This is the first time I've had to search online to find out the location of a brewery. Normally, breweries are very proud of their locations, and they sometimes even include them in the brewery name. In this case, they took up 95% of the label with a giant monster that is not properly captured in any of my pictures and the other 5% is the government warning. I guess this indicates a kind of casual and fun attitude that will hopefully translate to interesting and fun beer.
It's called Absence of Light, and it does a pretty good job of absorbing photons. It is black, but it's brown at the edges, and I've definitely had beer that was more opaque than this - Pothole Filler comes to mind. The off-white head simmers down to larger than expected bubbles around the sides of the glass and just a small stream of bubbles that gets maintained going across the center of the beer. The aroma should be chocolate and peanut butter, and I get a lot more peanut butter than I do chocolate.
First sip is sweet from the lactose sugars, and peanut butter is mixing with cocoa. I'm not sure I would go out of my way to call this chocolate, as it seems a bit more dry than I expect chocolate to be. On the label, it suggests pairing this with chocolate cake, and I think that might be an admission that the addition of real chocolate would balance this out quite a bit. I noticed that they're not suggesting you should have this with peanut butter cookies or the like. No, they know that chocolate is really what is not hitting hard enough for this dessert beer.
Tip-in is very light carbonation with cocoa and coffee mixed together with a burnt twig. The middle is where dessert beers normally figure themselves out, and this is no exception. The milk stout sits very smooth, and the creamy peanut butter mixes with the now sweetened chocolate to bring a delightful sensation that I don't want to stop. The finish turns slightly dry as the chocolate turns back to cocoa and peanut butter grabs hold of the tongue for the trail off.
3.75/5