BLVCK Celebration is a fixture at Adroit Theory, and it rarely arrives twice in the same outfit. The Purcellville brewery treats the imperial porter as a base to be finished in different directions, and this week it has finished it in two at once.

The new release is conditioned on cacao nibs, vanilla and cookies and cream flavoring. Sitting on the same shelf, with 25 cases of it currently in the taproom, is a version built on maple syrup, blackstrap molasses and black lava salt. Same porter underneath, two entirely different destinations.

The brewery's own framing of the new one is characteristically unfussy. It describes the original as good on its own, and the adjuncts as the way to make it better, promising everything from the base version with more flavor on top.

Conditioning is the operative word. Rather than being brewed to a different recipe, a beer like this is made once and then held on its additions after fermentation, which is how a brewery gets several distinct products out of a single tank of base beer. It also means the underlying porter is a constant across the variants, and the comparison between them is a genuinely fair one.

Worth noting what the ingredient list is actually doing. Cacao nibs are roasted cocoa beans broken up, carrying chocolate's roast and bitterness without any of its sugar or fat. In a beer already leaning on vanilla and a cookies and cream flavoring, they are the component holding the line against sweetness. That balance is the difference between a porter that tastes of dessert and a dessert that has forgotten it is a porter.

BLVCK Celebration [Cacao Nibs, Vanilla + Cookies & Cream] arrives Friday mid-day in Purcellville, in pours and cans, with 15 cases packaged.

Editor’s Take

The quietly clever ingredient here is the cacao nib, which is the least sweet thing you can possibly add to a beer while still calling it chocolate. Nibs are just roasted cocoa beans, cracked up. No sugar, no milk solids, nothing soft about them at all. They bring bitterness and roast and a faintly dusty edge, and in a beer otherwise carrying vanilla and a flavoring named after a sandwich cookie, they are the one component pulling in the other direction. Take them out and this is a milkshake. Leave them in and it is a porter that happens to taste of dessert.

I also enjoy that you can currently buy two different BLVCK Celebrations at the same counter, one running cacao and vanilla and the other maple, molasses and black lava salt. Same base beer, two completely separate arguments about what should be done with it. That is either a tasting flight or a controlled experiment, and I see no reason it cannot be both.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.

BLVCK Celebration Now Has Two Variants on the Shelf at Once

Adroit Theory has conditioned its imperial porter on cacao nibs, vanilla and cookies and cream flavoring. A second variant of the same base beer, dressed in maple and black lava salt, is on the shelf beside it.

Source & Editorial