Tasting Notes: Porterhouse Oyster Stout (Ireland)

330ml bottle: Pours with rich head, medium head retention.  Colour is deep dark brown, more porter than stout, bright.  Nose is that rich, earthy, seabreeze-scented aroma classic to oyster stouts, but what others may discern as herbal, probably grassy.  A lighter-bodied mouthfeel, fairly dry, but with a lot of herbal complexity at work in the flavour, as well as a mineraly character, reminiscent of the minerals in sea salt.  The roast adds a note of smoke in the finish.

All in all, a good stout, but if you go into this expecting an American-style heavyweight imperial stout, you'll be disappointed.  The brewery's website lists it as 4.8%.  (Interestingly, the brewery's website also proclaims it as "Ireland's Largest Genuine Irish Brewery"--a pot shot at multinational Diageo?  I enjoyed this paragraph from the website:

You may be very excited to know that The Porterhouse uses a traditional true top fermentation Bi strain Yorkshire stone squar yeast or, alternatively, your eyes may start to glaze over at this point. It's highly flocculent and comes from the Old Romsey brewery in Kent by way of the East Riding Brewery. Are you still there? Nearly finished. The lager strain is a Saccharomyces uvarum and it, too, is pretty darn flocculent. It gives great natural clarity, reducing the need for filtration. Weiss yeast is used for wheat beer and this explains the banana scent. It has nothing to do with Brendan Dobbin's greenhouse.

It's a good beer, but I think we can do it better here without the freight surcharge.