Thanks for joining us. This is another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. It's getting colder outside, and when it comes to beer, this is porter and stout season. So, joining me here today to walk our way through ports, stouts, all across the map, I have Greg Versch. Hey, Roger. Pad Brophy. Hey, Roger, what's up, man? And Chris Nellis. Hey, hey, hey. All right, guys, so I've selected several different classic examples of stuff here, all the way back from really traditional to the most cutting edge new popular Imperial stout. So let's just get our bearings here a little bit and walk our way through the history. Most important thing I think we have to get out here at the beginning, there's going to be some confusing terminology here. So keep remembering that all stouts are porters, but not all porters are stouts. And we'll explain what I mean by that. Do they have that on a t-shirt somewhere? They should, yeah. It's kind of like Cognac and Brandy, that kind of similar association. Kind of like rectangles and squares. Bourbon and whiskey, yeah. Porter, you don't necessarily hear about porter as much anymore, but stout is everywhere now. Stout, by far, one of the most popular beer styles on our shelf. Lots of different styles of stout, from milk stouts to imperial stouts to these big adjuncty, what people are calling pastry stouts. But it all gets its roots in a beer style called porter. Porter is an interesting story, not necessarily an agreed upon one. There's an account that was written in 1802 that is widely considered the story that a lot of books and everything pick up, and it was an interpretation of a brewer in London, England, went by the pen name Obadiah Poundage. What, really? Yeah. Obadiah Poundage. He was... It's like a... What's that? Mormon superhero. He's basically calling himself Money. That's what I understand from that. He's complaining about taxation on beer. So, you know, and that's been very connected, especially to the history of Porter's and Stout's is strength and how that was taxed. In this interpretation of his letter, some people have argued that there was some misinterpretation of the vernacular, and anyway, his story was about that there was this beer called Three Threads that was essentially a blending of three different styles of beer, an ale, a beer and two penny. Other people have said that in an effort to not have to mix these three styles of beer together, they started just brewing this one beer that went by the name Entire Butt Porter. Entire Butt Porter. Yeah, but as in Barrel. The important thing to take out of this is that Porter was one of the first mass produced beers. It became the beer style of England in the 1700s, previously to the release of Porter. Breweries typically brewed beer, sold it by the barrel. Publicans would then age the beer to their liking, serve it to customers. You see with Porter the advent of breweries actually aging and preparing beer themselves to the point where it was ready to be sold to the consumer. Became widely popular as far as why it's called Porter. The Porter trade really welcomed it with open arms. It became especially popular with them, and we see a whole slew of breweries opening and brewing their own take on this style. I have for you as the first beer that we're going to try here as a nod to that London history in England. It's a beer from England, Samuel Smith, Tadcaster Porter, Taddy Porter. We're lucky enough to have someone in the room here that's actually been to this brewery. They really have a great history. They stretch all the way back. They're talking about a well that was driven in 1758. Seeing the Samuel Smith Brewery in person, if you ever get a chance, it's a trip back in time and they still deliver all their beer locally. All the cascades go out every day on a horse-drawn carriage, and it totally gums up traffic in their little town, and the locals yell at them and stuff, and there's horse sh** everywhere. But it's really cool and they have these gigantic Shire horses which are big draft horses, and they pull this gigantic, completely unofficial and unnecessary cart of beer all over town. But it's really cool and they make some of the most traditional beers in England. England has a tight house pub policy, something we don't have in the United States where the breweries actually own the bars. So Samuel Smith also owns like 80 something pubs all over England, and their pubs are equally as stodgy and traditionalists. They're very, very well decorated. There's upholstered walls and stuff. Not a single one of them has a television anywhere in it, and they have all these really high-end heavy contemplative English ales. They're a really cool brewery and they are a treasure of a brewery, and it's something that gets unappreciated in today's beer arms race of bitterness and barrel aging and adding dried brownie mixes to stouts and other stuff like that. They, besides the beautiful balance to a lot of their beers, you can pretty much pick up anything from this brewery, and it's a great example of the style. The Taddy Porter, if you want to go ahead and give it a try here. Is this fresh? It tastes like an aged beer. You