TripleDigit-CraniumBrewery – Triple Digit
Beer – Cranium
Style – Oatmeal Stout with Coffee, Vanilla and Barrel Aged
ABV – 11.5%

Ale fermented in Bourbon Barrels and with coffee and vanilla added

The description of this beer from the brewery might be fairly straightforward and simple, but the beer is far from it.  This is brilliant fresh, or thrown in the cellar for a year or two as well. Fresh it has a boozy quality that I like to let calm down for about a year personally, which allows the sweet vanilla and sharp coffee notes to come out to play in the full bodied mouthfeel.

Once this mellows you’ll find a delicate balance of bourbon, sweet vanilla and a slight bitterness from the rich coffee flavors that isn’t easily beat.  All this is wrapped in a gorgeous package of smoothness of a big Oatmeal Stout.  Do I call this brilliant? I think I just might need to.

This is a big beer, and it’s not ashamed to be one…it’s big and ballsy and certainly one you need to try, let alone make a standby in your beer cellar.  Triple Digit Cranium is perfect to crack open whilst pondering your very existence… Big, Bold and of course freaking delicious!

Variants

There have been a few variants of this available on draft throughout the years, and even the base beer was released in bottles and draft (called Cortex) but Listermann/Triple digit got all their die hard Cranium fans in an excited uproar in early 2017 when they announced two 12oz bottles of Cranium variants would be released to the Cincinnati market.  I can’t wait to see what they’re going to think of next, but so far we’ve seen packaging released for:

  • Chocolate Cranium
  • Orange Cranium

GnarlyCranium

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