms out of a bar if there isn’t something readily available on the hand pump, and blanches at beer served from a bourgeois tap? I’ve never much cottoned to that whole thing after less-than-favorable results from most known beers served this way, though if there’s a stout on “nitro” I’m all for it. This is when a beer already given to natural creaminess is injected with nitrogen in order to bring said creaminess and smoothness to the forefront, leaving behind just about everything else except for primary flavors. Did I get that right, homebrewers? Well, I now know that nirvana can be and has been reached with regard to this hallowed nitro beer.

No one remembers that I once drank and reviewed a LEFT HAND BREWING “MILK STOUT” except for me. It was in Atlanta, it was a bottle poured into a glass, and I proclaimed it a little more than OK. This is a beer that many have busted a nut over, and one that I can’t get in California. Yet the other day in Overland Park, Kansas, at a place called OLD CHICAGO I had the most a-mazing glass of this stuff. And yes, it was “on nitro”. Never has a more chocolaty, milky, smooth and delicious stout passed before my lips. It quite seriously tasted like a glass of farm-fresh milk that just had the world’s greatest milk chocolate and the world’s greatest stout infused into it. More beer than milk, to be sure, which is as you’d want it, I’d imagine. But I just kept muttering to myself, “Whoa. Whoa. This is great. Whoa.” Ladies and gentlemen, the nitro pour of the century – Left Hand Milk Stout. Don’t let me catch you drinking this out of a bottle. 10/10.