Darkness descends on Peaks & Pints this Thanksgiving week, and it promises to be an eventful week with at scarce and salient selections from the dark side. Beginning today and running through Friday, Nov. 29, the right side of Peaks & Pints’ Western red cedar tap log will house dark elixirs, including imperial stouts. In the Georgian-era, stout meant simply that: strong. Stouts were more potent versions of porter. Made with an extra helping of dark grains for added booze and body, stout quickly caught on, most famously in Ireland and Russia where the style received an extra punch for the journey. Today, those so-called imperial stouts reign stateside. Imperial stouts spell comfort, warming us on a cold, windy day. Before even taking our first sip, we can smell the roasted malt. Depending on the variety, we may get a touch of chocolate, maybe even vanilla or bourbon. The first sip steals our soul. It’s sweet as chocolate. Sometimes bitter, too. It’s a warm blanket. It’s fuzzy slippers. It’s our in-house flight of the day, Peaks and Pints Beer Flight: Dark Side of Thanksgiving Week.
Peaks and Pints Beer Flight: Dark Side of Thanksgiving Week
Triceratops RevMo Caramel Coffee Stout
4.7% ABV
Homebrewer Rob Horn left New Jersey to become a firefighter at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. He and his wife, Kelly, opened Triceratops Brewing in August of 2014. With the last name Horn and three awesome kids, is there really any other name? At first, they brewed out of their home garage. After thriving there for three years they opened a tasting room next to Matchless Brewing in Tumwater. Their RevMo Caramel Coffee Stout, a collaboration with RevMo Choppers & Coffee in Olympia, and grabbed a bronze at the 2023 Washington Beer Awards, is a smooth and sweet coffee stout.
Pure Project Milagro
5.3% ABV
Pure Project brews Milagro with organic, shade-grown coffee sourced from Costa Rica hand-roasted by Manuel Antonio at Café Milagro in San Diego. They pair it with fresh organic Tahitian vanilla beans for a creamy, roasty flavor profile with hints of dark chocolate.
E9 O’Leary’s Coffee Milk Stout
7% ABV
Milk stouts originated in Europe in the 1800s. The style emphasizes a malty sweetness with hints of chocolate and caramel. They are sometimes called cream stouts or sweet stouts. Brewers intensified the dark, chocolaty malt body with lactose, the sugar in cow’s milk, hence why they’re more often called milk stouts. Brewer’s yeast can’t ferment lactose into alcohol, so it hangs around to give you a rich mouthfeel and a soft, creamy sweetness, balancing out the bitter and roasted qualities typical of its cousin stouts. E9 Brewery brewed a milk stout adding Organic Guatemalan and Sumatran coffee from Caffe Vita Roasters to the mix, a mix they call O’Leary’s Coffee Milk Stout.
Structures PB & Fluff
8.1% ABV
Fluffernutter sandwich — that heavenly, sweet combination of white bread, peanut butter, and marshmallow creme so beloved by children that it’s been known to stick around on lunch menus well into adulthood. Structures Brewing’s version is a decadent stainless imperial stout conditioned on peanut butter and marshmallow fluff.
AleSmith Speedway Stout: Toasted Coconut Vietnamese Coffee Edition
12% ABV
Brewed for the 2024 AleSmith Speedway Grand Prix, their signature coffee imperial stout is brewed with toasted coconut and Vietnamese coffee.
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