09.09.09 Stone Vertical Epic

Overall: 8 out of 10
The short of it: Great and complex dark stout beer. Spicy, Chocolate, and vanilla.

This year's Stone special release in the vertical epic series takes a trip to the darker side. It's a complex stout with flavors described on the bottle that come true.

Drink this one warmer or you will rob yourself of several of the intricacies of this beer. Pour aggressively and you are rewarded with a nice thick head from fine bubbles. A more conservative poor lets you get to the meat of the matter with less foam invading your mustache. Swirl it around and it willingly sticks to the glass leaving a smooth film.

I recommend drinking some to get the flavor or until you're content, and then eating something that is slightly spicy. The spice desensitizes you to the spiciness of this beer, and you get a better sense of the vanilla bean flavor.

Smell (That's "nose" to you wine snobs): it has that Belgian smell to it. That and the pointed chocolate malt smell of a stout. Indeed, the bottle says they used a Belgian yeast and chocolate malt. There's a little smoke and rye smell to it, too.

Taste: roasted malt and bar-b-q, good smoked bar-b-q, not that sweet weird stuff you get some places. After that, you get a good chocolate malt and honey/vanilla flavor (try the spicy). There's a bit of a clean rye taste to it, or maybe it's he alcohol, at 8.6%, peaking through. Either way, it's probably good for the aging part of this campaign. That flavor will mellow a bit, but keep it from turning to syrup.

Mouthfeel: This one sticks to your tongue a bit, a little tannic, but offset by smooth feel. Fine carbonation from the bottle conditioning (although I didn't see any yeast at the bottom of this bottle. Maybe I stirred it up too much. Maybe the Belgian yeast hasn't seen fit to precipitate yet).

Overall, a great to excellent stout with a lot of complexities. The combination of Belgian yeast with a slightly hoppy stout makes a good combo. I think with age, it will develop more of the vanilla, and will smooth out a bit. It's the smoothing that I'm a little worried about. Will it make it more complex like a tawny port combined with Kahlua, or will it smooth out to a somewhat disappointingly flat stout. I hope it's the former, because I'm saving a couple for 12.12.12 and looking forward to it.

It's good and complex now. That bodes well for the future. Buy enough. Drink some, save some.