Titanic Brewery Chocolate and Vanilla Stout Beer Review

After a long week at work I've decided to open a beer I've been waiting for over a month to try, Chocolate and Vanilla Stout from Titanic Brewery in Stoke on Trent. In theory this should be a great beer, I love stouts, I love chocolate, and I love vanilla, plus Titanic are a decent brewery, so I've been saving this one until I needed it. I really do hope this beer matches my expectations. So far I've only found Chocolate and Vanilla Stout when buying direct from the brewery, but I'm sure it must exist somewhere else too, so lets see if Titanic have created a beer that tastes as good as it sounds.

Sadly the beer comes in a little 330ml bottle, which is always a bit of a disappointment as all beers really should be pint sized. The bottle is also pretty much identical to every other Titanic Brewery beer, so they're consistent if nothing else. As always there's three key words on the front, in this case they are smooth, creamy, and sweet, these are all words I'm not going to complain about in a stout. Chocolate and Vanilla Stout comes with a rather mundane 4.5% alcohol content, which I don't mind in a 500ml bottle, but always seems stingy in a 330ml.

The beer pours as black as any beer can with a pretty good tan head, which settles nicely and holds pretty well. This is exactly what a good beer looks like in my head. The aroma is certainly sweet, and would probably be best described as very similar to a hot chocolate, it's a pleasant smell which very much matches what you'd expect from a chocolate and vanilla stout. I have to say that so far I'm pretty impressed, this seems to be a beer which might actually match up to everything I'd hoped it would be. 

The texture is smooth and creamy as promised, and the taste is certainly chocolatey, but not as much as I'd hoped. I have to say I couldn't taste any vanilla at all but there was a little bit of coffee. If I'm honest the taste left me a little underwhelmed, it actually tastes a bit like a watered down version of their Cappuccino Stout. Sure the coffee and chocolate ratio have been switched, but still I was expecting more from this beer. It's always difficult to rate a beer you've looked forward to trying as I immediately want to mark it down for not meeting expectations. All I can say is Chocolate and Vanilla Stout from Titanic Brewery is a very good beer, it's chocolatey and tasty, but it feels like it could have been so much more. I'll give this beer 7.5 out of 10, it's a very good effort, but it's nothing special.