Bell's Week: Kalamazoo Stout

Kalamazoo. That's where Bell's got its start. It has a map and a bad website and a Wikipedia page and even a college.

But the most important thing of all is, it has a beer.

Hey, that's pretty awesome. Even Lakehurst doesn't have a beer, and that town has the damn HINDENBURG!

Kalamazoo Stout is (obviously) named after the town of Bell's birth. It's a stout brewed with brewer's licorice, which might sound weird but used to be common.

(Licorice isn't unheard of in brewing, and in fact used to be used fairly often in classic porters. Still is, at times. I used it in the colonial porter you can see in these pictures.)

With Kalamazoo Stout, the brewer's licorice is very up front, stepping on the typical roasted malt of a good stout and dominating it with licoricey (is that a word?) sweetness. It's tasty but just off-kilter enough so that I'm not sure you'd want to have more than one in a row. Definitely a nice twist on the style, I can't say I disliked this stout because I didn't, but Bell's makes better stouts. And so does everyone else.