And the result?  After all the build-up, the flavor is just as odd as you’d expect — and oddly, it’s the least flavorful beer I’ve ever had.  Of course any normal beer probably tastes oddly flavorless to me, after trying Budweiser’s Clamato — but even after correcting for my forever-damaged taste buds, this is a very subtle beer.  It’s almost refreshing, practically alcoholic mineral water, and would be a good beer to drink after a marathon, if for some reason you had to drink a beer instead of a sports drink.  (Try it!)  But after the subtle dignified label and the promise of exotic sorgham, I was ready for a complex spectrum of unusual and challenging flavors to process, for tastes and top notes and bouquets and aftertastes, but instead I had to consciously check midway through to see if it still tasted like beer at all.  In other words, this is a Radiohead album cover containing a compilation CD of soap opera background music.

So — a stout, and a chocolate stout, to boot?  What’s more, a *double* chocolate stout?  I doubled up my life insurance before drinking, just in case.  Despite the implicit intensity, it turned out to be a fairly routine stout.  In that venn diagram of flavors that includes dark beers, coffee, and dark chocolate, this beer is pretty much in the muddled middle.  I’m not sure I could tell if there were chocolate in this beer in a blind taste test.  It’s not particularly bad, just didn’t live up to the Hershey’s-and-bubbles that I had been anticipating.  I really should have aimed higher, for my first beer back from sabbatical.  Then again, “aiming high” sounds dangerously close to exercise, and I don’t want to go through that again…

  In keeping with my pattern of either drinking 1) leprous domestic malt liquor or 2) run-of-the-mill imports, I recently tried out the Heineken Keg Can.  As you might imagine, it failed to live up to the hype — it’s essentially just a 24-oz can o’ beer with a little slope to the shape near the top and bottom.  About all it did was give me the illusion that I had somehow been shrunk to 2/3 my original size, and was now having a hard time getting my hand around a standard can of beer.  Perhaps I’ve lost the right to be snobbish given what else I’ve imbibed, but a can makes every beer taste like Coors Light to me — I suppose I could have poured it into a glass, but I decided to drink straight from the can as nature  intended, and of course I wound up imagining that I tasted aluminum with every sip. 

    Now that I got that complaint out of the way, I will say the can would be excellent if put to use for other purposes after you finish off the beer.  If you’re a little handy with tools, you could make yourself a nifty pencil holder, bacon-grease storage can, or a truly horrible-sounding addition to a drumset if mounted on a cymbal stand.  Not being handy myself (it once took me 5 hours to replace the leaky toilet hardware innards in my bathroom, true story) I’ll have to settle for a night of imagining I’m some sort of troll stealing brews from a regular-size human.  Hmmm, maybe I need to get out more…

By the way, the costumes went over pretty well, although I think we didn’t exactly pick an audience who would fully appreciate the humor.  Here’s what it’s like working at a science-tech company — after all four of us come in wearing charger’s gear, pillows for guts, fake mustaches, aviator sunglasses, and hoisting beers, one of our coworkers asked, “did you guys coordinate this?”  Next time, we’ve got to paint our jokes with somewhat broader strokes…