Honestly, I forget what it was that drew me to the Dieu du Ciel booth at last month's 10th anniversary edition of the Mondial de la Bière festival in Montréal. It wasn't that I was feeling the effects of an afternoon's tasting, just that I was in the company of Tom Dalldorf. And as anyone who has spent time with Tom will attest, trying to maintain a singular train of thought while chatting with the socially multi-tasting head of the Celebrator Beer News is, at the best of times, a challenge.
No matter. For whatever reason, there I was at the booth of the Montréal brewpub that last year had blown me away with an outstanding black pepper ale called La Route des Épices, when I noticed that they had added to their range of brews this year a stout flavoured with vanilla and cocoa. Knowing the heights they are capable of reaching with their specialty beers, and being a fan of vanilla-flavoured black beers in the style of Buckeye Brewing's wonderful Vanilla Bean Porter, I immediately got in line for a taste.
The stout called L'Aphrodisiaque, I later learned, is flavoured with both real vanilla beans and real cocoa powder, with no extracts or enhancements. And it certainly tastes the part -- rich, deliciously rounded, with the vanilla appearing more in the nose and the cocoa in the body, but neither overwhelming the basic stout-ness of the beer. Standing and tasting with Tom and Christine, our conversation quickly began to revolve around which type of ice cream would be best with the stout, either beside it or mixed together. I was for a bold vanilla or chocolate, while Christine thought that something with nuts in it would be nice and Tom sat safely on the fence. What we did not doubt, though, was that we were drinking a truly great beer.
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