The Best Stouts of 2018
January 2, 2019
Incoming hot take: stouts are delicious. We love them to warm us up on a cool wintry day, and we love them as a roasty post-dinner treat. Or a pre-dinner treat. Or during dinner. Or with any meal. The point is we love stouts. Whenever we hit the taproom of a new brewery, our eyes usually go straight to the end of the list where the stouts live. They can be relatively simple, they can be packed with additional flavors, they can be aged in barrels for years– it doesn’t matter how they were made as long as they end up in our glasses. Below is a list of the best stouts we had in 2018. As with our list of the best sour beers of 2018, we’re basing our list on date of consumption, not on date tapped or bottled.
We’re also limiting the list to one beer per brewery, just as we’ve done with our other lists. Selecting just one stout from titans like The Answer, Aslin, Prairie Artisan Ales, and FiftyFifty Brewing may seem like an impossible task. Well, you’re right– it was. We had hundreds of stouts and loved the vast majority. However, we clenched our fists and typed out a list of the sixteen that, for whatever reason, stood out from the pack. (We realize you can’t clench your fist and then type– we were trying to emphasize the difficulty of the task.) Here are those sixteen standout stouts.
Aslin Beer: Juan de Bolas
Avery Brewing: Raspberry Truffale
Fruited stouts are like Nicolas Cage movies. A number of them are really bad, but the ones that work are downright brilliant. We had two of the best we’ve ever had this year from two absolute titans in the stout game today, Aslin Beer and Avery Brewing. Aslin’s Juan de Bolas is more stuffed with blueberry flavor than Violet Beauregarde, and Avery’s 14%er is such a rich chocolate covered raspberry treat that you’d expect to see bottles of it served in honeymoon suites.
Bluejacket: Caribou
The Veil Brewing Co: Double Peanut Butter Hornswoggler
Far too often, peanut butter stouts end up as the kettle sours of the stout world. Sure, the flavors may all be there, but you can tell something was off in the process— the end result feels artificial. The best ones have incredible freshness and are thicker than spoonfuls of Skippy. The Caribou from Bluejacket in DC and the Double Peanut Butter Hornswoggler from Richmond’s The Veil both have Reese’s Cup level balance and Nicki Minaj level thickness.
Boxing Bear: Chocolate Milk Stout
Brink Brewing: Moozie Milk Stout
Institution Ale Co.: Scary Dairy
Remember that scene in Ratatouille when the food critic tastes the meal and is immediately sucked back to his childhood? The best milk stouts can do that. Most places have a milk stout that ranges from decent to good enough, but very few have the perfection of execution that Boxing Bear, Brink Brewing, and Institution Ale have achieved. One minute you’re in a brewery, the next you’re 5, sitting at the kitchen table, reading Calvin and Hobbes, sipping a glass of cool and delicious chocolate milk.
Hubbard’s Cave: El Zacatón
Jackie O’s: Oro Negro
Mexican stouts are all about the peppers. You read the label and see chiles or habaneros or some other tantalizing purveyor of spice. You imagine the tickle of the spice gliding across your tastebuds like an Olympic figure skater. However, far too often, either the spice never appears at all or it stomps on your palate like a step team. Hubbard’s Cave and Jackie O’s, both magnficent Midwestern masters of imperial stouts, unsurprisingly deliver the pepper with the delicate grace of a Kristi Yamaguchi. (That, and the rest of their stouts are also all really damn good.)
The Answer’s hazy IPAs are world-renowned, but on our visit to Richmond, we may have been more impressed with their coffee stout than anything else. While regular readers will know we’re suckers for a good coffee stout, the bourbon barrel-aged honey that the good people of The Answer laced this bad boy with made this a genuine contender for the best coffee stout we’ve ever had.
Barley Forge: The Peanut Butter Patsy
The Patsy is a staple at our household— the Costa Mesa rye stout is a lean and mean coconut machine. So when the Barley Forge bartender pointed us toward a peanut butter version, we were intrigued but mildly skeptical at the flavor combination. Our skepticism proved unfounded: the marriage of the peanuts and the coconuts… well, we went nuts for it.
LA Beer Fest showcased a number of fantastic beers, local and otherwise, but we did not expect for the highlight of the festival to be a coffee stout from Michigan. We knew Bell’s primarily from their classic Two Hearted Ale, but their stout game is ferocious, and on a hot summer day in Los Angeles, their smooth, spiced coffee beer was just what the doctor ordered.
Epic Brewing: Big Bad Baptista
Utah’s restrictive beer laws can make it difficult to find high-quality, high-gravity beer in the state. This makes Epic Brewing’s tiny taproom even more of an oasis. We wondered if these conditions were why our first taste of Big Bad Baptista stood out to us the way it did, but then we had it again at their Denver location. Even in one of the country’s great beer cities, Big Bad Baptista *still* stands out from the pack. The coffee is potent but the cinnamon is perfectly restrained.
FiftyFifty Brewing: Barrel Aged Apple Brandy Eclipse
Outside of Lake Tahoe, in the small town of Truckee, exists one of the best treats in America for any barrel-aged stout lover. We’re, of course, talking about the barrel-aged Eclipse variant FLIGHT that you can buy at FiftyFifty Brewing. Any individual variant is mouth-watering enough, but a flight of multiple variants at once is simply sublime. We could’ve chosen any version of Eclipse for this list, but the hint of sweetness from the Apple Brandy barrels lingers in our memory.
Moksa Brewing: Cold Steeped Vietnamese
Sacramento is home to the Kings, and Moksa can call themselves Kings in the coffee stout world. We’d drink a whole Willie Cauley Stein of their Cold Steeped Vietnamese. You’d have to be crazy like a DeAaron Fox not to enjoy this beer. So call your best Buddy Hield and take a trip to Rocklin to try it. (We tried to work more bad jokes into this, but Bogdan Bogdanovic was proving difficult to turn into a pun.)
Prairie Artisan Ales: Paradise
Two things put a smile on Russell’s face: whenever a new Tom Cruise action movie is announced, and whenever a local brewery has Prairie Artisan Ales imperial stouts available. It would’ve been easy to include their stellar Bomb or any of its variants, but we had an especially memorable encounter with Paradise on a drafty Long Beach day. Coconut and vanilla make your mouth water, then 13% ABV hits you as you sip, warming you from the inside out. The average temperature hits the 30s in Krebs, Oklahoma every winter— they should consider themselves fortunate to have Prairie Artisan Ales on hand.
What were your favorite stouts in 2018? What are you looking forward to trying in 2019? Please let us know in the comments below! Check out our list of our best brewery experiences of 2018, our list of the best sour beers of 2018, and keep an eye out for a couple more Best of 2018 lists coming in the next few days!
