Stone Smoked Porter

For quite a while I've had two smoked porters sitting around my basement--Alaskan and Stone. There's a pretty good chance that my next dark beer will be a smoked porter and I might as well do the research, right?

The Stone is pretty damned good. It's not impenetrably dark--red clearly shows through when held up to the light. It's 5.9% a.b.v., so they seem to have restrained themselves from making too bulky a beer--atypically. There's a wonderful chocolatiness to the nose, mingled with smoke. The smoke picks up on the palate. I'm pretty sure I read somwhere that they use peat-smoked malt and I'm inclined to guess that that's true. It's a little earthy/peaty, as against the cleaner hardwood smoked routine. Alaskan should be the opposite, but I can't have two right now. This is tremendously balanced, by the way: no exaggerated hoppiness or excessive astringency. The full nose suggests that underlaying the burnt overtones is a fairly generous application of dark crystal malts. A great beer overall.