Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout

Today we think of beer as being comprised of four main ingredients: barley, hops, water, and yeast.  This is partly because, dating back to the 1500s, brewers in Bavaria and Bohemia were prevented by law from making beer with anything else.  It was precisely these Bavarian and Bohemian beers that exploded in the 19th and 20th centuries and now dominate the world beer market (I also touched on this subject in the Pilsner Urquell post below).  So our perception of what makes "beer" is colored to some extent by the dominant beer style of our lifetime.  But the concept of a four-ingredient beer is actually a relatively recent trend.  For most of its history, in most parts of the world, beer was brewed by soaking a mixture of barley plus whatever grain you had available in water, tossing in some fruit, vegetables, or spices for flavor, and then letting bacteria infect the mixture and eventually ferment it into alcohol.  I'll admit that sounds pretty gross, but we do have relics of this practice today in the form of certain wheat beers, rye beers, fruit beers, and many others.

Oats, for example, were commonly used to make beer from the Middle Ages onward, particularly in England, Scotland, and Scandinavia.  A derivative of this tradition has survived to modern times in the form of oatmeal stout.

Oatmeal stout is exactly what it sounds like: a stout beer brewed with oats.  You're no doubt familiar with the dark, heavy, and heavenly brew known as stout.  The world's most famous stout, Guinness, is of course from Ireland, but the stout style was actually born in London during the 1700s as a stronger version of a dark beer called porter.  In the parlance of the times, this was called "stout porter" and eventually just "stout."  Dark beers like stout and porter were all the rage in England during the late 1700s, and before long English brewers were adding oats to the mix to create a beer they called "oatmeal stout."

The popularity of oatmeal stout waned over the next century, however, as dark, heavy beers fell out of favor in Europe during the 1800s.  But the 1890s saw a renewed interest in oat-based beers.  Oatmeal stout, which was considered a healthy and restorative beverage by the medical experts of the day, was especially recommended for nursing mothers.  Of course, this was during an era in which cocaine was prescribed to children as a toothache remedy...so I'd take that advice with a grain of salt.  The oatmeal stout fad was short-lived, and by the start of World War I in 1914 the style was practically extinct.

Oatmeal stout nearly faded into Bolivian, as Mike Tyson would say.  But in the late 1970s and early 1980s beer enthusiasts in Britain, fed up with mass-produced continental and American lagers, spearheaded a revival of traditional English ale styles.  Oatmeal stout became one of the beneficiaries of this trend.  One of the first breweries to jump on the oatmeal stout bandwagon was a historic family-owned brewery in Yorkshire named for its founder: Samuel Smith.

Established in the village of Tadcaster in 1758, Samuel Smith is oldest brewery in Yorkshire and currently one of the most popular breweries of northern England.  The brewery produces their oatmeal stout using the Yorkshire Square method, a rare brewing technique that dates to the 1700s .  A Yorkshire Square is a shallow stone chamber, approximately 6 x 6 ft. in size, used for fermenting beer.  A wooden deck is positioned above the chamber and used as a sort of filter.  As fermentation progresses, a thick layer of yeast builds up on the surface of the beer.  The yeasty sediment then attaches to the wooden deck rather than settling back into the beer.  The finished brew is full-flavored and fully fermented without having harsh yeast bite.

Like most beers of its type, Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout is opaque and black with a thick creamy head.  The dark roasted malt contributes a rich coffee-like flavor which is complemented rather than overpowered by the taste of oatmeal.  As is traditional for Old World ales, there is almost no hop flavor and very low hop bitterness.  The texture is somewhat smoother than you might expect and, as far as heavy beers go, it is surprisingly very drinkable.  It is not particularly alcoholic, containing 5% ABV (about the same as a Budweiser).  The end result is a creamy, milk-chocolatey brew that is comparable to other great stouts while retaining its own unique character.

The presentation of Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout matches the traditional flavor of the brew.  It comes in an old-school bottle adorned with a white rose - a badge of allegiance to the House of York.  Indeed, both the beer and the packaging recall the days of the Wars of the Roses, when beers were variable products that reflected the unique characteristics of their hometowns.  But it also has a satisfying, drinkable character that meshes well into the modern fascination with refined craft brews.  As a bridge between these disparate eras, and a fine brew in its own right, Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout deserves a spot in the pantheon of British classic beers.