The rest of the label tries to tell us of their brew day. It's that same old story: "let's put in double malt, double hops, double everything!". It seems lucky then to arrive at the advertised abv of 7.77%. It's also a bit of a shame that their prominent website link www.epicbeer.com/doubletrouble also leads to a page error (or at least it has every time I've tried it over the last few weeks). Double fail?
The nose on this is unifaceted and bitter, with a sticky head. Tastewise it's far too hoppy to be honest, a real assault on the senses that comes back to you after the mouthful. It delivers a treacly foreign extra stout sort of flavour behind that which nevertheless comes off a little empty and pale with the bitterness, far from the typical lush pillowy landscape you expect when you buy a double stout.
It does improve slightly as it warms, but we started these two glasses at what is normally a good stout temperature around 12C. I'd say it may be better when aged a bit longer too to mute the hops a little and expose the malts - but then, it's quite low abv for one of these too.
In the end I'd have preferred them to just double the water too and make a balanced, drinkable stout. As it is this is neither enlightening nor a good example of a stout, double or otherwise. It does however shed a little light on why the brew day website link doesn't work - "what happened on brew day was .. oh. An error." 4.5
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