Name: Bridge Road Brewers One Thousand

Style: Stout

Country: Australia 

ABV: 11.2%

Beer description: Bridge Road Brewers are one of Australia’s dominant craft breweries and they’ve been growing more and more. They’ve grown so much in recent years that they’ve recently brewed their 1000th batch of beer! Since this was such a momentous occasion, Bridge Road Brewers decided to brew a special beer. That beer was an imperial stout. It’s all pretty exciting, so we got our hands on some, had a drink, then wrote about it.

For a stout, this beer doesn’t give a lot of head, but it’s a nice coco brown colour. This beer is dark, almost black. It looks pretty thick as it pours, even oily. Basically everything a great imperial stout needs to be. On pouring this beer, the excitement really mounts.

Coffee and roasted malts fill the aroma, with a little bit of aroma. There’s a little bit of sweetness and coco in there and a nice burnt smell. The hop aromas seem to be very British, with a certain spiciness that’s hard to pick. Nice flowery smells come through as well. This beer is loaded as if it has the ghosts of the previous 999 brews inside it. Maybe Bridge Road isn’t cleaning out its equipment well enough!

The taste and feel here is smooth and not as heavy as one would imagine. It’s definitely a big stout, but it doesn’t feel like you’re drinking a loaf of bread as you would with some stouts. It’s a sweet-ish beer on the front and the chocolate tones begin to come through. At the very end, the burnt flavours come through and combine really well with the hop bitterness. It’s a burnt coffee, roasted malt, and hop bitterness combination that really ends this beer in an interesting way. If anything, it would be nice if the end of the beer was drawn out a little bit more as the three flavours all come at once; they’re great things to taste and it would be nicer to taste them separately.

All that being said, the fairly intense burnt/roast/bitter flavours at the end are relieved by the sweetness up the front. This makes the drinker go back for another sip and makes this beer go down faster that it should! But, that’s not to say this beer can’t be savoured. There’s a slight saltiness about the beer that slows it down.

Bridge Road Brewers obviously put not only their heart and soul into this beer, but also years of experience, plenty of trials, and probably a few errors that the public never saw.

Here’s to the next 1000 batches of beer!

Check out other stout reviews.

Go to other reviews of Bridge Road beers.