Coming in 2007: South Street Imperial Stout

Hooray! South Street might have an interesting brew in the pipeline! Every Tuesday all the grad students from the department head down to South Street Brewing Co. for a little early week stress relief. As you can imagine I'm a big supporter of this tradition, but I've always been a little disappointed in the mediocrity of their brews. The one exception is the Oktoberfest, which I'm pretty sure I already praised in a previous post, but the pale and the porter, which I typically drink, are solid but noticeably mediocre. The dunkelweizen they introduced last week was decent for an American weizen but thoroughly unremarkable, and their Kölsch is miserable (and I don't just say that because kölsch is perhaps the worst style ever. Theirs is particularly bad...). But this post isn't meant to simply hate on South Street, rather it is to express my excitement over what sounds like the approaching arrival of a beer that promises to be at least interesting!

This Imperial Stout is only brewed every other year, and spends some time aging in the bourbon barrels that have become so popular over the past few years. Mid-Atlantic Brew News didn't have a whole lot to say about what flavors to expect, but they did include this quote from head brewer, Taylor Smack: "It actually moves kinda slow because, you know, it scares the hell out of some people. And we're glad because we don't want them to drink it anyway." So hopefully we'll get some sparks of inspiration coming from what has been a solid but uninteresting selection of brews from South St.