BrewDog - Jet Black Heart

Our experience with canned nitro stouts (and this one in particular) suggests this shows best when poured firmly into one’s glass. Jet Black Heart has a beautifully pitch-black color, with a creamy tan head that lasted for the duration of our beer. There’s stellar lacing left behind, too. This pours quite dark—but that first sip reveals just how effortlessly drinkable this is.

The aroma demonstrates the contrasts present here: deep roasted maltiness throughout, with bitter and baker’s chocolate plus cocoa tempered brilliantly by the milkiness and soft vanilla. This nitro milk stout incorporates both oatmeal and natural vanilla flavor, with the latter just providing its subtle sweet roundness on the periphery. This is smooth, rich, and packed with specialty-malt characteristics, without anything feeling weighty. It’s silky milk chocolate and a touch of caramelization, taken as a whole, and one of the best beers we’ve smelled in a while.

What’s amazing about this nitro milk stout is how potent it looks on first impressions, how flavorful it really is, and yet just how easily this one disappears. One’s first sip leads with the especially smooth, nitrogen-led texture: creamy and streamlined and lightly milky-sweet. But it’s immediately filled out by waves of chocolate, sweet but also bitter and cocoa-packed, and this concludes with emergent ale fruitiness and those touches of vanilla and oatmeal. There’s so much dark-malt complexity playing out in Jet Black Heart, in a smooth, delicious package.

We encourage drinking this one on the fresher side, as that lighter ABV doesn’t give this the longevity of something like an imperial stout. The residual sweetness present can help calm spicier fare—like, say, chili-rubbed pork tenderloin. Also look to chocolate-angled desserts.