Stone Imperial Russian Stout 2006

2006 release, cellared and sampled 2007:

Oh golly gee, thank goodness Stone prevailed against those gosh-darn Federal Agents. Fully annotated with the full-on "Stone Imperial Russian Stout" moniker, and with a new label change, too. Soooo glad that was taken care of....

Why the sarcasm? Only in that I think if half the amount of effort that went into getting this beer "properly" named and labeled went into it's recipe creation and brewing, it'd be so much better than it is.

Maybe this is still too young. Or my sense are a little warped from the 2005 version of this beer. But really? This has actually degraded some over the past 17 months or so.

Has a very "burnt chocolate" vibe to it, that is really hard to get around or to ignore. Some "almost empty coffee pot dregs" aspects to this too -- and no, coffee freak that I am, that is NOT a positive!

This calmed down a bit as it warmed up some, thankfully. But not nearly enough to save this beer from my disdain, I'm sorry to say. Way too dry, acidic, and bad-coffee/old-cocoa'ish to win me over.

Drink `em NOW if you got `em.

//TB