Cellar Monday: Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout

Yikes! Just over two months since my last post. Ever since I stopped doing nightly posts, I've had a hard time getting back into the habit of making blog posts. Without a regular schedule to stick to it all kind of went to hell. No more though, as I've begun instituting Cellar Mondays. After a bump from Christmas and the Southampton Imperial Russian Stout release, my beer cellar is up at about 275 bottles, with way more upward pressure than downward. To counteract that, I've decided that every Monday I will be opening one bottle from my cellar and talking about it here. The rules are that the beer in question must be at least a year old, unless it's being stored in my cellar but I haven't actually tried it before, in which case it's fair game no matter what the age. Without further ado, the brew for the inaugural Cellar Monday is Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout.

I'll skip the back story for now, but suffice to say, Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout (BBCS) is the reason I'm writing this post tonight. It's the beer that kicked me down the proverbial rabbit hole of craft beer. Furthermore, several months into this journey, I read that BBCS, like some kinds of wine, could be aged and enjoyed for years. This idea led me to join Beer Advocate (another pivotal player in my beer obsession), and bottles of the most recent Black Chocolate Stout vintage at the time (Winter 2008-2009) became the first additions to my new beer cellar. The last of those bottles left my cellar a while ago, but I also started a new tradition the following winter of getting a case of BBCS at Christmas time to put away. This bottle came from my Winter 2009-2010 stash, more than half of which remains. I allowed the beer to warm a little from the fridge and poured it into my Founders CBS snifter, and the all-too familiar aroma that hit my nose made me crack a smile. The rich dark chocolate is there, but there's also a dark fruitiness that I can't quite pinpoint. One sip and I nail it down though. The early signs of oxidation are giving the beer a little bit of a cherry edge to it. It's not as much of a chocolate/malt bomb as a fresh bottle, some of that is muted by this new addition, but I'd honestly have to do a side by side to decide which I like better (sounds like a fun experiment for another night). Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout is one of my favorite beers fresh, and it wears a couple years of age well. I look forward to seeing how these bottles fare even further down the road.