White stout brewed with Ghanaian cocoa nibs, Chanchamayo coffee and Madagascar vanilla beans.
Our white stout is a golden pale, full bodied and strong. We’ve added back the chocolate love, roastiness and vanilla notes with healthy doses of the real McCoy; Ghanaian cocoa nibs, Chanchamayo coffee and Madagascar vanilla beans. At a strength of 8.7% this is a true stout in the historical sense of the word unlike many modern stouts of any colour.
Named for the schooner Lady Lovibond, a ghost ship that appears cast in an eerie white glow to lure rescuers to their own demise in the North Sea, our white stout is likewise not what she appears. With the coffee roastiness, chocolaty maltiness and vanilla sweetness expected of its darker kin, Lovibond eschews typical ingredients and relies instead on real coffee, cocoa and vanilla beans for ballast.
We first came across the story of the schooner Lady Lovibond when researching the tragedy of the clipper Baba Yaga. We were having a beer at Bell’s Eccentric Cafe in the summer of 2015 just before opening the original brewery. We had already decided on Baba Yaga’s name because it was named after the witch that European grandmas used to scare children into behaving — kind of an Eastern European boogeyman — and it gave John fond memories of his own Romanian grandma. The Lady Lovibond, story, though, caught our attention because her name has meaning to brewers. We think of Lady Lovibond as the ghost ship version of the Baba Yaga, which did go down on October 6, 1871 (incidentally, exactly 100 years before Dave was born), so it made sense. to us, anyway.
Named for the ghost ship Lady Lovibond, a legendary schooner said to have been purposely wrecked on 13 February 1748 when the first mate, jealous that the captain had won the hand of the woman they had both courted, seized the wheel and steered the ship onto the treacherous Goodwin Sands off the Kent coast of south-east England, killing everyone aboard.
Since then she appears shrouded in an eerie white glow to lure rescuers to their demise on North Sea sandbars.
Appropriately, the name ‘Lovibond’ also refers to the oldest standard for measuring the colour of beer. Introduced in 1833, degrees Lovibond and the Lovibond Comparitor device are still widely used as the scale of choice to declare the colour of beer and malt. For the record, Lovibond White Stout comes in at about 6.6° Lovibond.
