It’s an imperial stout with a gloriously friggin’ stupid name and a stupidly friggin’ glorious finish. This isn’t even the first imperial stout named “Thiccolas Cage”—Sacramento’s Track 7 got there first. What in Zeus’s butthole is going on here? Welcome to the very weird and wooly subculture of beers (and meads) brewed in tribute to America’s greatest living actor, Nicolas Cage. Like his cinematic oeuvre, these beers are to be savored and scrutinized; Nepenthe’s Thiccolas Cage will make your eyes go wide and your hair stand on its head like Nic Cage in, well, every goddamn Nic Cage flick.
This is also somewhat of a flex for the Baltimore brewery, known mainly for its generously hopped West Coast style IPAs. Stouts are somewhat of a more recent addition to Nepenthe’s regular line-up, and it doesn’t hurt that Thiccolas Cage was brewed with Nepenthe’s pals at Black Flag Brewing in Columbia—a pretty awesome purveyor of stouts in its own right. Hails to the can art with its appropriately manic rendering of Sir Cage and one very funny joke in the beer’s description: “Nouveau-Shamanic Imperial Stout.”
There’s a missed opportunity here in terms of a more explicit tie-in to one of Cage’s movies—note to Nepenthe, please brew a banana nut muffin version of this to pay homage to Adaptation—but you can’t knock the roasty coffee, cherry and vanilla notes. And this is no low-brow affair when it comes to the concept, since Thiccolas Cage was brewed with graham crackers and Honeycomb cereal. And it is, as noted above, perfectly delicious. If anything, it’s a little on the sweet side, especially with the syrupy, low-carbonation mouthfeel really drawing the cherry flavor out like a cordial. But maybe it’s the subtle imperfections that remind us of greatness; some things are true whether you believe them or not.
For more info on Nepenthe Brewing Co., please head here.
