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Mornin’ Latte
Our Rating: 3.63 / 5
Toppling Goliath’s Mornin’ Latte pairs lactose sweetness, cacao, and big-stout heft with a clear café ambition. Chocolate and milk come through cleanly, but the coffee skews burnt and smoky. Creamy, approachable, and deceptively strong, yet let down by acrid roast and a thinning finish as it warms.
Beer Name: Mornin’ Latte
Brewery: Toppling Goliath Brewing Co.
Beer Style: Imperial Coffee Milk Stout
Alcohol: 8.9%
Taste Notes: Milk chocolate, cacao, milky, burnt coffee, caramel, soy sauce
Serving: Can
Serving Size: 355 ml (12 fl. oz.)
Monday Morning Coffee
Mornin’ Latte is Toppling Goliath’s take on an Imperial Coffee Milk Stout, built around lactose sweetness and a “careful blend of cacao nibs”, with the can straight-up promising “dark chocolate, toasty, sweet coffee taste.” The can’s graphic leans hard into café vibes, right down to the latte-cup and the name that practically dares you to start nit-picking what counts as “coffee”. Fair warning: we did.
Served in a stout glass at roughly 9°C, Mornin’ Latte shows itself as a very dark brown rather than pitch black, and it’s oddly clear when held to light. Head formation is possible, but it backs off quickly into a thin halo, with decent lacing until the liquid starts sliding down the sides faster than the foam can pretend otherwise.
First nose lands where the label wants it: chocolate, roast, cocoa, and a coffee note that immediately drifts into burnt and slightly acrid territory. Carbonation shows as medium for the style, and on the sip, it feels velvety but still lively. The opening flavour is sweet, bitter chocolate and cocoa with a clear milky impression, but that “coffee” arrives more like scorched edges and smoke than anything you’d happily drink from a mug.
Coffee To-Go
Halfway in, the beer starts behaving more like its own argument. The sweetness deepens from dark caramel towards molasses, and an odd savoury stretch shows up: leather and even a soy-sauce hint. The structure is genuinely solid. It’s creamy without going full pastry-thick, and the sweetness and bitterness do a decent job of balancing each other. The issue is the quality of that bitterness. Instead of reading as coffee roast bitterness, it’s acrid, burnt, smoky, and stubbornly un-coffee-like despite the entire concept being “coffee milk stout.”
The finish does something nicer: a slight sour-sweet flicker with fudgey butter-caramel notes, and that’s the first time “latte” feels earned, like milk-sweetness and roast finally agree on a shared language. As it warms, sweetness climbs (more milk, more dark caramel), the smoky bit hangs around longer than invited, and the acrid edge refuses to fully pack up. Weirdly, it also feels a touch thinner when warmer, which is a rough look at 8.9% ABV for something calling itself imperial. Credit where it’s due, though, the alcohol is hidden with suspicious elegance.
BJCP-wise, the closest anchor is 20C Imperial Stout, mainly on strength and the big dark-malt footprint, but this one diverges by leaning sweet (lactose) and by letting “coffee” present as burnt/ashy rather than the cleaner roast-chocolate-coffee spectrum you’d hope for. But styles are merely guidelines, and it’s fitting that Mornin’ Latte is positioned as an Imperial Coffee Milk Stout.
Untappd lists the average at 4.07/5, which is noticeably higher than us. Scores split right down tolerance lines: Jesper and Viktor at 3.50, Laurits and Casper at 3.75. Mornin’ Latte is definitely easy-going, considering the alcohol content.
Mornin’ Latte is sweet without being cloying, and it sticks to well-known flavours that complement the style and don’t scare anyone off. But execution is a missed mark: Heavily burnt coffee, acrid, and thin mouthfeel make this beer a decent pour but not a great one. We land at a collective 3.63 / 5.
- Jesper: 3.50 / 5
- Viktor: 3.50 / 5
- Laurits: 3.75 / 5
- Casper: 3.75 / 5
Our Average Score: 3.63 / 5
