Have you ever wondered what makes a stout a stout? We know some of you have because it's a question we get asked quite often.

To really get the picture you first need to understand that the main ingredient of beer is malted barley. Over many years barley has been selectively bred to give variants that produce a large amount of sugar.

In order to unlock this nutrition we allow the barley to germinate, which breaks the hull and sets in motion the chemical process of turning the fuel inside the grain into a usable form.

But those little seeds are then placed in a kiln — the very same thing we use to make ceramics! The grain is totally baked and dried out in there. Finally, it is crushed and sent to us in big sacks.

Now that you understand what malted barley is we can explain how stout comes about. What if you kept kilning the grain far beyond the point it was ready, in fact turning it as dry and brown as coffee beans? You'd get a very dark powdered barley indeed: roasted barley.

By itself this tastes acrid and bitter, but a small amount — e.g. 10% added to the malt grist — causes the resulting beer to darken all the way to opaque black.

However even within this variety there are different degrees of how kilned the malt is, giving rise to black malt and chocolate malt. All of these taste a bit different and contribute liquorice, coffee and chocolate notes to various degrees. Combining these different dark malts in different ratios is what gives rise to the great variety of stouts we have today.

Here at Lacada we have always loved making stouts, that's why we've done Utopian, Anarres, Shore, Shamrock Pinnacle... the one thing they have in common is the layering of different types of malt to create a rich and full profile for your palate.

Utopian stout even won 3 stars at the Great Taste Awards, a feat we haven't managed since and which only a small percentage of Great Taste award recipients ever get.

Why did we call it Utopian? It all has to do with the co-operative nature of Lacada. Right from the start the brewery was conceived as a project aimed at creating an alternative culture. Of course we know that utopia — a perfect society — is an ideal that can never be attained. A perfect stout on the other hand... perhaps it can be done!

Writing this has got us fired up to brew stout, so watch this space...

Oh! And we haven't even talked about porter...

P.S. Some well known stouts are very smooth from the use of nitrogen gas and a mesh filter. Nitrogen gas forms smaller bubbles than carbon dioxide and that gives the beer its creamy head and soft mouthfeel. One of these days we might invest in that equipment at our taproom!