Allgates Hung, drawn and portered
You see what they’ve done there? I could taste distinct mild and stout elements, reminding me of the (mythical?) prehistory of porter as a mixture of different beers. The different flavours were well balanced and the end result is very drinkable – a fine porter, despite its name.

Beartown Polar Eclipse
This is a stout, but I ordered it under the impression it was a dark bitter & didn’t realise my mistake until about halfway down the pint. Quite a light stout, then – not as thin as the Rutland Panther (see below), but more like a dark bitter with added toasted-grain flavour than the full-on mouthful-of-ink-and-an-instant-hangover stouts we’re used to. (Or maybe that’s just me.)

Boggart Rum Porter
Very nice indeed. Not the ’stoutest’ of porters – could pass for a dark bitter or an unusually bitter mild – but a nice full flavour, rounded out nicely by a touch of rum. Sounds peculiar, but works rather well.

Grainstore Rutland Panther
Stockport Beer Festival 2008. A light stout – 3.8% and with the thin mouthfeel of a session bitter, but the burnt-grain bitterness of stout to go with it. Flann O’Brien’s ‘pint of plain’ was probably something like this (the Guinness we know now is ‘Guinness Extra’). I’m not a regular stout drinker, but I’d have this again.

Marble
Chocolate
It’s a stout – heavy, bitter, espresso-dark with a tight, creamy head – and then it’s not. More specifically, something strange happens around the middle of your tongue, where the malt and the burnt-grain sourness usually kick in: there’s some of that, but there’s also a big sweet dollop of, well, chocolate. It really shouldn’t work, but it really does. It’d be interesting to compare it directly with Orval, which isn’t a stout but works a similar trick of simultaneously tasting like (a) plain chocolate (b) marmalade and (c) beer.

Mild of the Times
Very dark, not very sweet; if you had this and the Boggart porter in a blind tasting you’d be hard put to identify the mild. The slightly sour flowery front end and the bitter finish are present and correct; in the middle there’s a bit more going on than usual, but it’s not really distinctively mild.

Well Cut mild
A good strong mild is a thing of beauty. (If you like mild, and you like stronger and darker bitters, what’s not to like about a good 6% mild?) But strong mild is also an oddity – almost a contradiction in terms – and a rarity with it; this is only the second example I’ve come across, the other being Sarah Hughes’s Ruby Mild. Well Cut is good, but it’s nowhere near that good; lots of malt and tannic bitterness, but not enough sweetness. Would also lose points, if I were giving points, for playing silly beggars with pricing (see also Decadence) – yes, it’s seasonal and yes, it’s unusually strong, but £3.20 a pint? Give over.

Stouter Stout
It was Christmas Eve a couple of years ago when I went to my local and noticed that they had the Marble Port Stout on. There wasn’t a price for it, so I asked how much it was. They said it was free. That had never happened to me in a pub before, and will probably never happen again. (It was nice, too.) I’ve had the Stouter Stout before and not liked it much. A draught stout is a difficult thing to get right, and in that earlier pint I couldn’t taste much apart from great slabs of inky burnt-grain sourness. (A real aficionado probably doesn’t mix beers, but I have to admit I’m partial to a black and tan, precisely because the bitter hides the sourness of the Guinness. Or rather, the sourness of the bitter and the sourness of the Guinness cancel each other out, somehow – with the right bitter, a black and tan tastes of almost nothing at all.) This one, anyway, was a lot better; the sourness was still there, but well down in the mix. A big, dark, bitter stout – inky in a good (metaphorical) way. As distinct from the earlier one, you understand, which actually tasted of ink.

Titanic Iron Curtain
A Russian Imperial stout, apparently. Very dark – and, at 6%, quite strong – but with a richness and ‘old ale’ quality which put me in mind of porter more than stout; just a slight edge of that sour burnt-grain flavour that overpowers a lot of stouts. Good stuff.