I didn't even know you liked beer, cdl.

My plan of walking into a store to grab a bottle of the reg worked. Might check the packy near work on Monday.

BCS peeps,

Had the regular and northwoods today. Regular was great as usual. I dunno, tasted like bourbon county stout!

The northwoods first sip was overly sweet and fruity for me. And something has to be plenty sweet to taste sweet next to bcs. But the more I drank the more it grew on me. I tasted more of a sweet cherry flavor than blueberry, and didn’t get much almond/marzipan flavor. Overall was pretty into it. Def one to share though, don’t need a ton of this at once.

Also **** getting up Friday morning to pay $15/bottle.

Damn. I assume this was at the Lincoln Park Binnys? You must have gotten in line early Thursday.

Georgia only got Coffee and Northwoods because of the abv limit. One of the best bottle shops in Atlanta is across the street from my building. Initial Friday release at noon was 1 bottle per person of Coffee and Northwoods. I get 1 Coffee bottle. I got to try Northwoods on tap waiting for the sale and it wasn't really my thing. Roll back in a few hours later and grab 4 more coffee bottles. I've been buying beer there for about 5 year and the managers know me and don't care. I go back this afternoon and there are about 10 cases of Coffee still just chilling on the floor so I buy a whole case at $15 a pop. I'm kind of tempted to go buy another case tomorrow.

Yea I’m going back to try to pick up 4 more bottles at 12:30 this afternoon at the one I go to. I wonder if we’re going to the same place because they just have it sitting behind the counter on the floor. I wouldn’t call it one of the best bottle shops in atl though so I suspect not.

Way jealous of the coffee availability. Was in line at the biggest store in Indy at 3:30 am and got 1 coffee and 1 NW. Lucked in to 1 more coffee later in the morning. The entire city is cleaned out.

Got 2 more bottles today. One by returning to the same packie and one at another random one. Indians run the second and woman at the register didnt even know anything about it but someone grabbed one from the back.

My guess is I could get a case just hopping store to store around here for a few hours.

Didn't check anything local. I was visiting family for Thanksgiving and a store by them got 25 cases of regular (but no variants), but no one seemed to know they had any. I strolled in on Friday and grabbed a case. Easy game. They also had just found some of last year's Christmas bomb in the back so I grabbed last year's and this year's just for fun.

Getting jealous of all you people casually strolling around and buying this stuff hand over fist. So I decided to open one from the basement:



Disappointingly flat, but still pretttay good. Looking forward to trying this year's vintage.

Also looking forward to getting my hands on some of Epic's Big Bad Baptist variants. This year, they've got another Mexican variant (which was fantastic last year) and a triple barrel version that sounds wonderful:
1st use bourbon barrel aged Imperial stout with Barrel aged single-origin coffee, artisanal batch cacao nibs, and rum/bourbon barrel aged toasted coconut.

Not to make you more jealous but I’ve seen those on a couple of shelves this weekend. Grabbed one of each.

Nice. I'm sure I'll get my hands on some, but I haven't seen any indication of when they'll be in Ohio.

Also, not sure how I'm supposed to effectively function after drinking a BCBS. I feel slightly bad for my wife sometimes - telling her I'm going to have a beer at 5pm on Sunday is a total crapshoot for her. Sometimes it has zero consequences, other times I decide I'm going to throw down a 15% monster when I'm supposed to make dinner, and then I'm useless. (Tonight. Kids get tuna melts.)

Good times.

Cruised out to Night Shift today to grab my latest barrel society bottles, Macbeth, a saison fermented on meyer lemon and grapefruit aged in white wine barrels. I really liked it a lot. Great citrus notes with some funk from the barrel. I like seeing lighter beers aged in barrels. Sometimes I find the bourbon barrel stouts get pretty heavy. While I was there, I also sampled the Darkling (their bourbon barrel stout) varieties they had left (regular, coffee, maple cinnamon). Sadly, their release was Friday while I was out of town so I missed the ones that were tap only (vanilla, coconut, fluffernutter). Darkling is alright, but definitely not as good as BCBS. It lacks some of the subtlety and I don't get a lot beyond the bourbon barrel. At $22 per 750ML, its a pass for me. The variants were better. They stood up to the bourbon notes nicely without being cloyingly sweet. They also had Second Breakfast, their baltic porter, which was excellent; even better than last year. It was smoky with notes of plum and raisin. That was a snap-buy for me.

Went to one of my local packys which people seem to forget about just to satisfy my curiosity and they did indeed still have 2.5 cases of BCBS left.

No, but that Binny's was the only other place I'm aware of that had a case of VR. Only 1 case and ~1500 people or whatever... yeah, no. Kinda dumb of them to even advertise it there, imo. Just literally put it at the register and it's a way better surprise or whatever. Idk. k.

I'll probably end up in Indy every other year as my wife has some family there... that sucks about the coffee allocation. Ugh.

In other news, not chasing for the rest of the weekend and just continuing to enjoy everything on draft was pretty k. However, yeah as spider mentioned 15% monsters = lots of "why am I like this" reflection time, as it's pretty rare I have so many drinks on back to back days. On the other hand, 16 and 17 coffee side by side was pretty fun! 17 such a sharp and fresh coffee flavor, I really enjoyed it! 16 really smooth and mellow and also still great imo. Takeaway: if you need to drink really big beers for many days straight, maybe add some coffee to them.

