The guinness variations, Part one

The details: Guinness Extra Stout, 5.6% ABV, poured into a pint glass

I've been thinking about this beer theme for a few weeks now. I don't exactly know what brought it into my mind, but it probably hit me while watching a match. It was probably then because the #1 beverage ordered while watching a match is Guinness.

Certainly you are all familiar with the wonderful elixir that flows forth from St. James Gate, Dublin. It's still the gold standard for stout; the one that everything else is compared to. I guess it's only natural if you've been making the same beer in the same place since 1759. 

I've done months of import beers before, most notably back in December of 2016. That month I tried various rice beers to determine if that alternative grain helps those beers give me worse headaches (verdict: it does). I'm somewhat getting back to that this year - this will be an all import beer month - but to make it more interesting I'm going to do variations on Guinness. I don't mean things like Guinness ice cream (it can be delicious) or bratwursts par boiled in Guinness. What I mean is that I'm going to focus on the different ways you can enjoy that mother's milk we all know and love.

This week it's Guinness Extra Stout from a regular bottle. This is just plain brown glass with nothing to stir up the beer. I've just poured it vigorously into a pint glass, and while it's got a substantial head, it's not cascading down the glass like is seen in a draft pint. It's also of note that I couldn't get all 11.2 oz poured into the 16 oz glass because the head rose so quickly. While I let it settle, allow me to give you some trivia about Guinness:

1. This one's an easy one - Guinness isn't really black. Hold it up to the light and you can see that it's actually really dark red.
2. Guinness is around 200 calories per pint, which is about the same as equal containers of milk and some fruit juices.
3. First produced in 1954 and intended as a marketing giveaway, the Guinness Book of World Records was started by the managing director of the brewery and is still around today.

I'll save more trivia for later, now back to the beer. This particular bottle is 5.6% ABV, and that's as high as it gets here in the US but goes as low as 4.2%. Regardless of the alcohol, this beer still has that 'zing' that's really the hallmark of this particular dry stout. This bitterness used to be achieved by adding a bit of beer from the previous batch into the next one made, but these days it's done via modern methods for barley malting. It's smooth as always, and so flat - there's not a drop of carbonation rising up out of the glass. It's of course also not heavy and drinks quite like a glass of water.

I don't think this will be my favorite way to drink Guinness, but it's not at all bad either. It's a good bottle size, though I do wish it were still the easy drinking 4.2% variety. Of course I won't know which is my favorite delivery method until I try them all, so check back next week for part two!

The verdict: 3.75 out of 5 (on Untapp'd - follow me @slownumbers to see what I'm drinking)