Sunday Night Suds - Shiner Birthday Beer - Chocolate Stout

This week's Sunday Night Suds looks at Shiner Birthday Beer - a new Chocolate Stout produced by the good folks at the Spoetzel Brewing Company.

Every year Shiner produces a unique beer which it tags with the number for the year of the brewery. Some of the time the beer becomes a full time fixture such as the White Wing (reviewed here http://kosherbeers.blogspot.com/2014/05/sunday-night-suds-shiner-white-wing.html) and Wild Hare Pale Ale (reviewed here http://kosherbeers.blogspot.com/2013/08/sunday-night-suds-shiner-wild-hare-ipa.html) while others do not make the grade and fade into the history of this great brewery.

This year the new limited offering is #106 - Shiner Birthday Beer - Chocolate Stout. The beer pours a rich dark brown, even darker than a Guinness. When bringing the glass to my lips I could smell the chocolate, although I suspect that based on the intensity of scent and flavor that the chocolate is not derived solely from the malt and that there may be some chocolate nibs or other form of cocoa extract added to the beer.

The Chocolate Stout is definitely in the category of a dessert beer and it went exceptionally well with Mrs KB's scratch batch chocolate birthday cake. I would not recommend this with any form of main course, but if you have a rich chocolate dessert and want to have something with a little kick to sip with it, see if you can find a Birthday Beer - Chocolate Stout.

The Shiner Birthday Beer - Chocolate Stout is under the Kosher Supervision of the Va'ad of Detroit although there is no symbol on the the bottle. To see what the experts on Beer Advocate think about this brew, please follow this link beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/143/144286.

As always, please remember to drink responsibly and to never waste good beer unless there is no designated driver. If you've tried this beer or any others which have been reviewed on the kosher beers site, please feel free to post your comments (anonymous comments are acceptable).

Before closing the post, I wanted to write briefly about a piece that is making the rounds on the possibility of stouts being dairy or made with lactose. I have personally spoken with mashgichim from the OU and the Va'ad of Detroit and have confirmed that the Coors and Brooklyn beers which are listed in the article are not made with lactose and are not dairy. I did not attempt to contact the Star-K mashgiach as they tend to keep their mashgichim insulated from the general public and thoroughly inaccessible, but I did look into the Samuel Adams Cream Stout a number of years ago and was assured that it is not dairy.

While I am certain that the article on the Yeshiva World News site was well intentioned and I cannot possibly argue halacha with a Rav, I can report that the mitziyus as it relates to these specific beers is incorrect.

If you have seen this post being carried on another site, please feel free to click www.kosherbeers.blogspot.com/ to find other articles on the kosherbeers blogsite. Hey its free and you can push my counter numbers up!