I would just do a 4 year vertical of regular (or barleywine) and add the northwoods in if you're stuck on the #5 here.

I think '15 bw was totally infected (same with coffee) fwiw.

How do people feel about '17 so far? I thought '16 was a drop off from the soaring heights of fresh '15 (and 13-14 which were also amazing and continue to age well last I had them). I'm trying '17 Friday night, a buddy chases every year so we'll do a 4 year vertical, but after having last year's '16 (which wasn't bad or anything, just not the epic BA RIS I've come to expect) I didn't chase this year.

i've had '13-'17 recently, although not side-by-side.

'17 is very good fresh, my favorite of the last 3, which are the only ones i've had fresh. Its a little hot (as all of them have been), but has some good roasty/chocolaty notes as well as some almost dark cherry/berry flavor. it does seem a bit sweeter than i remember the last 2 being.

'16 was much more smooth with the roasty/chocolaty flavor being predominant with a really good smooth barrell finish.

'15 i was at the tail end of a 5 hour share, but had a good bottle date and remember it being good, very close to '16.

'13 and '14 were the best by far. both were incredible and have aged very well. i drank '13 next to a Maman from Perennial which kind of ruined how good it was, but it is such a perfect example of a non-adjunct BA stout.

Also had a '13 barleywine in line black friday that was great. i'm not a big BW fan, but it was so sweet and smooth.

Bode,

As someone who has had BCS fresh every year since 2008, I'd say the 2017 is probably my 3rd or 4th favorite that I've had. This year's roasty chocolatey notes are reminiscent more of Peruvian and Ghanaian cacao flavors than some of the brighter and nuttier Madagascan and Ecuadorian cacao notes of prior years.

I had an 07 next to 17 on Sunday. Pretty amazing how well the 07 held up. Obviously there was almost no heat left and it was certainly more thin than the 17, but the flavors were still incredibly robust and forward.

Is there a consensus on aging beer?

I’ve had verticals of KBS and have always preferred fresh.

Hoagie,

Ive been doing it less and less.

Sours I seem to always prefer fresh.

My favorite stouts mostly have big coffee, chocolate, vanilla etc flavors that usually fade with time.

The only recent beer I’ve thought improved a lot with aging was 2014 or 2015 abyss I had bought a couple bottles of. The first one I just wasn’t into the flavor profile at all and found it weird, too much licorice, etc. Opened the other bottle recently and thought it was pretty tasty/balanced/etc.

It used to be nice to have some stored in case I wanted a specific style at any time. But now if I want a big barrel aged stout or excellent sour or whatever, I can just walk into a number of stores and always have my choice of many good ones available.

No consensus. Personally, I love aged beers, you can't mimic the flavors in the best of them in any type of fresh beer.

Buy this book, it's cheap and very informative https://www.amazon.com/Vintage-Beer-.../dp/161212156X .

Start verticals of cheaper shelf offerings of your favorite styles. Oskar Blues Ten Fidy, Great Divide and Stone Imperial Stout are 3 good and affordable candidates.

The above mentioned Abyss, Alesmith Old Numbskull, North Coast Old Stock ale are some others I've had great luck with.

If you get a chance to try some vintage aged beers and you like them, with a bit of research and proper storage you can take most of the uncertainty out of aging beers. Most of the (few) misses I've had this year were beers that weren't all that great fresh.

A lot of big beers I've preferred after 6-18 months, '15 Bourbon County was an exception to that. I can't believe of all this discussion above nobody is mentioning the trademark vanilla barrel flavor of this beer. It was remarkably present in the boozy fresh '15, that was almost a perfect beer for me. It wasn't present in '16 to my tastes. But that was the one major thing that separated the best bourbon counties I've had from other good BA stouts.

I will add that there's a limit to an informed person taking the guesswork out of aging. I have some early 2000s Thomas Hardy, an '04 DFH WW Stout, I traded for both so I wasn't in control of the cellar conditions and they are old... so that type of thing is more of a gamble. That said, I've had 01-02 JW Lees that was excellent this year.

If you want to age something for a long ass time, buy Samiclaus and hang onto it, probably my favorite aged beer.

There's also something to be said for aging the lambics. Buy a boon geueze and/or Cuvee Rene off the shelf, age it around 55F for a year, buy another, repeat, do a 3 year vertical and see what you think. I love those two beers and have had 0-3 years (from bottling date not brewing date, they already blend various aged lambic in those) and I think they're all really wonderful.

Beer peeps,

Hmmm, I'm kinda curious...



Some of these cream ales and stouts sounds pretty good: https://www.decadentales.com/beers/

El D, I really need to look into those. They look like something I'd be into and I have family that live in that town. I am there multiple times a year.

Drooling so hard for this, hoarders-only release next week (Black Tuesday fermented with Napa cabernet sauvignon grapes). Potential complicating factor though: as the wine cork might suggest, it is not carbonated.

Generally I think aging really only helps stouts that are a bit too hot at release. It is definitely tell funk to drink verticles though.