Those there are but three of the many refrigerators devoted to fine beer at the superlative Red Carpet Liquors. I can often be found pacing back and forth before the hundreds of bottles, muttering and plotting. Yesterday, myself and Mrs. Beer went to a stout tasting event at Red Carpet, and it was the cat’s pajamas, I tell you. The bees knees. On the menu were 10 different stouts, ranging from Guinness to Lagunitas’ Cappuccino Stout to Asahi’s take on the darkest of roasted brau and so on. Also presented were many…… off-list beers, some so off the list that I’ll never be able to find them again, some just not available around these parts.

We even brought a bottle of our homebrew stout and let me tell you, watching 15 or so strangers (and beerlovers at that) try your beer, at a stout tasting event no less, is stressful. It went pretty well, but as I addressed the crowd I explained that the beer still needed a few weeks to reach ideal, bottle-conditioned excellence. A fella whose soon opening a brewery made some nice comments. So hey, good times.

More than anything it cemented Mrs. Beer’s feelings of stout supremacy, and my deep love for stout among the whole pantheon of beer. Some of them stouts were crazy, man—syrupy, sweet, oily and wild. Some, well, mild and rather flavorless (used as examples, not hailed, of course). And one—I can’t recall the brewery for sure and am not one to kiss and tell wrong—had a stout with a higher IBU count than most IPAs. Most double IPAs, in fact. I think it was like… 111 IBUs. It was cuh-razy bitter. A bit too much, but hey. They went there.

So stout on, friends and perfect strangers. And, do have some porter. And ale. Maybe a nice copper ale?