know, this is fresh. However, it has a definite tang to it. The way that they brew these beers, they're fermented in these stone fermenters that are one of the treasured aspects of that brewery. Yes, they are called Yorkshire Squares, and they are big granite square and rectangular shaped pits essentially that are all granite and they have square sides. So, they're very difficult to brew with there because they're difficult to clean. Because whenever you have 90 degree angles, you're inviting things like wild yeast and wild bacterias to kind of nestle and populate. And it's a very tough, inefficient form of brewing. A lot of wine producers, especially old school wine producers in Europe, will do like concrete rooms. And they'll have somebody climb in there with a mop. Like in Chianti, I've seen places in Chianti with the... But you know, concrete and stone is porous. And I think that's part of, you know, it promotes a healthier yeast environment for them. I like with this that it's softer. It has a chocolatey character to it. Most importantly and unique about this is that it's not overly roasty, which a lot of other porters and stouts, that's one of the signature flavors. I mean, it's roasty. It's roasty. It definitely is, but not overbearing. It's pretty light-bodied. You're saying compared to others? Okay. It's very light. You'll see as we progress here. There isn't a ton of coffee roast flavor. Oh, wait a minute. Guinness is in this lineup and it's not the first one. That means that this is really light-bodied. Yeah. Roger was talking about the provenance of the brewery and how cool it is. When I was there, they were very proud to show us the only computer in their brewery, which is an old copper panel with four manual pump dials on it that you have to turn to let work flow between the mash tons and the boiling, and the boil cutters, which they refer to as the boiling coppers. So the Yorkshire Squares are actually made from slate, and they are an open fermenter, and so they have this very active ale yeast that flocculates a lot, so it gets very frothy and it will spill up over The fruiting. And they're not lined? No, they're not lined. It's just slate. It's got to be tough to clean. Oh, very difficult to clean. So the yeast character of this is another big part of it, so those fruity, almost wine-like characters at times off of this, that's a signature of these beautiful British ale yeast, really produce a lot of that neat flavor. So for the point of contrast, we're going to open up an iconic American porter. This is Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald. We used to have to sing that song in grade school and choir class. Really? That's kind of morose. Gordon Lightfoot. It was super depressing. Especially the part where the cook goes, hey boys, it's been nice to know ya. Yeah, they're all like, well, we're not dead yet. Yeah, well, you're gonna be, you're gonna be. Way more chocolatey here, Roger. Well, holy cow. Like, talk about old world, new world. This immediately has a little more sweetness, a little more pillowy mouthfeel, lot of sweeter chocolate notes to it. And I consider this a dry porter. You know, we're talking about American Porter. I'm like, oh yeah, I mean, Edmund Fitzgerald, one of its, it's traditional, it's dry, it's roasty. And tasting it next to Samuel Smith really puts a whole new light on it. Yeah, there's some really unique chocolate, like you said, and caramel. But I also do get a more pronounced, roasty hazelnut. There's a little raisin, kind of raisiny flavor going on here. And a tiny bit of mint. Like whether you want it or not, it's like gracefully a tart. There's an earthiness to it. It's kind of interesting too. Again, I would argue that the hop character is maybe a touch more pronounced in this. This is using American hops, pretty traditional varieties. There's some cascade in there. So there's some subtle, probably what you're picking up was the mintiness. Like I agree in some herbaceous quality to it. And even some citrusy kind of component as well. As we're trying this American one, let's go back to England. And as the English enjoyed their Porter and started producing it in greater quantities, they started exporting it to Ireland. Ireland fell in love with it. Porter first started being brewed in Ireland in 1776 by Arthur Guinness. And Guinness is of course a name that is synonymous with stout literally the entire world over. I brought a couple different varieties of Guinness today to try and Guinness, as we've said before in other podcasts, I think is one of the most misunderstood beers. The most common form of Guinness enjoyed in the US is Guinness Draft. So Guinness Draft is trying to emulate what it is like to drink a draft pour of Guinness that you would order at a pub. Brought to you by the technology of the widget. Exactly. So you can hear that. Arthur Guinness started to realize that these porters were by far the most popular style. By 1799, he phased out production of anything else. Most porters were available in different strengths. You had ones that were popular in Ireland. And then if they wanted to export a beer, we typically had to brew a stronger version