Chocolate stout face off & a few other beers to mention.

On the left we have Youngs double chocolate stout and on the right is my own Chocoholic stout.
Now these are two slightly different styles. Mine is a higher gravity sweet stout, almost like a foreign export.
The first difference is obvious from the picture, the head on the youngs is quite small where as mine was massive, possibly due to a little over carbonation for a stout. Eventually mine dies down to a similar size as the youngs but it does stay with the beer all the way down.
When I tasted it last week I found it a little lacking in body but perfectly acceptable and hoped another week would fill it out, well it did exactly that and I found it had a very nice body.

Youngs
sight - Black with small tan head.
smell - roast coffee & chocolate
taste - dry, little bitter, chocolate
sweet - 2/5
bitter - 3/5

My own
sight - Black with large tan head.
smell - Strong chocolate and slight roast coffee.
taste - As above but with a background sweetness as well as a nice bitterness.
sweet - 3/5
bitter - 3.5/5

I am quite happy with my chocoholic stout. In the end I preferred the youngs for the simple reason that I prefer a dry stout to a sweeter/stronger style but mine was an experiment to see what I could do.









Monty pythons Holy Ail is from the Black sheep brewery. I was curious about it but was not too happy with it. It was less an ale and more a lager to my taste and my wife agreed. She said it smelled like any Czech beer she had while she lived there for a year.
I did take more notes but I will not bother with them, if you like lager you will like this. I wold not bother with it again though.







My next ale is Bannockburn.
This was a very drinkable 5% ale, especially on a hot summer day as it was when I drank it.




sight - Dark cloudy amber
smell - some honey and hops
taste - nice balance of sweetness and hops
sweet - 2/5
bitter - 3/5





Finally comes the Fullers Golden pride. I usually enjoy fullers beers but I found this one a little too sweet for my taste. If you like sweet beers then you will probably like this. Now don't get me wrong, I did not dislike this beer at all, it is a very complex beer but I would not drink this very often. It is almost a barleywine so when treated as such it is wonderful actually. As a special occasion beer to be sipped then it goes down a treat. On the hottest day of the year in the sun, it did not go down as well as its not refreshing.

sight - Clear amber, light head.
smell - Pineapple?
taste - some honey and nice hops
sweet - 4/5
bitter - 2/5