Saturday was of course Public Drunkenness and Green Novelty Hat Day in our fair city, but I spent the afternoon indoors at Goose Island’s Clybourn Avenue brewpub, going toe-to-toe with more than a dozen Chicago-area brewers at Stout Fest 2010. The brewers won—I’m amazed I can read my notes, honestly—but it’s easy to be a good sport about it because before I waved the white flag I managed to try 15 different stouts, some of them among the best I’ve tasted.
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Goose Island’s own offerings numbered about a dozen and included no fewer than five varieties of their world-class Bourbon County Stout. The vanilla edition—which I tried first, remembering the unearthly vanilla-bean Dark Lord from Dark Lord Day 2008—was boozy and flat as oil, with notes of milk caramel, pralines, and roasted hazelnut. Next came a revamped version of the Crop to Cup espresso stout Rind Grind: originally brewed with Meyer lemon peel, it’d been juiced up with additions of whole honey tangerines, green coriander, chamomile, and Citra hops. The herbs and hops gave it a cool, almost spearminty flavor, woven into the taste of lemon espresso. Among the more audacious stouts I sampled, it was by far the most successful.
Already in bottles is Goose Island’s Night Stalker, a silky imperial stout that’s massively dosed with Simcoe and Mt. Hood hops. Just breathing over a glass of this stuff is better than drinking most beers. The interplay of spicy, skunky hops and the sweetly roasty base beer works to fend off the palate fatigue that can make it hard to finish a glass of some amped-up stouts—I’m pretty sure I could keep drinking this stuff until I required medical attention.
