2010 was when getting a BCBS was really hard! Bravo on aging that one over a decade.
Sorry I have skills
I hear girls want boyfriends who have great skills.
Omg @spidercrab. I still have a 2010 vanilla in my fridge as well. I’ll crack it this month and post a TR.
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well, sounds like getting ripped is the play here.
I have some in my fridge and I thought the same thing. Taste really good cold. You can tell it’s 0 abv as it warms though. I’m a fan.
I agree this seems like a big inconsistency. So here’s a bunch of words that no one asked for: my recollection of that period in time, with absolutely no fact checking.
In 2010, Goose Island’s Bourbon County Stout was a well-known barrel-aged stout, and one of the only ones of its kind. It was readily available in liquor stores. In spring of 2010, they released their first variant - BCS Coffee.
I was introduced to the coffee variant very indirectly. I was living in Chicago and headed over to Dark Lord Day at Three Floyds in Spring 2010. (Dark Lord Day, as people probably know, is the big festival that Three Floyds hosts and is the only sale date for Dark Lord Imperial Stout, which is actually not very good, but I am an enormous sucker for hype and subject to extreme FOMO, so I was excited to have gotten tickets and was looking forward to buying bottles.)
Dark Lord Day was famously very poorly run, and I was waiting in line and waiting in line forever, to the point where I had to leave because I was teaching class that afternoon (Saturday MBA class). So I was super bummed out that I had wasted all my time with no payoff. [Fun fact, as I was leaving I saw someone wearing a sweatshirt from the university I was teaching at, and I offered them my tickets if they promised to bring me a bottle at work. They actually did!]
Anyway, to alleviate some of my irritation, I stopped at a big beer store on the way back home (shoutout to Binny’s) and got a bunch of stouts to take the place of the Dark Lord bottles that I had expected to buy. Among them were some bottles of Coffee BCS, which had just been released and which I bought on a bit of a lark. When I opened one, I thought it was the very best beer I had ever had. After trying it, I went and bought several more bottles of the coffee variant. It was selling quickly at liquor stores (much more quickly than the base stout), but not immediate sellouts - I was still able to find some a week or so after it had been released.
As time passed, people realized that Coffee BCS was incredible. And Goose Island announced that they’d be releasing new variants in the fall of 2010, among them a Vanilla variant. The hype was absolutely incredible - everyone wanted the Vanilla, including me. The problem was that I moved to lolOhio in the summer of 2010, and Ohio had an ABV cap that prohibited Bourbon County Stout from being sold here. So I asked a bunch of my friends and co-workers in Chicago if they could try to find bottles for me. I think 3 or 4 of them were ultimately able to.
But the real score was from my mother-in-law. She is the kind of person who loves pleasing people, and who believes that if you just want something hard enough then you can make it happen. Knowing that I really wanted this beer, she called all around the country trying to find places that would ship her a bottle of this stout. For Christmas that year, she ended up giving me a box of 6 bottles, and she was enormously proud of herself for doing so.
To get a sense of its rarity, it was selling in the $250-$300 range on the secondary market recently:
Which isn’t the most expensive beer ever, but does illustrate that the hype was/is there.
Was it worth $250? Of course not. I couldn’t really get a sense of vanilla, and I’m not sure I could have distinguished it from a base Bourbon County Stout of similar vintage. If I were rational, I would have sold it. (That’s what I did with a 2010 bottle of Bourbon County Rare that I had - I exchanged it for a new Garmin watch a few years ago.) But it was really good and I’m glad I drank it, other than feeling a bit like crap today because my tolerance for alcohol has plummeted.
The end.
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What do y’all think of this beer name? bolded below
Instagram doesn’t seem to embed well with a link or anything…
I was hunted by my own mind. These were the unrelenting manifestations I was fit to conquer.
Many of My Thoughts Are Pragmatic And the Rest Is Mangled Homogenizations of Meaninglessness. An Imperial Stout with Toasted Almond, Cocoa Nib, Raspberry, and Vanilla. A cautious mixture of 4 different stout bases, both new and old. We then aged the blended stout upon gobs of house-toasted almonds, @frenchbroadchocolate cocoa nibs, dried raspberries, chopped and scraped fresh Madagascar vanilla bean, and a touch of natural almond extract to bring the essence of truly confectionary goodness to the palate.
A full on array of Brooklyn bakery at dawn, almond biscotti dipped in chocolate, raspberry ganache and of course the three layered obsession that haunts our CEO with every awakening. 15%.
Bottles will become available on Wednesday the 16th at 12 PM in AVL, CLT, and Online, as well as 2 PM in DTR. Because what you are handed by others, might not be what you find along the way.
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Not pretentious enough, IMO.
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What should I drink tonight?
- Martini
- Manhattan
- Negroni
- Margarita
- Last Word
0 voters
Other ideas and variations are welcome. Still have to go to the liquor store.
What’s a Last Word?
Drink more bourbon.
Gin, green chartreuse, luxardo, and lime juice - in equal parts.
So so good.
Yes doctor
Voted for two options, but not intended to be an endorsement of having both tonight.
Go with margarita if you want a night of excitement. Manhattan if you want one of relaxation.
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Meaning what? I got ~10 in my bar and kinda am concerned that they’ll go bad if I don’t drink them soon?
Exactly