Top to bottom: Cashel Blue, Barely Buzzed

Stout, Porter, and Imperial Stout

STYLE NOTES: Stouts and porters owe their dark color and layered aromas to deeply roasted barley malt. The hues on these brews range from over-steeped tea to inky espresso, and their alluring scents elicit descriptors like toast, toffee, raisins, molasses, coffee, Kahlúa, and chocolate. Despite these dessert-like aromas, porters and stouts often (but not always) finish dry.

Many of these beers exhibit little or no hops aroma, although American stouts and Imperial stouts may show some. Moderate hops bitterness helps balance the mouth-filling malt, and a little bitterness may also come from the heavy roasting. Some recipes even incorporate roasted coffee beans or brewed coffee. For oatmeal stout, the brewer adds a small portion of oats to the grist, the ground grains that supply the sugar for fermentation. Oats contribute a particularly creamy texture to the finished brew and help generate a fluffy, voluptuous head the color of café au lait.

The term stout derives from stout porter, historically a stronger, more alcoholic rendition of traditional English porter. The typical English or American porter is moderate in alcohol, in the 4 to 5 percent range, and modern stout is often not much stronger. But Imperial stout, sometimes called Russian Imperial stout, is another matter. These massive brews are often quite potent, from 8 to 12 percent alcohol, and everything else about them verges on extreme, too. They can look almost like chocolate syrup, opaque and mysterious, with a thick foam the color of an espresso’s crema. Expect heady, spirituous aromas, perhaps mingling dried fruit, coffee liqueur, vanilla, and bittersweet chocolate—a panoply of scents as sensuous as a chocolate-covered raspberry. An Imperial stout is a fireside beer for a cold winter’s night and an ideal companion for robust cheeses.

BEERS TO TRY: Stout and Porter: AleSmith Speedway Stout; Bear Republic Big Bear Black; Boulevard Brewing Bully! Porter; Carnegie Porter; Deschutes Brewery Black Butte Porter; Dogfish Head World Wide Stout; Eel River Brewing Organic Porter; Firestone Velvet Merlin Oatmeal Stout; Founders Brewing KBS (Kentucky Breakfast Stout); Fuller’s London Porter; Marin Brewing Point Reyes Porter; Meantime Brewing Coffee Porter; Moylan’s Dragoons Dry Irish Stout; Samuel Smith’s Oatmeal Stout; Samuel Smith’s Taddy Porter; Sierra Nevada Porter.

Imperial Stout and Imperial Porter: Brooklyn Brewery Black Chocolate Stout; Deschutes Obsidian Stout; Dieu du Ciel Péché Mortel Imperial Coffee Stout; Grand Teton Brewing Black Cauldron Imperial Stout; Great Divide Brewing Yeti Imperial Stout; Napa Smith Bonfire Imperial Porter; North Coast Brewing Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout; Port Brewing Santa’s Little Helper; Stone Brewing Imperial Russian Stout.

CHEESE AFFINITIES: This well-populated beer category embraces a broad style range that makes cheese recommendations especially challenging. Is the stout dry or syrupy sweet? Is it moderate in alcohol and medium bodied, or as viscous as maple syrup? Even mellow blue cheeses can vanquish some dry stouts, for example, while an Imperial stout, with its alcoholic power and residual sugar, doesn’t bow to many blues. The stronger and sweeter the beer, the more robust the cheese can be.

In most cases, the malt-forward character of stout and porter complements cheeses with nutty or brown-butter aromas, and cheeses that leave a subtle sweet impression. The alpine wheels of France and Switzerland—such as Beaufort and Gruyère—come to mind on both counts. Buttery, relatively mild blue cheeses and creamy, mellow Cheddars can be good matches, but be wary of assertive blues with dry stouts and porters. Aged Goudas, with their candy-like butterscotch and salted-caramel flavors, need the heft of an Imperial stout or Imperial porter for balance. Triple-cream cheeses complement the texture of these smooth, silky brews and can be as pleasurable with a stout’s mocha flavors as cream in coffee.

Mature Comté, aged for a year or more, has riveting depth of flavor. With profound aromas of roasted hazelnuts, sautéed onion, and bacon and a lingering aftertaste of butter and cream, it is a far more engaging cheese than the young supermarket Comté that many shoppers use for sandwiches. Produced from raw cow’s milk in the Jura Mountains of eastern France, the hefty, 80-pound wheels of Comté may be sold as young as four months, but twelve to twenty-four months brings them to greatness. A deep-yellow to gold paste is one sign of a more mature cheese, but a big meaty fragrance and concentrated sweet flavor are the real giveaways. A nutty aged Comté heightens the roasted-grain character of stouts and porters and has enough intensity to partner the high-alcohol Imperial brews.

Young wheels of Barely Buzzed, a cow’s milk Cheddar from Utah’s Beehive Cheese Company, are rubbed with ground coffee and dried lavender and aged for about six months. This unusual rind treatment produces a subtle coffee scent throughout the mature cheese, mingled with aromas of Kahlúa, Mexican chocolate, and smoke. A stout or porter, with its own coffee notes, produces a lingering aroma echo, like having a double shot of espresso.

Ireland’s Cashel Blue, an especially mellow and nutty blue-veined cow’s milk cheese, melts in the mouth when ripe. Moist and spreadable, even creamy just under the rind, it moderates the bitter edge of a stout and makes the beer taste sweeter. Remove the cheese from the refrigerator a few hours before serving to bring it fully to room temperature and allow the buttery texture to show at its best.

MORE CHEESES TO TRY: With stout or porter: Beaufort; Berkswell; Bleu d’Auvergne; Brillat-Savarin; Challerhocker; Coolea; Cowgirl Creamery Mt. Tam; Ewephoria; Garrotxa; Gruyère; Hook’s 5-Year Cheddar; Jean Grogne; Lamb Chopper; St. Agur; Vermont Butter & Cheese Cremont; Willamette Valley Farmstead Gouda. With Imperial stout or Imperial porter: Abbaye de Belloc; L’Amuse Gouda; Beecher’s Flagship Reserve; Beemster XO; Challerhocker; Fourme d’Ambert; Stichelton; Stilton.