Commentist Beer Barrel: Bottle Royale

I’ve made my peace with the very strong possibility of another Broncos Super Bowl loss, or at least I’m going to keep insisting I have. I love my team, but as I see it, a Panthers championship would be pretty okay. Cam’s more fun than any player has a right to be. The defense features a whole bunch of stars who deserve to leave the league with rings, not least of all Jared Allen, who is practically a wild animal, and Thomas Davis, who is playing this game with a goddamned broken arm. I like the Panthers. I hope they lose, but at this time last year I was still trying to decide whether I hated the Patriots or the Seahawks more, and this is a vast improvement.

So, in that spirit, I decided that this week I’d pit a bunch of beers I like against each other. One of them’s my favorite, and it’s from Denver, but with lady snow’s help I’m giving all four of them an even playing field. Our contestants are a quartet of imperial stouts that have been sitting in my closet for somewhere in the neighborhood of a year and a half:

Great Divide Yeti, bottled 6/27/14

North Coast Old Rasputin, bottle date unknown, purchased fall 2014

Oskar Blues TEN FIDY, canned 8/26/14

Sierra Nevada Narwhal, bottled 7/31/14

I’ve had all these beers before fresh, but I’ve never aged any of them, which (I think) makes this extra fun. lady snow will serve ’em up in four color-coded 5oz glasses (red, white, black and gold). I’ll say a bit about how each of them is tasting after 18-ish months, take a stab at which one’s which, and then rank them all. Good?

Great. Let’s get started.

Red: The thing that immediately strikes me about this, before even tasting it, is the way the head sticks around. Lots of foam on top of this one. This is still very dry with a lot of hop bitterness. It’s almost briny. That’s a quality I’ve always associated with Old Rasputin, and I’m guessing that’s what I’ve got here.

White: Almost the polar opposite of Red; no hop character to speak of and a lot of sweetness. This is chocolatey, nutty, and kind of reminiscent of raw cookie dough. That says TEN FIDY to me. It’s showing its age, for sure; there’s a bit of paper-like scent in the nose, and a bit of soy sauce in the taste.

Black: Very balanced. Kind of an enigma, really. Prunes, cocoa, coffee, hops, all in fairly equal measure. I’m struggling to say anything about this that would differentiate it from the baseline style description of the American imperial stout. I think this is Narwhal, but that’s the one of these four I’ve spent the least time with.

Gold: I feel I’ve saved the best for last. This is hoppy up front, but not as sharp as Red. It follows through with a big, bold, well-rounded chocolatey malt base. To me, it’s just more lively than the others. I’ll be very surprised if I find out this isn’t Yeti.

Ranking these, from awesome to best, it’s White, Red, Black, Gold. Let’s check in with lady snow to check my work and certify the results.

lady snow: Yeah, you got them all right.

make it snow: Shit, really?

lady snow: Yeah, check the post-it note.

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make it snow: Would have been more interesting if I’d gotten a couple wrong, honestly. So, obviously no surprise that my beloved Yeti got the top spot from a panel of just me, even in a blind tasting. But I didn’t expect Narwhal to compare to the rest so well, or TEN FIDY to compare so poorly. What hurt TEN FIDY, I think, wasn’t so much the way it tasted but the way it just felt thin on the tongue. That’ll happen a lot of the time when you age beer, so if there’s a lesson to be learned here, I think it’s “don’t age your TEN FIDY.” That’s all I think I’ve learned. lady snow, thoughts on these four beers?

lady snow: Narwhal! Is that Narwhal?

make it snow: Yeah.

lady snow: My heart is with the unicorns of the sea.

make it snow is an alot of beer who now has to finish the four bottles of imperial stout he opened for this. lady snow is the world’s best girlfriend for indulging him in this. Minnie is their cat, who provided quality control and ensured that all experiment protocols were followed. Don’t @ her.