Christmas week: A "meh" gose and two sweet, sweet stouts

Firstly, Merry Christmas and happy holidays! Hope you managed to minimize exposure to the shopping insanity and got in some good chill time with friends and family around good food and drink!

This week's beer pick up was a four pack of "Grammy's Favorite", a gose from BenchTop Brewing in Norfolk, VA that features...get this...sweet potato, marshmallows and orange zest (6% ABV).

As usual I found this at my default bottle shop, De Fles Winkle (aka "The Wink") in the Food Lion shopping center off Nuckols Road in Glen Allen. This particular one was a little underwhelming, as I only picked up on the orange zest and didn't really taste anything else. It was mostly a run of the mill gose...a little sweet, mostly tart. But not bad, just didn't really stand out. I gave it 3.5 stars on Untappd.

Also in the beer fridge from earlier in the week I had two versions of Marvolosa from Commomwealth Brewing, an imperial stout. Both had Ghiradelli chocolate but one featured maple syrup, coconut and praline, and the other featured banana, coffee, and vanilla beans. I tried the second one last night and found it to be like your typical imperial stout...very roasty, smooth and thick, slight sweetness from the chocolate but a subtle yet still evident twist from the banana. As you might expect, it was a high ABV (12.6%) and the sweetness made it a good "slow sipper" beer to enjoy over the course of an hour.

Stay tuned for the next brew reviews, most likely this weekend.