strictly plutonic

The details: Kings County Brewers Collective Strictly Plutonic Stout, 6.0% ABV, served in a pint can

We live in a time of excess. Stop for a moment and really think about just one example: people are buying phones that cost $1000. Everything is bigger/better/faster/more than last year. It's enough to make you want to just press pause for a few minutes (because let's face it, we're all addicted to this excess in one way or another). Sometimes you just want something, for lack of a better term, plain.

I was trying to think back to the first time I tried Guinness. I know it was from a bottle, and I'm pretty sure I got it so my dad wouldn't drink it. For so many of my early drinking years (seriously not as bad as that sentence sounded) under his tutelage I was afraid of stout beer. I was really afraid of any dark beer to be perfectly honest, even though one of his favorite old Army stories was about this one time in Pennsylvania with some bock beer he couldn't even remember the name of. We never had dark beer around the house. In those early years mine was a steady diet of Killian's Red, Rolling Rock, and for a while quite a bit of Mickey's Malt Liquor.

But I tried Guinness, and it's good. It's the gold standard for stouts, and has been for way too damn long. Sure, there are better and different ones, but to me Guinness is like pad Thai: if you're a brewery/restaurant and you can't pull off a dry Irish stout/bowl of noodles that's good, I wonder about any other stout/food you might make. 

So a while back I was walking home and I went in search of that typical dry Irish stout. I even thought about reviewing Guinness, but I don't think you need to read 500 words on why you must be able to identify that beer blindfolded. Which led me to pick up a can from a brewery that I've been interested in for a while: Kings County Brewers Collective, better known as KCBC. Their amazingly colorful labels made it hard to know that Strictly Plutonic was a stout, but after a while I figured it out (after noticing that it's a collaboration with Rockaway Brewing Company, whose ESB I'm a big fan of). 

Of course we all know a traditional dry Irish stout for it's low ABV, low carbonation via a nitro line, and higher malty sweetness against a lesser hop bitterness. Strictly Plutonic gets pretty close to this for the most part. It's only 6% ABV, which while higher than the 4.2% of Guinness isn't astronomical. It's relatively lightly carbonated even though it's in a can, though it's not in nitro with a widget, it's just smooth as far as bubbles go. The biggest departure that I can taste is that in Strictly Plutonic's case, the hop bitterness is equal to the malty sweetness, which gives the stout more bite. I like the added bitterness, though I think one thing would become quickly apparent: I wouldn't want to drink this all day like I want to drink Guinness all day. 

I would also let my dad continue to be scared of this beer. That just means more for me.

The verdict: 4.0 out of 5 (on Untapp'd - follow me @slownumbers to see what I'm drinking!)