Lighthouse Brewery's Keeper's Stout

As I was up in Canada for about five days, I had the opportunity to drink several Canadian beers. The coolness of the Great White North creates a many wondrous thing: the Northern Lights, a reason for owning a sweater in the the middle of July, and a populace that appreciates a dark brew year round. I'm a stout and porter man, so getting away the lager-sipping wusses of Nashville, Tennessee was a welcome change. I mean, if you walk into a store, and the only dark beer available is Guinness (i.e. the most overrated beer in the world), you have a problem.

While Canada offered up a selection of stouts, this first one by the Lighthouse Brewery out of Esquimalt, British Columbia was a lazy, subtle beer. The smell of the brew was light, smelling sort of like a wicker basket used to carry liquorice. It was difficult to put a finger on the scent due to its weakness.

Like a Guinness, the Keeper's Stout calmly slides into your mouth like flavorless milk. A sort of coffee taste attempts to assert itself, but it is quickly suppressed by the burn of delayed carbonation. It is almost as if flavor was a student uprising and the beer was Red China: a merciless repression of culture.

The beer slides down your gullet the same way it flows over your tongue: like a bored prostitute. But this time the milkiness leaves behind a gentle coffee flavor. Though tame and hardly memorable, it excites you because it is so much more interesting than the rest of the beer.

The Keeper's Stout is an okay beer. There is no reason to turn one down, or to try one if you never have. But you wont find much reason to grab a second pint of this lackluster brew.