UPDATED: JAN 8, 2022 Svart. Lavt tett lysebrunt skum. Lett sjokoladearoma. Silkemyk munnfølelse. Smaken røstet malt, lakris & nøtter. Avslutning: Kakao, kaffe & litt bitterhet. Av de bedre.

UPDATED: JAN 5, 2022 Sort, 5 mm beige skum som svinder. Aroma er mørk malt, lidt kaffe kakao, fin. Smagen er fyldig, mørk, kaffe, god rund, fylde.

UPDATED: JAN 5, 2022 0.355l bottle, 2021. Thick full black colour with long lasting but quickly shrinking brown head. Aroma: Blackberry, roasted coffee beans, cocoa, with notes of lactose and earthy tones. Elegant but not harsh. This is the trick because the...Taste: Oh my, the taste explodes in my mouth. Very elegantly sweet malty start, forest fruits, gently sourish, grainy tones with an espresso-like bitter mouthfeel. Amazingly balanced and the high alcohol isn't noticeable at all. Full body with medium carbonation. Long lasting pleasent bitter and earthy finish. It is just a perfect imperial stout without any surprises but this is the way.

UPDATED: DEC 21, 2021 From a 16 oz can into a stem glass. Ooh mommy ... if I'm reading this right this can is from 4/14/21. Glad these impy stouts age better than my beloved IPAs!! Also I'm semi-amazed I've not rated this before. In a nutshell this is a decent imperial stout ... a touch of chocolate & dark roasted malts is fine, but, as Joris picked out ... some solvent, alcohol and fennel doesn't make for a fine stout. Nevertheless, a fresher can may have smoothed out some of the difficult notes ... or not!

UPDATED: DEC 19, 2021 I 2020 Ed /I Cream-tan head over viscous black beer. Pastry, with fennel & cardamom, vanilla, felt, wood. And quite a bit of chocolate. Solvent, (ply)wood, dry wood, cardamom. Then chocolate (black), and light touches of tobacco; felt and musk. Full bodied, viscous, thick, alcoholheat. Sierra Nevada - seems always good, without ever being the best.

UPDATED: DEC 1, 2021 So interesting story, no, scratch that, boring story. I've spent years looking for this and when I finally managed to find it at Publix, I almost didn't buy it. For one I was kinda low on cash and we were buying up food for Thanksgiving, but also I've lost interest in Imperial stouts over the years. Heck I've lost interest in most high grav beers, I just want to have some easy drinking stuff these days, no need for big and chewy. But my wife actually over rode me and made me buy it. So that was nice. Turns out I still liked it quite a bit, and its entirely because of how SN always manages to stick to the rules and follow a good play book in their recipe design. This is entirely right in the wheelhouse of the classic impy. Its big and heavy and dark, but also incredibly balanced with a nice mouthfeel that makes it surprisingly drinkable. Sure its got a lot of chooclate, coffee, roast. It has a full but soft almost creamy, maybe oily body, not especially acrid like some can be. I drank 5 of the 6 over the span of 5 days, and never once felt 'blah this is too much beer in one glass'. Though on the last day I tried to drink 2 at once and didn't finish the 2nd bottle. That's one strike and recalls my fatigue with the high grav beers. When I wanna drink, I want to *Drink*. So in a way, its almost the perfect imperial stout, and if I were rating to style I would approach a 5.0 here, but on the hedonic scale, I have to max it somewhere in the upper 3.0s. I sure wish the RB top 50 would begin to reflect the beauty of drinkability but that's just me thinking I know more than everyone else.

UPDATED: NOV 29, 2021 LCI. Uit de fles geschonken. Prima imp stout met een ietwat rokerige smaak, samen met chocola en liquorice, beetje koffie. mooie bittere afdronk.

UPDATED: NOV 7, 2021 Used motor oil opaque pour. Sweet java/cocoa aroma with brown sugar, molasses and blueberry pastry. Mellow coffee oak flavor with bitter chocolate finish. Texture is oily, carbonation is low. Great

UPDATED: NOV 6, 2021 Bottle from Cascade Club This is a fantastic example of a traditional, i.e. adjunct free, imperial Stout. There’s a great depth of malty goodness here. Dark, dark chocolate cake, hints of rum raisin, cinder toffee. The body is full and each sip leaves a delicious sticky coating. Impressive.

UPDATED: OCT 14, 2021 Imperial stout by this famed and highly influential craft beer pioneer; launched in 2012, but from a brewery with roots in the eighties I expect old school style throughout. Thick and dense but quickly thinning and eventually dissolving, membrane-lacing, mocha-beige head on a jet black beer – so far so good. Aroma of melting ‘fondant’ chocolate, espresso, burnt blackcurrants, dried blueberries, sweet pipe tobacco, toasted walnut, dry leather, brown bread crust, peppercorns, dried grapefruit peel, whisky, blood-like iron faraway in the background. Dried-fruity onset, fig, old raisins, restrainedly sweetish with a very light black olive-like umami touch somewhere, full and deep from the start with that typical roasty sourishness running underneath, medium carbonation, full oily body. Caramelly malt core under additional layers of bitter black chocolate, toasted walnuts and eventually black coffee, with leathery and blood-like aspects on the sides; generally more bitter than sweet, an overall impression reinforced by old school dry citrus pith- and peppercorn-like hop bitterness joining the coffeeish roasted bitterness in the finish. Warming, whisky-like alcohol in the end too, but largely absorbed by those masses of malt, with a roasted bitterness lingering on for a long time. It seems I got what I was hoping for, and I’ll take this kind of old-fashioned, almost ‘English’ style imperial stouts – with a classic American twist of course – over all those pastry stouts anytime. After this one, I felt satisfied and comforted that this kind of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first century brewing style still exists.