Bill's Brew Thoughts 2/28/12

Another week, another vintage beer cracked. I took the beginning of last week's post to recap a bottle share I had been to the previous night, and I think I'm going to keep that format and split each week's post into a recap of any adventures I've had in the previous week and then the Cellar Monday half of the post. So without further ado...

This Week in Beer

There was nothing quite as exciting as a bottle share in my beer world this week. The highlight of my week (or lowlight, given how much a PITA the work is) was bottling a double IPA I brewed last month. This beer's hovering around the 8%ABV mark and features aggressive late hopping with Nelson Sauvin and Galaxy hops. These are two of my favorite hop varietals, and the white wine/grapefruit and tropical fruit notes from them respectively should play well together. I ended up with about 34 bottles, so I hope it turns out well because that's a lot of IIPA drinking in my future. I also received a trade in the mail on Tuesday with a bottle of Cantillon Fou Foune (a limited release yearly brew they do with apricots), as well as my first can of Heady Topper thrown in as an extra (opened it almost immediately, killer beer). Hopefully next week I'll be recounting the brewday for my next beer, a hoppy tripel. 

Cellar Monday

For week 3 of Cellar Monday, I pulled a bottle from another brewery that's well represented in my stash, Stone Brewing Co and their 090909 Vertical Epic Series. 

From the description on the bottle, they were going for a beer that was "reminiscent of artisanal chocolates accentuated with orange", and  nearly two and a half years after the release, I'd say the beer is drinking pretty close to that. 09 Vertical Epic's got a killer nose, with a powerful chocolate aroma that's offset by just a hint of citrus. The flavor profile has all that, but there's also a little spicy clove thrown off by the Belgian yeast that, for me, just doesn't mesh well with the rest of the beer. It only makes up a small portion of the flavor profile though, as big orange-tinted chocolate dominates the beer. The sense of sweetness and flavor from the vanilla beans really helps those chocolaty flavors pop. The beer's held up surprisingly well to aging, as I don't think I would have guessed it had a couple years on it if I was drinking it blind. No real signs of oxidation, though I'm sure some of the yeasty phenol and citrus flavors were a bit more prominent back in 2009. I've gotten to try Stone Vertical Epic beers going all the way back to 2006, and the 2009 edition is probably my second favorite behind only the 2007 version. I'm glad I have a couple more bottles of this in the cellar.