They’ve adjusted to the seasons quite nicely down at the Endeavour Tap Rooms, unveiling a pair of distinct dark beers to please your palate across the warm days and cool nights currently constituting Sydney’s moderate winter weather.
The first is a Scottish Heavy, a beer that’s weighty in name but light in nature at just 3.5 percent ABV. Unlike your average mid-strength golden ale, which can err towards a crisp nature and display of hop character, the Heavy is more determined to leave you with a little something to chew on. That it does with its mix of malts, creating something that has a strikingly similar flavour profile to munching on a raw piece of grain. That, just to be clear, is a good thing, a kind of direct reflection of the character of the star ingredients. While there’s just a touch of caramel sweetness, it doesn’t come remotely close to being cloying, instead maintaining a bit of elegance in the way it balances its various bits within a still small package. This is the kind of beer where the pleasure is in the subtlety – that and the fact you can drink it by the pint.
A step upwards and outward in flavour comes by way of the Chocolate Orange Stout. This is the latest, and third beer to date, in the brewpub’s ‘Something with Staff’ series whereby the brewers yield to the ideas of the wider team. Drawing on a dark but playful turn of mind, they opted to try their hand at a kind of Jaffa-inspired stout. To do so they added cacao, orange peel and the merest hint of orange extract. These manage to find balance within a fairly archetypal base stout recipe that dishes up plentiful chocolate and roasted barley character. The intention of the orange addition is to offer a little sweetness to balance out the raw bitterness of the cacao, which it does without coming fully to the forefront or dominating the palate. That they’ve opted to serve it on nitro and add a deliciously creamy feel gives it a bit of gentle indulgence.
Nick Oscilowski
Published July 5, 2018 2018-07-05 00:00:00