You can't accuse Lost Palms of lacking (lactose-ing?) ambition with their beer recipes, or indeed the corners of the pantry they're willing to raid for limited releases. Here we have two beers encompassing the usual beer ingredients plus vanilla, oats, chocolate, lactose, hazelnut, maple syrup and, of course, bananas.
The last few of those appear in Tools Down, a pastry stout that weighs in far smaller than most beers bearing such a style tag from the Gold Coast crew. And, indeed, the atypical additives appear to have been added with relative restraint too. Upfront, there's a sweet nuttiness and plenty of chocolate, which appear to have been swirled with syrup then drizzled into a banana, creating a beer akin to drinking the melted remnants of a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream from the bottom of the tub.
I'd spotted the words "white" and "stout" when pouring my can of Late Checkout, but only with a cursory glance. Had I looked more closely, what followed would have made sense earlier as "chocolate" and "golden" are there too. So, while this is a take on a white stout, it's not one in which they're aiming to boggle the mind with something overtly roasty yet pale. It looks like a copper ale and, if you take the coffee allegory approach to describing stouts, this is in café con leche territory – with a scoop of dark sugar and a chunk or two of Cadbury’s Dream stirred into its midst. A GABS beer landing a few months after the party ended.
James Smith
Published August 21, 2023 2023-08-21 00:00:00
