Imperial Stout Appreciation Thread (2022)

No Ends, Only Beginnings. BBA stout from Firestone Walker in collaboration with Highland Park.

A let down from what FW can do, and a big let down after that beautiful beast that is Parabaloid. Lots of raisin/fig/prune things going on. Hot and boozy when it was closer to fridge temp, better flavor when it warmed but it also gained a sour note. And the feel was way to thick/sticky. Enjoyable but far from great.

Is Parabaloid still available at FW locations? I'll be down that way this next week and would absolutely pick up more of that. I've got one more of these No Ends in the fridge. I'm probably gonna throw it in the cellar for a year or two and see what happens to it. I don't need another anytime soon. I need more Parabaloid

 

1.75. It would have been lower, but I was able to drink about 10-12oz of it before giving up. Mostly due to the price point.

Ratings are a joke. Nothing is rated on the actual "out of five" scale. Basically, any beer that gets a 4 or lower is considered trash. I see people giving a 4 rating for a beer on Untappd and then comment "really didn't like this one". Bro, you gave it an 80% rating! That's well above average, and pretty good.

There's a bell curve for everything. It's called "math". You can't have every beer be rated above 80% because it's impossible. A lot of people seem to be afraid to give honest ratings for whatever psychological reason or another.

There I go, ranting about stuff that doesn't matter!

 

Don't get me started.

The biggest issue is that you can't figure out sometimes if people are rating to style or rating to enjoyment.

Supposedly the score on BA that says "Overall" is supposed to take enjoyment into consideration, but that makes no sense since the reviews are supposed to be objective. That means if you objectively say that the taste is spot on, but you don't think it was enjoyable that you should give it a lower overall rating. That wasn't my understanding of what Overall meant at all. Rather, I thought overall was supposed to be, "Without parsing out each item, how well do you feel this beer scores overall, on the whole".

I still think there should be a separate score for "How much did you enjoy this beer". Make it clear that that what is currently set up as the way to rate the beer is for "Objective statistics" - then make a simple 0 - 5.0 scale that is strictly "How much did you enjoy this beer" or "Would you drink this again" and so on. Two separate stats. If I could make my dream rating come true, I'd even add in one additional checkbox to filter reviews by; it would say, "Is this beer style something you typically enjoy or seek out?"

 

Yeah it's not something I would pick up again. It wasn't bad spread out over like 3 hours, and I kind of like the fig/raisin flavors that this thing was full of. But when you could be making masterpieces like Parabaloid, well why do anything else.

And yeah, considering that it's sporting those dark fruit flavors that typically develop over time I'm also not optimistic that it'll improve any. But I'm not drinking another one of those anytime soon and I don't have infinity space for beer in the fridge, so it's gotta go somewhere.

Besides parabaloid, are there any other stouts you'd recommend I look out for while I'm in LA?

 

I picked up a couple of those. I'm looking forward to them for sure.

I don't know about untapped, but on BA the 1-5 scale isn't intended to be a smooth curve with the worst beer a 1 and the best a 5 and everything else distributed normally along a curve that peaks at 3. Due to market realities, the vast majority of beers should be between 3 and 4 (okay-very good), and a careful consumer could easily have most of there beers be more in the 4-5 range.

 

You really just connected some dots for me that I never considered. I’ve spent a long time thinking most BA’ers were overly generous in their reviews. This is a whole new perspective to consider. Cheers.

 

As long as you learn to apply the style bias handicap (there's not a single "world class" bock or English dark mild but every single top 50 neipa is "world class"? Really?) the BA ratings are pretty helpful and accurate in my experience.

 

Yummy

 

Excellent as always!

 

will @Resistance88 and the rest of you degenerates allow it?!? was gifted a 3pk vertical (2017-2019) from my buddy for my birthday. listed as an oatmeal stout (although the 2019 bottle says Milk Stout… anyone know the story on this?). however, at 8.5% i’d say this is imperial. not bad. have had it before although i can’t recall which years. i like it but this one never grabbed me like parabola (or stickee monkee or the anniversary blends) did. cheers!

 

This is the imperial Baltic Porter thread bud so we’re gonna have to axe this one, sorry.

 

i think we’ve all had enough posts removed in the last few days

 

My last bottle of last year's batch of Victory Storm King

 

Well, I mean. When you get “off topic”, who knows what could happen. I mean, we might derail this thread so hard we spill into the rest of the forum and change this from beer advocate to Coffee Klatsch.

The new censorship is pretty bizarre, and I don’t get it. Seems like keeping up with this would be a full time job in the WBAYDN and NBW threads. Or maybe those are exempt.

 

yeah, they might get a little more leeway. idk. used to be that folks would get grumpy if you even mentioned another brewery in a specific brewery’s forum, but that seems to be allowed more now. but i’ve never had that happen as far as the notification that a post of mine was taken down for detailing a thread!

for the sake of it not happening again, IMPERIAL STOUTS RULE!!!!

 

This one has saved itself by not being too sweet. No head, not much carb, and pretty thick. It’s way better than I thought it would be when I poured it out.