I had to check back through the beer club archives to see if we had shared this beer before or not. It’s a beer we’ve had on our wholesale portfolio for some years, so it was a bit of a surprise to find that we hadn’t featured this beer yet. We can rectify that now.
‘Malt & Mocha’ is a beer brewed seasonally, released in October each year for in readiness for the European winter. It is a big coffee Imperial Stout, and in recent years has had a little batch variance in the ABV.
If you had the pleasure of trying a pre-2011 version, this was brewed at 9.5%. Since then it is normally around the 10% ABV, though we have had batches as high as 11.4%. So a little surprise when we open our cartons of each batch.
As the name suggests, the beer is dominated by chocolate and coffee aromas. The big chocolate and caramel malt body balances out the roasted coffee bitterness really cleverly. So much so, that as a non-coffee drinker, I still very much enjoy this beer.
The suggested best before date on this is a mere 5 years, as opposed to the 25 years code on most of De Molen’s dark beers. It is shown this way so the coffee flavours don’t dissipate over time. But I’ve never kept any bottles long enough to test that theory.