“Home & Away, a series of rebrews bringing some of our funnest overseas collaborations back to the Garage. For this release we turn to the dark side with South Pacific Soufflé Stout, first brewed with Boston’s beer bosses, Trillium. Brewed with Tongan vanilla pods, cacao nibs and Timor-Leste grown coffee beans from Wellington’s own Flight Coffee, this huge dessert stout pours an opaque jet black with luscious layers of vanilla gelato, burnt marshmallow, chewy dried fruits and mocha latté. Bringing home the goodness.” 

Glassware: Snifter.

Appearance: Solid black pour with a thumb of brown head assembling on top. It retains relatively well and leaves wet patchy lacing on the glass.

Aroma: We’ve been eagerly awaiting this for weeks now. Sometimes the pent up excitement can be detrimental but not with a GP X Trillium collab…you could almost bet your house on it being amazing. Coming off are big roasty notes backed up by melted chocolate, spicy vanilla and cocoa. The coffee is also quite succinct. Hints of toasted marshmallow, roasted almonds and rum-soaked raisin. Hot damn!

Flavour: Wow, it’s multi-layered and super complex. The evolution of it is insane…it’s morphed like 4 or 5 times already. Wow! Upfront it’s rich and sweet but also kinda tart, like blueberry and blood plum. The chocolate is fudgey and melted, the coffee is mocha-forward and the vanilla is spicy. There’s quite an aggressive roasted quality that carries all the way into the finish which provides chocolate powder, raw cacao and ash for days.

Mouthfeel: Dense and muscly yet surprisingly elegant. The Co2 is slightly higher for the style and the 12.4% ABV comes in and out.

Overall: Two heavyweights from each side of the earth collaborate on another absolutely cracking beer. How original! Nah, in all honesty this was superb. How we wish Trillium were more readily available here in Australia. We’d be broke but it’d be worth it.