The Double Mocha Porter pours with a chocolatey head, deep brown color. It leaves serious lacing on the glass as you drink it.

There is a sweetness in the aroma – to the point that the bitterness in the flavor is quite surprising. There is plenty of chocolate malt, but its not nearly as sweet as that first whiff hits at.

You also won’t be surprised at the 8.2% – the alcohol is high enough that its flavor comes through fairly distinctly in the palate.

Also present is Pacman.

You may have noticed that there is often a distinct flavor that Rouge’s beers have. For years all of their beers have been brewed using exactly one strand of yeast. For its ability to continually devour malt sugars and sometimes create high-ABV beers (and perhaps for its friendly, lovable character), they dubbed it Pacman.

It strikes me as something that could very well be attributed to the water, but since Brian and I once brewed using Pacman and gained the very same character, I’m going to have to go ahead and attribute it to this fine strand of bacteria.

In that familiarity of flavor, this beer is no exception.

This is a really solid beer, worth a few bucks whether you find it in the bottle or on draft at your favorite beer bar.

8/10

So Brian pulled this one out of the fridge.

Not a lot of head from the get-go, and the smell is hoppier than I expected. It also kind of tastes like a stout – which is what I always thought when anyone brought up an imperial porter: doesn’t that kind of take it into stout territory?

Brain had this to say:

“Yo, it smells slightly chocolaty, and somewhat malty and bittery. It tastes like a porter on steroids. Its too thin to be a stout, but too thick and too hoppy to be a real porter. For your money, its the best buy I know of in the porter category. I don’t find most porters to be that interesting, aside from the Arcadia Shipwreck Imperial. I mean, porters aren’t interesting to me. This is a good, solid porter, that reminds me a good, solid stout.”

7/10 – this is an absolute must-try.