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Clusters Snow Globe
Our Rating: 3.69 / 5
A winter-themed pastry stout that promises white chocolate and coconut but delivers a more roast-forward, toasted, subtly sweet profile. Leaner than expected, but balanced and enjoyable, with cocoa, caramel, and savoury vanilla carrying the experience. Not full dessert mode, more a clean, seasonal stout with restrained adjuncts.
Beer Name: Clusters Snow Globe
Brewery: Neon Raptor Brewing Co.
Beer Style: White Chocolate & Coconut Stout (Pastry Stout)
Alcohol: 5.2%
Taste notes: Chocolate, roasted coffee, caramel, savoury vanilla, toasted
Serving: Can
Serving Size: 440 ml (14.88 fl. oz.)
A Little Risk of Snow
The can leans into its seasonal theme without turning it into a gimmick, snowflakes, winter blues, and a general sense that this is meant to be a cold-weather stout. The “White Chocolate & Coconut” headline that Neon Raptor has slapped on Clusters Snow Globe stands out immediately, and we start the tasting with that expectation in mind. If a brewery frames a beer around two distinct flavours, especially flavours commonly associated with holiday sweets and dessert tables, it’s fair to check how those elements show up.
The pour gives us a familiar opaque black body and a lively head that climbs quickly and sinks just as fast. Nothing pastry-thick or creamy in appearance. It actually looks more like a classic stout dressed in seasonal graphics rather than a confectioner and brewer that met halfway and turned into beer. Light Christmas nod number one: it behaves more like a stout you’d drink alongside a tin of cookies, not one brewed to mimic the cookies themselves.
Aroma follows that direction closely. We get chocolate, roast, caramel, and a vanilla note that leans savoury rather than sugary. And this is where the “coconut” claim becomes interesting. There’s absolutely none of that classic coconut flesh aroma, none of the soft, creamy sweetness that often shows up when we’ve encountered the use of flavourings, concentrates, or lactose to simulate coconut confectionery. Instead, what we’re reading as coconut is closer to a toasted nuttiness, dry and subtle, almost like the coconut has been roasted long enough to lose all its defining features and most of its sweetness. That toasted edge may even be what pulls the vanilla into its savoury zone; without any creamy counterweight, the vanilla has nowhere sweet to settle.
By the first sip, it’s clear this isn’t the dessert snow globe we expected initially. It’s more like a winter stout with a nod toward holiday flavours, but built on a straightforward, albeit very decent, base. Not a bad thing, just not the creamy confectionery direction the ingredient list suggested to us at first glance.
All I Want for Christmas Is… a Bit More Adjunct
Once we move past the aroma and into the actual drinking experience, the beer continues to behave like a stout first and a flavoured stout second. Cocoa and roast take the lead, followed by caramel and that same savoury vanilla we noticed earlier. The “coconut” stays firmly in toasted territory, dry, slightly nutty, and extremely subtle. Nothing creamy, nothing confectionery.
Given that this edition of Clusters allegedly contains no lactose and uses no flavour concentrates or added aromas, we start wondering how the white chocolate and coconut were introduced, as there is no mention of these ingredients on the ingredients list or in the beer descriptions. If both components were added through real ingredients, there are only a few ways they could be integrated: added late in the boil (which would strip most delicate aromatics), added in the whirlpool, or added during fermentation as actual white chocolate pieces or toasted coconut. Without concentrates or lactose, it makes sense that the flavours present as roasted, dry, and restrained. White chocolate, after all, gets most of its identity from cocoa butter sweetness and fat, elements that usually won’t survive fermentation unless delivered through lactose or flavour additions. Coconut behaves similarly: without sugar, fat, or essence, you’re left with toasted character only.
The beer’s structure supports this interpretation. The body is lighter than modern pastry territory but not watery. Carbonation is soft and creamy enough to support the roast without thickening the texture. The bitterness reads like a deliberate choice, keeping the beer balanced and preventing any drift toward cloying sweetness. As the beer warms, the caramel becomes more expressive while the roast deepens, giving us a slightly richer mid-glass impression but still staying within stout fundamentals.
When we try to frame this in a BJCP perspective, this Clusters Snow Globe falls closest to a flavoured American Stout, roast-forward, balanced bitterness, leaner body, adjuncts used as accents rather than anchors. And honestly, that fits how we end up evaluating it. We don’t need it to hit an overt pastry profile, even if we might have expected one. The beer just needs to drink well, and it does.
In terms of transparency, we don’t feel Neon Raptor oversell anything. They explicitly state the flavours they aimed for, and the beer gestures toward them, just in a drier, more roasted interpretation than the wording might suggest.
Our final scores reflect that we enjoy this angle. It’s not a mismatch; it’s simply a different style of execution. And given the price point and ABV, a rating around 3.5 on Untappd is completely fair. We just happen to find a bit more charm in the balance and drinkability than the average rating suggests.
By the end, the aftertaste settles into chocolate, roast, caramel sweetness, and that dry vanilla-toasted interplay that impressed and confused us earlier. Subtle, steady, and very much its own idea of a winter stout, just not one built around overt sweetness or confectionery intensity.
Our scores for this beer are as follows:
Jesper’s Score: 3.75 / 5
Viktor’s Score: 3.5 / 5
Laurits’ Score: 4.0 / 5
Casper’s Score: 3.5 / 5
Average Rating: 3.69 / 5
