Harviestoun - Old Engine Oil

The very first adjective on the bottle is "viscous." A bottle that Harviestoun wish to sell to the public... This is why I love Scotland! Not only have they called their beer Old Engine Oil but they've essentially told you that if you don't like it then you're a big wuss and you should go cry to someone who gives a damn... Like Carlsberg. The only other beer I've tried in the Harveistoun range is Bitter and Twisted, which impressed me so I expect big things from this, a beer I found in a garden centre next to a bottle called "sheep shagger."

Because it's a porter you have to expect a ratio of dark chocolate and coffee aromas and they're definitely there, putting in a good showing for the olfactory senses and whetting the pallet before you take a drink. The pour is particularly frisky and it has that kind of head that looks like raised yeast, only a thousand times quicker, it's not over zealous and doesn't overflow if you know how to handle a bottle and it soon retreats to a half finger head, leaving behind moderate speckling.

The taste is an enjoyable attack on the senses, with a bitter siege to start and an enjoyable raw powdered cocoa taste at the finish. If all engine oil tasted like this then I may well pay more attention to my car. In some respects it is a typical porter but what I like about it is that it knows what it wants to be, I've had some beers recently that describe themselves as one thing and then do something else. This says it's a porter, it's going to look like engine oil and it's going to be as bitter as the ex wife of a man who won the lottery and married a strip club. It does the simple things brilliantly, like the texture, a porter should be as smooth as silk and this is! Where they add to it is by having that delicious taste of powdered cocoa at the end to give you, for a brief moment, the sensation that you're drinking a boozy hot chocolate.

A cold 6% hot chocolate for a warm summers day. Next level alco-booze logic!

Food suggestion: Smores... Seriously, I could drink this by a campfire and make smores with marshmallows and hobnobs (that's the closest thing we can really get to gram crackers... Not that I really know what those are either.) Though this could also go with a much heftier meal, I wouldn't say no to this if someone plonked half a bloody cow down in front of me.

Drink this if you like: This reminds me of St. Petersburg by Thornbridge, an Imperial Stout that packed a punch and packed a whole lot of flavour. At 6% this isn't quite as strong but it fits a whole lot into such a small bottle.