Tiny Rebel Space Cake

The Tiny Rebel Brewing Company Ltd was founded in March 2011 in Newport, South Wales by a pair of brothers-in-law, Gareth Williams and Bradley Cummings. Both avid homebrew fans, they had spent the previous years concocting brews in a garage, and were confident enough with their skills to start a commercial venture of it. An industrial unit in the south west of Newport was their initial premises, though within a year they had outgrown this space and had to expand to the unit adjacent. Moving forward to present day and the company now operates from a bespoke built 3,300 square metre brewery in the west of Newport, with an output of over 5 times more than their initial few years. They even run a few bars in South Wales, two in their native city and one in the capital Cardiff.

And so to the subject of this review, Tiny Rebel’s Space Cake. It’s labelled as an ‘oat milk mocha stout’ which immediately gets the brain working on what expectation signals it should be sending to our taste buds and olfactories; a nice thick body from the oats, sweetness from the lactose, and coffee and chocolate flavours and aromas from the mocha is what my noggin is telling me. Space Cake was originally made available at the start of 2021 as part of Tiny Rebel’s Dry January releases, along with two other non-alcoholic beers. The brewery’s only previous NA beer was an alcohol-free version of their popular Clwb Tropica IPA. Will Space Cake remain a part of Tiny Rebel’s core range or just a space oddity that floats out at the start of the year?

The beer pours a deep black colour with a very slight milky cloudiness to it. A decent-sized beige head is produced, but this quickly fizzles away. On the nose we get black coffee and roasted grains, with a hint of milk chocolate and malt sweetness. Certainly smells similar to an oat milk mocha.

On tasting we get slightly smoky black coffee up front, with some roasted grains and a slight background sweetness. There is a tad of chocolate there but really nothing like you would expect from the initial cocoa aromas. The carbonation level is quite low and the drink feels rather thin, which is a shame as I was expecting a bit of viscosity from the oats here. A touch more chocolate comes in at the finish, which is slightly sweet with a bitter and marginally sour note.

Tiny Rebel’s Space Cake is a fine non-alcoholic stout, but it lacks the depth of flavour and luxurious mouthfeel of other similar offerings by other AF brewers. For a brewer famous for it’s bold flavours this feels somewhat muted in taste. I’d certainly buy and drink it again, but I’d be thinking of other AF stouty goodness…

Buy Tiny Rebel Space Cake

Tiny Rebel’s beers such as Space Cake are available all over Wales, in independent bottle shops, and available online from one of the following drinks shops:

Nutritional Information (per 100ml, taken from the side of the can)
ABV	0.5%
Energy	20 kcal
Fat	0.1g
Carbohydrates	1.8g
Sugar	0.6g
Protein	0.1g
Ingredients
Water, Malted Barley, Malted Wheat, Lactose (Milk), Coffee, Cocoa, Hops, Yeast
Additional Information
Country of Production	United Kingdom
Brewer	Tiny Rebel – https://www.tinyrebel.co.uk/
Gluten Free?	No
Vegan Friendly?	No, contains lactose