Reserve Series (Firestone Walker)

Well I sat down to type an entry about a limited beer of a different style I was fortunate to fall into and saw that I had this draft chilling in the Que. Firestone walker celebrated their 18th anniversary this year as well as fellow California breweries stone and Coronado. It must have been a booming era in California beer, and these folks have proven that they have the staying power to get it done.

I got trapped into collecting these beers for a special occasion and settled on breaking them out for my 1000 check in on untapped. Two dear beer friends of mine treat me to the spoils of their aggressive trading hobby, so south I went to share these. 

We had six participants at this particular bottle share and started with velvet merkin, a barrel aged oatmeal stout. This beer has a light flavor profile and is only 8%, most of the others we drank this night are well over 10%. I had to trade to get this beer, a 2013, and had been kind of let down when I got to try the 2014 on draft months ago. It was better out of the bottle.

We had sets of 2013 and 2014, sucaba, parabola, and double DBA. I wanted to end with Parabola, my favorite. I believe the order was Merkin, Double DBA, 17th Anniversary, Sucaba, Stickee Monkey, and last the huge BA stout. Luckily these were pretty cold so we tried to take our time and sip through all the beers to experience each as they warmed up. Anniversary and Sucaba really benefited from this tactic. The sticky monkey was a huge let down for me. It was too cloyingly sweet, and was damn near honey like. 

We blind taste tested all of the verticals, and Parabola was the only one that actually aged the way we expected. Most beers just lost the sharpness in flavor with age, parabola mellowed and gained a deeper complexity with only one year of cellar aging. I hate to do it but this year I have to thin out my hardywood collection. I am afraid that some of their early barrel series beers may have gone to far. I think my attitude about cellaring beers has changed in 2014. I will no longer age any coffee or flavored beers. Most signs say that aging coffee stouts deadens the coffee flavor. I love the coffee flavor!