It’s been a pretty good football season for me. I got to watch my Broncos play the sort of defense that every football fan gets frustrated at his team for not playing. I got to watch them bring the world another Patriots Schadenfreude Day. And next weekend, there’s a solid chance I’ll get to watch the Carolina Panthers run for 250 yards on them, but I’ve made my peace with that. It’s always a good season when you get to watch your team all the way to the end, I think.

Another thing that went well for me this season is that, for the first time in years, I won a fantasy football league. Specifically, I won the Commentist league run by Old School Zero. (I also won a very stupid twenty-team league of my own design, but the less said about that, the better.) My prize, along with a Pinewood Derby trophy and a box set of Wrestlemania VHS tapes, was a couple of bottles of beer.

The first of two bottles OSZ sent me, a 12-ouncer of Conflux No. 1: Collage, is a collaboration between two legendary Oregon breweries, Deschutes and Hair of the Dog. To be more specific, it’s a blend of four beers those breweries were already making. Deschutes provided The Dissident, a Belgian-style sour aged in wine barrels, and The Stoic, a rye barrel-aged Belgian quadrupel. Hair of the Dog added two probably uncategorizable beers of its own to the mix: Fred, aged in bourbon barrels, and Adam, aged in fresh Oregon oak barrels. Yeah, we’ve got a few barrels here. The finished product pours reddish-brown, hazy but without any large bits of sediment. Flavor-wise, it hits just about every note you could think of for a beer, other than “hoppy”; if Collage ever had any noticeable hop character, it’s gone now. It is, however, somehow sweet, sour, spicy, and dry all at once. This beer has a lot of depth and complexity, but for all that I think it’d be fine for a beer drinker just getting into sours. The “wild” flavors don’t show up as intimidating or overwhelming tartness, but as a whole range of notes from lemon to apple to maybe even cinnamon. It’s even a bit savory. And one thing I’m noticing missing is the soy sauce-like flavor that develops in many beers when they’ve been aged this long. I’ll never know what this beer was like fresh, but drinking it now, it seems like it was made to age three or four years. I can’t believe OSZ even found this thing after all that time, but if you see it, grab it.

lady snow: [takes sip, checks bottle] I knew it! I knew this was barrel aged! And I think they got the aging and blending exactly right. I like that I can tell it’s barrel aged without it just being way too boozy, and I think the wine barrels in particular add a lot. I love wine, so it’s like integrating my wine and my beer.

Now, the other bottle’s from a brewery I’d never heard of until the beer showed up on my doorstep. Ex Novo Brewing Company, it turns out, is a nonprofit brewery in Portland, Oregon; it literally donates 100% of its net profit to charitable groups. This is a concept I absolutely love; we’ve got an outfit in nearby Marble Falls, Save the World Brewing, that does essentially the same thing and makes some truly excellent Belgian-style beers in the process.

The Ex Novo beer OSZ sent me is called Nevermore, and the label describes it as a black barleywine brewed with chocolate and smoked figs. Now, an admission: I don’t really know what figs taste like. I’ve never just eaten figs. I’m not even sure I’ve ever eaten a Fig Newton. I think I’ve had beers with figs in them before, but I wasn’t, and I’m still not, really equipped to separate the taste of the figs from the taste of the beer. I even tried to find some figs at the grocery store before reviewing this beer, so I’d have a point of reference. The grocery store was out. Oh well.

This “black barleywine” delivers, first of all, on its promise of being black. This is a very, very dark beer. Now, I’ve said it many times: There is little, if any, difference in reality between “black IPA” and “hoppy stout”; to the extent that the difference exists, it’s in the absence of roasted malt bitterness. There’s a broad consensus among beer geeks that this difference is either of utmost importance or an utterly meaningless gimmick. Black barleywines aren’t yet trendy the way black IPAs are, but they’ve got an analogous relationship to the imperial stout; that is to say, they’re the stout without the roast. This fits the bill. It’s sweet and thick, with coffee and chocolate and plum notes, without the bitterness of a big stout. And the smoked figs are a great addition. Yeah, sure I can’t taste figs, but I can taste smoke, and it’s the perfect balancing element in a beer that would otherwise be much too sweet. If I’m honest, I’d still identify this without hesitation as a stout, if I were tasting it blind. Whatever. It’s absolutely delicious from the first sip to the last, style guidelines be damned.

lady snow: This is what we should do. We should start a nonprofit brewery, and then in the taproom, we should have puppies and kitties for adoption, like a cat café.

make it snow: Little Friends Brewing Company.

lady snow: YES.

make it snow: How’s the beer?

lady snow: I really, really like it. I love that I can taste the fig in it. It really adds to the sweetness of the beer.

make it snow: Sure, rub it in.

lady snow: I love the smokiness, too. And I think just the idea of smoked figs is just mouthwatering. I got a fair bit of chocolate too, but it didn’t stand out to me as being as remarkable as the figs.

make it snow: There you have it, folks. Figs.

tl;dr: Old School Zero is a good and generous friend with fantastic taste in beer. Here’s to him!

Overall Grade: B. Wait, no, that was my Yahoo! draft grade this year. A+.

make it snow is an alot of beer and fantasy football champion. For this review, he split a bottle of Collage with lady snow, and drank two thirds of a bottle of Nevermore with lady snow getting the balance. Draft him to your injury-depleted Pro Bowl team!