of it. If it was headed especially to warmer climates, places like the Caribbean, Africa, a beer that was lower in alcohol would sour. It would start to totally change its character by the time that it got there. So over the years, we've seen lots of different reiterations of Guinness. The Guinness we're most familiar with is actually a somewhat recent development. This form of Guinness was this Guinness Draft, which uses nitrogen, was created in 1959 for their bicentennial. The most famous thing about the can package is that it has this little widget that Greg mentioned. So there's a little plastic ball in here that's filled with liquid nitrogen. So when I open this can, you're going to hear the immediate pressure change, which then is going to send the gas rushing out of that little ball. It's going to spiral around the can and create this chain reaction of bubbles. That's an amazing technological advancement. And this was patented by them. Other breweries have had to reverse engineer it. It's been somewhat of a struggle. Where did Bodington's get theirs? These guys? I think so, yeah. They probably hired a Guinness engineer. Other breweries in the UK have started to figure it out, but it was just recently in the US that American craft breweries figured out a fixed widget that's glued to the bottom of the can. Breweries are starting to experiment it. Also in glass, right? They just figured out how to do it in glass like a couple years ago. Yeah, there's different ways to nitrogenate beer. So what some breweries were doing was that they were putting the nitrogen into it and you get sort of a similar mouthfeel with the creamier head and the finer textured bubbles. You really need a widget of some sort in the bottle or can. Widgets in bottles haven't typically worked as well and they've been problematic. Guinness had that in their bottles for a while, of the draft version. They ended up taking it out and just doing a nitrogen in the beer like some American brewers do. If you enjoy this style and you're looking to try it, do it at a pub or by the cans. I think that's such a realistic expression in Guinness. Where's Brett during this, right? Yeah. He's a champion of this beer. Then how can you not love it? I mean, it's the original Session beer. You hear that term thrown out nowadays and people want something that they can sit down, that's lower in alcohol and that won't weigh you down. This is where we get with the paradox of Guinness. So many people say that they don't like Guinness because it's too heavy and ironically, Guinness is a light beer in every sense of the word. It's light and creamy and the mouthfeel on your palate. It's so light in gravity that if you've ever ordered a black and tan or a half and half, it's floating on top of a lager because it's such a light beer. It's floating on top of a light beer. Exactly. Yeah. And the biggest bonus when people have asked me over the years, what's a good light beer as in calorie wise, Guinness is light in calories. Guinness has a 125 calories and 12 ounces. It's light in alcohol. As well. Because what is that 3 point? 4.2. 4.2. So, I mean, alcohol is basically pure calories. It's rocket fuel. And you can have a bunch of Guinness and you got a glass full of flavor and you're not getting... So, I was just at the Guinness Brewery in Dublin, about two and a half weeks ago. Oh, really? Yeah, I did the Guinness Experience. I didn't realize that. And it was absolutely fantastic. I think that if anybody can go, they should. And we got to do the Pour Your Own Guinness. And I got actually a certification that I said that I went through the class. Would you say that's your proudest professional certification? Apart from WCET diploma, it's a close second. It's a close second. Yeah. I think you got your priorities wrong here. Exactly. It precedes it on my resume, that's for sure. But no, but like I said, I think it's fantastic that if anyone gets a chance to go, it's absolutely wonderful. By comparison with such a fresh memory of the stuff at the source, how is this? This seems leaner and less viscous than what I remember tasting, my perfectly poor draft that got me the best certification of my lifetime. It just seemed, you know, and it was a little bit warmer, but maybe that's just why it took me a long time to drink. It takes me a long time to drink a whole pint. Thanks folks for listening to a Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Going back to Porter Stout history here, so it's widely popular in the 1800s. There's a big technological advancement. In 1817, Black Patent Malt gets introduced. Brewers start to learn a little more about the brewing of science, and they realize that it probably makes more sense to use mostly pale malts to brew the beer. It's more efficient. And then they can add this Black Patent malt, a much heavily roasted malt, to the beer to give it some color and some bitterness. So, Porter starts to change from something that was sweeter, more chocolatey, to something that has a little more depth of character to it. Also, the popularity of Porter starts to wane, and the Porters that stick around, that survive, are typically of the Stouter