Review: It’s The Golden Goo-Beer-Lee Creme Egg Beer

It's The Golden Goo-Beer-Lee Creme Egg beer
It’s darker than a Creme Egg.

Just when you thought the craft beer world couldn’t get any weirder, Goose Island Beer Company make a Cadbury’s Creme Egg beer. The Golden Goo-Beer-Lee Creme Stout has been brewed in collaboration with Cadbury’s in celebration of 50 years of the wonderful Creme Egg. What a time to be alive.

Before I give you my thoughts on what it tastes like, I need to point out that you won’t be able to drink this unless Goose Island changes its mind and decides to make more. 

It was an extremely limited supply, limited to one pack of two per person. The first batch, available last week, sold out within a couple of minutes. The second and final batch, released yesterday at 11am, only had 500 available and, again, sold out within a couple of minutes. Goose Island says that’s the end of it and they won’t be making anymore, which is a shame and has led to a lot of pissed-off responses on social media from people who didn’t manage to buy a pack.  

But I was one of the lucky ones. I made sure I had the website open before 11am and created an account. I also had my payment details saved so I could instantly check-out, which is likely why I managed to grab one before they sold out at 11:02am. 

The Creme Egg beer can.
The marketing team at Goose Island did a great job with the name.

The two beers arrived this morning, but obviously I put off trying one until I’d finished work for the day. The can design features the famous Cadbury purple, as well as the yellow and red that make up the Creme Egg colours. This being Goose Island, you also get a giant goose that’s done in the style of the yellow egg-splat we see on every egg. 

Golden Goo-Beer-Lee Creme Stout is made of a blend of malted barley, oats, wheat, milk sugar (lactose), cacao nibs and vanilla beans. It’s supposed to have a rich and creamy texture, just like Cadbury’s famous gooey chocolate egg.  

After I opened it, I gave it a quick sniff and was met with a sweet chocolatey wave. But you’re not here to read about the smell, so what did it taste like?

The taste was heavy on chocolate, which was more bitter than I expected. You’re also left with a creamy after-texture. If you’re expecting it to taste exactly like a Creme Egg then you’ll be disappointed, although Goose Island did point out that this beer didn’t contain actual Creme Eggs. It could also have done with being a higher percentage, as 4.5% for a stout leaves it tasting quite thin. 

Back of the Creme Egg beer can with a giant yellow goose.
The back of the can is full-on goose!

I drank the beer straight from the fridge. A few people who had already tried it and logged it on Untappd suggested that leaving it to warm up helps unlock the flavour. I did this and can confirm that it did have a much creamier texture once it had warmed up to room temperature, which I enjoyed a lot more than when it was cold. 

Goose Island suggests biting the top off a Creme Egg, licking out the goo and using the chocolate shell to drink the beer out of. I didn’t end up trying this, but I have another can, so I’ll have a go next time and then update this post. 

All in all, it’s not a bad chocolate stout. Am I disappointed that it didn’t taste exactly like a Creme Egg? Not really, because that would have led to drinking something that was overly sweet and sickly. Instead, you get an average stout that goes down easy, with a nice creamy texture that lingers on the tongue.  

Related reading: My current obsession is craft beer

Screaming Is Cathartic

Woman screaming

If the last 10 months of this god-awful pandemic have taught me anything, it’s that screaming is cathartic. I’ve often found myself randomly screaming, mostly when I’ve been home alone, if only to relieve some tension from being trapped at home all the time. Millions of people all no doubt feel the same, and thousands of them found a way to just scream.

The Just Scream project has collected over 130,000 screams from October 2020 to January 2021. They asked people to call a number, scream in whatever way they felt, then hang up. It’s now over (they’re collecting messages of hope at the moment) but you can still listen to them over on the website. I listened to a few and I was impressed at how varied a human scream can be.

This reminds me of an ad campaign run by Promote Iceland that I gleefully took part in. You scream ‘to let it out’ and they’ll play back your scream through real speakers peppered throughout Iceland. They’ll send you a recording once your scream has aired.

Apparently screaming is also good for you. There’s a thing called ‘primal scream therapy’ that Kanye West is a fan of. I can totally imagine Kanye West being the kind of person to stand in a room and scream. It can help you release anger and frustration, as well as help you with anxiety issues.

Although you can’t just do it yourself and should hire a therapist who specialises in it. Because if you can think of it, there’s money in it.

Anyway, if you’re interested you can read a bit more about primal scream therapy over at Shape.com.

Speaking of the pandemic. In the U.K. we did a ‘clap for the NHS’ that became a bit of a cringe-fest (I’m all for supporting the NHS, it’s a wonderful thing, but I’m sure most NHS would agree that they’d rather have better wages for the hard work they do than a clap at your front door once a week), but I’m all for standing at your front door and just screaming loudly into the night. Although I’m not sure my neighbours would agree!

Now if you’ll excuse me…. AAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!

The Mystery Flesh Pit National Park Is Amazing Worldbuilding!

One of the best things about blogging back in the pre-2010 era when the big social media websites were still finding their feet was the randomness of it all. I could spend hours trawling the blogosphere. It wasn’t just about reading about random people’s lives. The best thing was coming across some weird and wonderful things that just begged to be blogged about.

Of course, nowadays you can just send out a quick tweet, but I do feel as though social media takes away the wonder of just exploring the Internet. Part of the reason I started this blog is to share things that interest me, and weird creative stuff is one of the many things that interest me. Enter the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park.

Ok, so I’d be lying if I said I’d discovered this while randomly trawling the Internet. I heard about it on a recent episode of Waypoint Radio, a gaming podcast from Vice. The Mystery Flesh Pit National Park began as posts on the subreddit r/Worldbuilding. The posts document a fictional National Park where the star attraction is a giant orifice in the Earth’s surface that is literally made of flesh. Underneath the surface lies a massive superorganism, with its internals regularly explored by thousands of tourists.

I’ll let its creator Trevor Roberts, describe it better:

The Mystery Flesh Pit is the name given to a bizarre natural geobiological feature discovered in the permian basin region of west texas in the early 1970s. The pit is characterized as an enormous subterranean organism of indeterminate size and origin embedded deep within the earth, displaying a vast array of highly unusual and often disturbing phenomena within its vast internal anatomy.

Following its initial discovery and subsequent survey exploration missions, the surface orifice of the Mystery Flesh Pit was enlarged and internal sections were slowly reinforced and developed by the Anodyne Deep Earth Mining corporation who opened the Pit as a tourist attraction in 1976. In the early 1980s, the site was absorbed into the National Park System which operated and maintained the Mystery Flesh Pit until its sudden closure in 2007.

The Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

The best place to follow this fascinating project is to check out the Tumblr blog, where Roberts says new art and lore will be posted at a minimum of twice a month. You get such delights as this beautiful cutaway page that reminds me of Dorling Kindersley books:

Or this one showing a map of the ‘Amniotic Thermal Springs’ where visitors can bathe in amniotic fluids for its perceived health benefits:

There are also adverts:

You can also read a detailed investigation conducted by the US government into the disaster that ultimately led to the closure of the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park to tourists.

I LOVE stuff like this. I love how much detail, world building and sheer amount of creativity that gets put into something that’s entirely fictional, but comes across as if it could be very real. I’m also interested in fiction that creates parallel universes that are very close to our own reality, but with random batshit things like this in them.

If you know of more projects similar to this then drop them in the comments as I’d love to explore them!