Ballast Point Red Velvet
Ballast Point Red Velvet is a Golden Oatmeal Stout with beets, chocolate & natural flavors added, 5.5% ABV. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a shrink wrapped beer bottle before, this is a really engaging presentation, it caught my eye at the store immediately.
The nitro bottle works like a charm (honestly better than the last few Left Hand Nitro beers I’ve picked up) creating a long cascading pour of pink head that becomes a clear and bright beet red beer as it rises. So we are clearly not going to review this like a typical Oatmeal Stout, the idea here is red velvet cake and we’ll see if it meets the mark. The aroma seems a bit lacking, both in general aroma and in red velvet cake similarity. Sweet on the nose with some generic chocolate, sugar and biscuit malt. The taste is a little all over the place. Kind of fruity with a little chocolate, some vanilla and way too much in the way of bitter hops. I have certainly had enough red velvet cake in my life to know this tastes nothing like it. The nitro pour was beautiful, but the mouth-feel has too much carbonation tingle and not enough creaminess to be appropriate.
This was really on the cusp of being good enough for me to review, but I do like the creativity. It might be a novelty act, but at the price of admission I wasn’t too disappointed in the performance.