variety. So, going back to that clever little saying in the beginning, all starts are Porters, not all Porters are Stouts. So, the stronger Porter is Stout in character. Stout just meaning strong. It was synonymous with strong or bolder. Because they start exporting these, as I said before, you have different Guinness or different Porters for different markets. Guinness starts making a West Indies Porter, which obviously intended for the Caribbean market where it's much hotter, and if they'd ship it down there in the 1800s, it'd be by ship. By the time it got there, it would just be a barrel of sour beer. So, they need this more heavily fortified beer. You do that by not only increasing the alcohol, but the hops as well. So, again, this is sometimes difficult to convey to people that are big fans of American craft beer, because they're talking about English or UK hops that are less aggressive. They don't have those huge high alpha acids, but comparatively to other beers, it's a much hoppier beer. So, you could perceive some of it in the taste of the character of it, but then it also has just a bigger, bolder flavor to it. The other aspect that's pretty interesting of the older style of Porters is that they were usually blended beers. So, part of it would be an old or aged beer, and then the other would be fresh. So, the older age component had a bit of souring aspect to it. So, it might have a little lactic character, which is going to give the beer a little bit of tang to it. You're not going to notice that because proportionally, you might only be using a really small amount of that with a bunch of fresh beer. But this is my theory as far as why a lot of people say Guinness is too heavy for them or they don't like it because it's too strong. Really what they're tasting is that character of the blended beer, of the little bit of tanginess combined with those burnt, roasty characteristics. It's a full-flavored beer, but it's not a heavy beer. So, let's try another variety of Guinness here. This one's one of my favorites. This is Foreign Extra Stout, which is one of the best-selling types of Guinness in the world. This absolutely cranks in Africa. It's one of their favorite beers. And the Caribbean. Yep. I think it's underappreciated around here. I totally agree. I couldn't agree more. This recently got a little more attention. Guinness has started doing these brewery variety packs, which I highly recommend when they come out. Roger, that's what I was going to tell you. That is where I discovered this. The Guinness variety packs are a great price. They're a great value. They walk you through the entire Guinness portfolio. They help you understand where these different reiterations come from and the slight differences. So this is going to be remarkably different from the Guinness draft. Not only are those gift packs available throughout the holiday season, but they always stick around through March. And we get fresh goods in March heading into St. Patty's. And it's always a great, like, totally affordable way to try a bunch of really cool beers you wouldn't usually. So for an extra stout, go ahead and give this a try. This is 7.5% alcohol. It's like two Guinnesses in every Guinness. That's so good. I'm shocked this beer is that strong. I mean, this tastes like a 5% alcohol. You don't taste the alcohol at all? Not at all. This is way roastier on the nose. Way more of that caramel, malty, chocolatey. This is 7.5%? Yeah. It picks up, yeah, like, heavy caramel and, like, even, like, black licorice, like, confectionary flavors. And it's not sweet still. It's got more and more of a molasses thing, too. Molasses, and then also a dark fruit, like, cherry quality to it that I really like. Plum, like, plum. So, Roger, have you ever tried using this foreign extra stout in a half and half or a black and tan? I have not. It would sink like a lead balloon. But I will say that when you make half and halves or black and tans, I like when they're just mixed as opposed to they look really cool when they're layered, but then you usually just mix it together. Yeah, instead of a black and tan, that's just a gray. It's like a dark brown. A bland. It's a bland. But you're right. It tastes better. What are you drinking later? Again, this is something that is great to cook with. So when people say that they want to cook with Guinness, I think they want some of these bolder flavors. So the extra stout or the foreign extra stout really amp up dishes if you're making the classic Guinness stew, Irish stew, putting things in things like meat pies or doing steak in ale pie. Yeah. Can be really nice. Mmm, pie. Ella said steak in ale pie. When we were in Scotland, she ate it like every single place we went. I ate all the pies all the time. So good. Yes. I was on vacation diet. It was fantastic. My clothes were pretty tight after that trip. So this process of taking a stout and amping it up so that it would survive a long voyage, this isn't just to the warmer climates. It ends up being a big thing for English breweries for shipping stouts to the Russian Empire. So now it's absolutely commonplace that you see Russian Imperial stouts all over our shelves. It's one of