This limited release from Sapporo and apostrophe’d Japanese confectioner Royce’ is a strange Belgian nightmare; multiple vices backsliding into a brown can of depravity. Hops bitterness and cacao bitterness are perfect partners, malty and chocolate-y sublime and congruent combinations. Beer and chocolate works together.

But these two really don’t.

The pour is black with a quick-fading, soapy tan head. The taste is like stirring Nesquik through watered down Guinness. This would be a great place to start if you wanted to wean your kids off cola and straight onto stout. It’s sweet like candy rather than rich – the aroma of milk chocolate is there, but it doesn’t carry into anything more complex when imbibed. For a beer that weighs in at 5% alcohol by volume, the booze flavour seems to be front and centre – maybe the chocolate brings it forward?

I’m not at all against a novelty beer and Japan seems to do a good job of filling every drinking niche with unnecessarily innovative liquids. The wonderful flexibility in brewing is that if you want your beer to taste like juniper or coriander or in this case, chocolate, you can just dump it in and see what happens. The style guide can be prescriptive (if you happen to be a brewer that is driven to win awards) but the reward in any brewing should be in the drinking.

Royce’ other crossover product is chocolate coated potato chips. I’d serve them with this beer as a reminder that both ideas are an injustice to their constituent parts.

ABV: 5%

Price: Y264 from a 7-11.

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Brewer: The Hite, South Korea

Scouting about for a stout with no clout? Shout for Hite Stout.

There are two things wrong with this stout. Firstly, that it’s black; and secondly, that it is not labelled as “lager” anywhere on the bottle. It is beer at its most deceptive. It’s a brewery’s equivalent of a Decepticon that uses your body to transform back into urine.

ABV: 4.5%

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