I've had 2 or 3 at least over the years, and all of them left me pretty meh. I don't hate them, but I was sifficiently turned off to pass them by at the store shelves ever since.

Speedway and all its variations are well worth your time if you can find them. Both Yulesmith's are darn tasty too. Oh, and then there's all the barrel-aged Decadence's's's.

Agreed, especially regarding Speedway. The Vietnamese Coffee Speedway was the best thing I had all day at the last beer festival I went to and I tried A LOT.

Vietnamese like cat shit coffee?

No that's Mikkeller that makes that civet poop coffee stout. Vietnamese is just a style of coffee generally made with chicory beans and sweetened condensed milk.

We'll have to fix that at some point.

I've got faith in Sculpin; I'm not dismissing it out of hand or anything. To wit, it will be interesting to see how it "travels" seeing as how they've just started up national distribution.

Hope you are feeling better, amigo. The flu got my girls a couple of months ago and it SUCKED. Restored my faith in getting free flu shots for the whole family after I had to drop 200 bucks on Tamaflu.

The Boulevard Chocolate Ale was pretty tasty this year.
I also consumed A clock wit Orange from Upstream in Omaha, which is brewed with blood orange, and Green Flash Treasure Chest, a Belgian Brown Ale tonight.

I am swimming in a delicious flood of homebrewed DIPA goodness. Came out awfully close to Heady. Shit. Probably my best yet.

I attended the event tonight, and came home with a pint glass for $.50. The Threadless IPA wasn't very good. It had a session IPA level ABV, but an Imperial IPA IBU level, and the Secret Stache stout wasn't very robust. The only redeemable beer I tried from Finch's was the Fascist Pig Strong/Imperial Red Ale. It was a quality beer, that was well balanced and had a significant hop profile.

The highlight of my night was Harumeku from local brewery, Zipline Brewing Co. It is a single hopped Saison/Farmhouse ale that uses organic Nebraska wheat and Sorachi Ace hops. It was magnificent, and I got to mention it to one of the owners later in the evening.

Dropped by my bottle shop and made a pretty great score on Saturday:



From left to right:

Stillwater Small Black (Sensory Series v2) - A Black Saison
Stillwater Debauched - A Scandinavian Farmhouse Ale brewed with Juniper, Brett and some smoke
Prairie Ales Birra - A sessionable farmhouse ale
Prairie Ales Puncheon - A Farmhouse Rye Ale with lots of wild bacteria
Prairie Ales Prairie Bomb - A 14% ABV Imperial Stout brewed with espresso beans, chocolate, vanilla beans and ancho chili peppers. This gets 100 pt scores from Rate Beer and Beer Advocates and always sells out immediately. I managed to snag the last one.
Prairie Ales Potlach - a collab beer with Omnipollo from Sweden and another Farmhouse beer with lots of Brett. The guy at the bottle shop told me it's his favorite beer by them.
Hair of the Dog Blue Dot DIPA - a top 3 DIPA for me
Eagle Rock Brewery White Rabbit - Special release for Eagle Rock's 4th anniversary, its a boozy version (11% ABV) of a wit bier

If you can't tell, I'm a big fan of both Stillwater and Prairie. Prairie might be my favorite brewery right now.

Had some of this the other day and was great

http://m.portlandmercury.com/portland/b ... &year=2013

Prairie Bomb is terrific

These guys sound incredible.

5 weeks does seem awhile for Sculpin. As you can imagine, best when fresh

Recents:

Logsdon Oak-Aged Seizon Bretta - Very good but not that much different from the regular Seizon Bretta and I prefer the regular one. The oak tames a little of the funkiness from the Brett and that isn't an improvement.

Bourbon County Stout - I was frankly expecting this to be better than it was. That's not to say it isn't a good beer but there are plenty of stouts I like more.

Hopfenstark Brewery "Saison Station 7" Herbed Saison - Really nice saison from Canada. One of my stores decided they wanted to close out their inventory of this so they marked it down from $17 to $6.99. I bought one bottle just to try it but wish I'd bought a lot more. Other stores are still selling it for full price but I didn't like it quite that much.

Stillwater Existent - a Black farmhouse ale marrying the characteristic bready/yeasty/funky farmhouse flavors with rich sweet dark malt notes. Really good.

New Holland is coming to Nashville. WHOOP!!

Would love to know which - and don't pull some "small batches made in an LA kitchen down the street from me, available only in a 2-block radius" California shit. I want something I can actually get dammit.

I'd say the top tier (in rough order) for me are:

Firestone Walker Parabola
Avery Uncle Jacob's
Alesmith Speedway
Hanger 24 Pugachev's Cobra
Taps Remy
Ballast Point Sea Monster

Still haven't had the Prairie Bomb yet but I'm guessing that it might deserve to fit here too.

Probably not really a fair straight up comparison due to big stylistic differences but I'd also rather drink

Noble Ale Works Naughty Sauce (Golden Milk Stout)
The Bruery Tart of Darkness (Sour Stout)
Jolly Pumpkin Madruga Obscura (Sour Stout)
New Holland Dragon's Milk (Milk Stout)
Some of the varieties of the Great Divide Oak Aged Yetis (Expresso, Chocolate)

There are still others I probably like more but that's probably enough.

I've only had the New Holland of those, but for me Burb Co was better. -shrug-

I'll look for the others.

Well, I had Dragon's Milk on Nitro Tap and Burb Co in a bottle. Also, my biggest problem with Burb Co is a stylistical preference. I prefer creamy to oily and like some sweetness to balance out the bitter. I'm not at all a fan of Ten Fidy for example which Burb Co seems to have much in common with even though its a much better beer than Ten Fidy.

I doubt you'd find Naughty Sauce or Remy or Pugachev's Cobra back east. The first two are hard enough to find here. I'd expect that at least half of the others have good distro though.

Agree on Parabola, Pugachev's Cobra and Remy and Speedway is great but I like BCS much better. Sea Monster is the Guinness of that list... I'll drink it if it's free. I will say that Vanilla BCS and the first two years of Coffee BCS topple everything though.

I debated whether to include Sea Monster and I put it last on that list on purpose but I clearly like it A LOT more than you do.

I got both the regular BCS and Coffee versions this year (on a trip in St Louis), and loved both but the regular version was still better for me. Interesting about the balancing sweetness, Billy - I like BCS slightly more than KBS because I found KBS slightly too sweet. Fortunately, I like Backwoods Bastard almost as much as all of these, and even though it's not a "big stout" but a scotch ale (or perhaps because of that fact0 I can actually find it sometimes. When I do, I hoard it. Hits the spot for me when

- it's dumping snow
- kid's in bed
- fireplace is kicking

Not a huge fan of California stouts to begin with but compared to the others you posted, it's an afterthought for sure. I will say I held onto a bottle from 2008 and drank it last summer and it held up really well. Have you tried any aged BCS? The 2010s are peaking right now and 2011 is really good too.

No, the BCS I had last night is the only one I've had and it was the current release. This is the first year they've distributed it in CA. Who knows, maybe I had a bad bottle.

I grant you that I like all the others I listed more than Sea Monster. That said, I think you're nuts if you would only drink Sea Monster if it were free. It's a great beer. It has a 98 score on Rate Beer.