Stout Yeoman

Had a tip-off from a friend that there was a sale on stoats down the supermarket. Always keen to replenish my supply of burrowing rodents, I went along, only to find that it was in fact stouts on special offer. I was momentarily disappointed, until remembering how much I actually love stouts.

From here, this blip may confuse people who a) think Guinness is the best stout in the world, b) think that Guinness is the only stout in the world, or c) think that Guinness is actually a stout. Because Guinness is none of those things, and the fact that it's so often drunk by people wearing floppy four-leaf clover hats and carrying an inflatable potato (or some comparable tat), claiming that they're Irish on the basis that their grandmother once worked as a navvy, does little to improve its standing in my eyes. Real stout is hand-crafted and conditioned with its own yeast inside a cask or bottle. Guinness is not. Real stout is brewed in the place it claims to be from. Guinness is not. Real stout is served between 12 to 14 degrees centigrade - just below room temperature. Guinness are engaged in an ongoing quest to try and serve their product at the kind of temperatures you'd normally only encounter in deep space.

So can you imagine my joy at having such a wealth of actual, genuine stout at my fingertips? Oyster stout. Imperial stout. Double chocolate stout. Oatmeal stout. Coffee stout. Stout from Scotland, stout from London, stout from Herefordshire, stout from Oxfordshire, stout from Suffolk. It's enough to make a Guinness rep choke (something that, for the record, I once succeeded in doing).