Stopped in at BlackStone to see Red and his new line of brews and from center to the right: XV, Hoppy Top™, and an Imperial Chocolate barrel-aged stout. Now from what I can remember XV is the anniversary ale brewed in December of 2012 and constitutes a nice lightly white-frothed Belgian strong ale that initially was a different recipe but now has a tweaked brew sheet and hovers around 10.2%abv. This brew was a cool great Belgian candi with warming alcohol. Hoppy Top™ is a very nice IPA of 69IBUs (purely coincidence, I'm sure;) with a nice Big C flash across the gullet, I think it was Centennial I picked up but Red told me there was some raging Simcoe and another hop, sorry probably could have recalled it before now. But the beast of the night was the Imperial Chocolate barrel-aged stout. Barrel temp with an absolutely phenomenal 10.4%abv chocolate gingerbread nose and aftertaste. Can wait to try this one on 42lbs of pureed cherries per 53gallon barrel! Colors can be seen above. From there on to Bosco's for mug#155 and #153, we comprise the Red sandwich of mugs, and taste Ice Age Wheat and Ice Age Pale Ale respectively. Good beers but the bottom line is, is that they took your basic building blocks of each and smothered them in Glacier hops for minty marketing. They must be abundantly cheap right now. We also sampled Jacklope's Rompo Red Rye Ale (5.6%) but the takeaway there was Bearwalker Maple Brown (5.1%). Bearwalker's use of 100% Vermont Maple syrup gave it a distinct nose and taste of exactly that with the noticeable slight astringency on the tongue sides from it's use. Told Junk we needed some pancakes and bacon to pour it over! Then just to start diluting our urine down below 10% we had Yazoo's latest Hop Project, 72 I think and hefe.
