Beer Review: Saugatuck Brewing Blueberry Maple Stout

Name: Blueberry Maple Stout
Brewing Company: Saugatuck Brewing Co.
Location: Douglas, Michigan
Style: Milk Stout
ABV: 6%

From the beer’s description on Saugatuck Brewing Company’s Web site:

A rich, sweet stout with classic malt characteristics with a bold, unique twist. This beer tastes like you crammed a fat stack of blueberry pancakes into a pint glass and smothered it with maple syrup. Channel your inner lumberjack, because it’s in for a real treat.

Sometimes a beer grabs you because of its name, because of how that name is translated into the taste of the beer and because that beer is off the beaten path. Such is the case with Saugatuck’s Blueberry Maple Stout.

Sounds odd, doesn’t it? Stouts allow for a great variation of flavor enhancements and beers with syrup flavoring are not uncommon. Founders, another Michigan brewery, has a few that are even aged in Syrup barrels. I’ve had a few beers with syrup as a flavor enhancement/component, usually stouts and sometimes porters, but there’s something even more “enhanced” about this one, from what is touted to be a complex flavor profile.

The beer pours very black, but is not quite as thick as other stouts. There’s blueberry on the nose and that’s the first taste to hit my taste buds when I sip the beer. I’ve had my share of beers with blueberry in them, usually wheat based ales and naturally some were better than others, but I can’t quite recall having a stout with blueberries before this one.

It works pretty well. I suppose the closest comparison would be chocolate covered blueberries for the richness of the stout. With the blueberries upfront, the beer finishes with the maple sweetness. It makes for a good combination and an interesting flavor profile overall. The maple is overpowered by the blueberries, at least for me. Sure the maple is present, but it doesn’t assert itself to the extent that the blueberries do up front and throughout the whole beer.

Like a lot of stouts, this one benefits a great deal from warming up to room temperature. The flavors just become even more prevalent. Although I liked the first beer from the six pack I had, I think I enjoyed the second and third days later even more. I wasn’t sure if I would even want to finish the whole six pack, to be honest. By the third or fourth beer, I began to enjoy the beer more. Sometimes with a six pack I’ve never had, the remaining beers will sit in the fridge for months on end as I avoid drinking the beer, not so with this one. I found it to be a nice dessert beer, largely because for me, the tastes and flavor profile are complex enough that I think it would stand better on its own. I’m not sure why, maybe because I didn’t initially know what to expect with the first beer and my taste buds “knew” what to expect on second consumption and could enjoy the beer more. Regardless, this is an interesting, tasty beer.

Recommended, link to Untappd 3.75-star rating.

Untapped badges earned with this beer:

So Udderly Sweet (Level 8)

Wouldn’t it be nice if milk stouts came directly from beer producing cows? While this unfortunately isn’t the case (yet) they do have a full body and sweetness due to a larger amount of lactose and sugars.