Backswing Oatmeal Stout

Number Five in the Backswing series. This one is a beer that I often drink only in the colder months, but I needed one more to fill out a mixed six-pack, so here we are. 

There are a lot of different types of stouts: cream stout, milk stout, imperial Russian stout, hybrid styles, it's almost infinite! An oatmeal stout uses...you guessed it...oats as one of its grains. The result is a thicker, creamer brew. The misunderstanding among "dark beer" neophytes is that stouts are necessarily heavier, as well as higher in alcohol content. For the old school stouts such as Guinness, this isn't the case, although for sub-styles like Imperial Russian Stout this would be true. A Guinness has about the same consistency as any other mass-produced beer and the ABV is usually at 5% or less. 

Backswing's version of this style pours a deep chocolatey brown, with a three-finger beige head that slowly recedes to a thin lacing. As one would expect from a stout, there's a mélange of flavors that include milk chocolate, café au lait, brown sugar, molasses and vanilla. The ABV is 5.5%, so it's definitely sessionable. 25 IBUs give it a moderate hoppiness, but nothing distracting. Something that I did not expect was the mild smokiness. I'm of the opinion that you definitely can overdue the smokiness, and some rauchbiers are frankly undrinkable, but the smokiness level adds an air of mystery. Thumbs up.