Sweet Stout (Milk Stout) is the dark beer that most consistently converts people who think they dislike dark beer — the combination of roast character, genuine sweetness from lactose, and creamy body makes it approachable without being cloying.
Oatmeal Stout is the style that converted me to using oats in brewing — I was skeptical about flaked oats beyond their role in NEIPA haze, but the way a 15–20% oat addition transforms the mouthfeel of an otherwise standard …
Russian Imperial Stout is the most ambitious beer I brew regularly — the 12-month minimum aging commitment and the technical demands of fermenting OG 1.
American Stout is the style that showed me how American hop character could work beautifully in a dark beer — until I brewed my first American Stout I’d been thinking about hops and roast as separate dimensions that didn’t interact, …
Foreign Extra Stout is the stout style that gets almost no attention from craft beer writers despite being the most widely drunk stout in the world by volume — Guinness Foreign Extra Stout is available in over 150 countries and …
Irish Dry Stout is the style I return to whenever I want to remind myself what clean, roast-driven simplicity in brewing looks like — the Guinness template is so familiar to most beer drinkers that it seems mundane, but brewing …
Irish Red Ale is the style that consistently surprises people who’ve only encountered the commercial mass-market versions — when a homebrewed Irish Red is made with proper malt balance and the traditional small roasted barley addition, the toasty, ca
Wee Heavy is the Scottish barleywine equivalent — a massive, warming, intensely malty dark ale that demands months of patience and rewards the wait with a complexity that evolves in the glass.
Scottish Heavy (70 Shilling) is one of the most underrated session ales in the British tradition — the malt-forward, lightly roasted, barely-hopped character is a complete departure from what most craft beer drinkers expect from a dark-ish ale, and e
Belgian Quadrupel is the strongest style I brew regularly, and the process management it demands has made me a better brewer across every other style — when you’ve successfully navigated a healthy fermentation at OG 1.