Beer styles are strange sometimes.
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Take the black IPA. Now IPA stands for India Pale Ale. How can something with “pale” in its name be “black” as well? I don’t know the answer to that one.
Then there’s “domestic stout” and “export stout”. It would seem an obvious conclusion to draw that the former is something made in your own country while the latter is an import from another country.
But you’d be wrong. Sure, it might have meant that in ye olde times. But not any more. Take the latest Little Creatures seasonal The Hotchkiss Six – it’s tagged as a domestic stout but if it was sent overseas, it’d still be called a domestic stout.
These days “domestic” and “export” have more to do with alcohol content than country of origin. An export stout tends to have a higher alcohol count, apparently because once upon a time these beers needed that extra oomph to survive the long trip across the waters.
The domestic stout, on the other hand, stayed at home and didn’t need the extra alcohol kick.
Which is why The Hotchkiss Six clocks in at 4.5 per cent. It’s actually inspired – in name and style – by an earlier Little Creatures limited release called The Dreadnought.
The Dreadnought was an export stout – at 7.4 per cent. It was named for a sort of early 20th century warship – and it had a six-calibre gun on deck called the Hotchkiss.
The Dreadnought also inspired the lower-alcohol of The Hotchkiss Six. The brewers wanted to show that stouts don’t always have to be big, super-roasty and boozy.
And they've achieved that in spades. The Hotchkiss Six is a really very nicely balanced beer – it mixes the chocolate/roast coffee notes you expect from a stout with the fruity aroma and bitterness from the hops.
The result is a beer that starts out with roast coffee characters before the hops slip in with some bitterness that carries through to the back end. There’s also some oats thrown in, which give it a bigger mouthfeel than you’d expect from the alcohol.
If you’ve avoided dark beers because you think they’re all too heavy, maybe you should give this one a crack.
Glen Humphries is the 2016 AIBA Australian Beer Writer of the Year