by far the most popular beer styles. It has its heritage in this really obscure beers that were popular with the Russian aristocracy. Oh, the kids are clamoring for those. It's also pretty amazing that stouts and porters really fell off the map for a long period of time, especially porters. Stouts survived, Guinness has always been there in the background, but porters had all but disappeared until the American micro-brew movement in the late 70s, early 1980s brought it back. Yes, Greg. Can I please introduce this next beer? Yeah, absolutely. Do you guys remember the Pilsner Podcast? Yes. This beer is officially better than seven scrimshaws. I don't know. I really like that scrimshaw. So Anchor Brewing Company releases a porter. It's the first porter to be brewed in years. American micro-breweries start to take notice and realize we should be brewing more porters and stouts. In 1995, North Coast Brewing releases one of the most flavorful beers in the market. Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout. American Brewing said it before, will say it again, we want to turn everything to 11. It's kind of our style. And a big beer like this is the perfect turn it to 11 kind of beer. How much flavor can you pack into one package? And Old Rasputin has always stood the test of time as one of the iconic examples of the style. It's a tremendous value. We sell four packs for under $10. If you want to play around with selling beer and seeing what changes take place over time. If you want to play around with selling beer and learning why you shouldn't sell a beer, this is a great example. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of truth to that. Well, you can see it, you know, because all the chocolate falls away and it tastes like Clorox. This has so, so much bitterness to it, though. Would that, with cellaring, I understand how you guys feel about it and the proclivities therein, but would that take away some of this bitterness, even if I let it sit for six months? Bitterness definitely fades with cellaring. Bitterness and alcohol burn. Keep in mind the Russian Imperial Stout style is a hoppier style of stout. What a lot of people don't understand is that a double IPA is anywhere between normally nowadays 70 and 100 IBUs. That's about the same as a Russian Imperial Stout. In order to have this much alcohol, we have to put a lot of malt barley in here, and that's going to make for a very inherently sweet beer. And so to balance the sweetness, you need bitterness, so you need to put more hops in. I think that it hides it a lot better than a really super hoppy IPA. Exactly, because it has more of the sweet malt. Exactly. But hops also act as a preservative, so to get a beer to ship and stay fresh from England across the Russian Empire, you needed a beer that was both high in alcohol and had enough of the preservative goodness of the hop. Anti-accident, basically. Yeah. One of the first adjuncts, that being something besides a classic building block of beer, so not malt, hops, yeast, or water, was lactose sugar. Lactose sugar is unique because it's a non-fermentable. Traditional beer yeast can't ferment it. It's a way for brewers to tweak the sweetness level of their stout. So some of these bigger stouts with more roasty character, you could balance that out with a little bit of sweetness by adding the milk sugar in. So milk stouts become a thing. They fit right in because there's actually some pretty hilarious marketing strategy with stout, that it's something that's good for you. It's perceived as something that's so rich and has so much caloric quality to it and carbs that it's something that's nutritious. Yeah, those old Guinness ads with like the goofy circus animals. And they said, Guinness is good for you. Exactly. In fact, they have a nice little Guinness slogan here for you. It's great purity. Guinness is made solely from barley, malt, hops, yeast, and it's naturally matured. No artificial color is added. It builds muscles, feeds exhausted nerves, enriches the blood, restorative after influenza and other illnesses, and is good for insomnia. I mean, I'm sleepy and holy cower, my nerves just ready to go. Stout, like I said, lactose becomes a thing that milk stouts are the first riff. And American brewers have really embraced this concept with open arms. They brought back the milk stout from being a pretty obscure English thing to a wildly popular style. And they've started to add even more things to milk stouts. So our next beer here is from Stone. It is an Imperial milk stout called Xocoveza. And this stout is actually inspired by Mexican hot chocolate. So that being the type of hot chocolate that has chili pepper in it as well. Like a Abuelita kind of a thing? It's in an Abuelita grandmother or something? Yeah. Yeah, there's a, it comes in a wafer. You break off sections. You're describing a cookie and I just asked if it was a grandmother. No, man. It's like instead of hot chocolate coming in a powder packet, it's like a big disk of chocolate. And you melt it open and melt it in the chocolate like in a pot and pour it. I obviously drink hot chocolate like a peasant. Yeah, you gotta get in on this, trust me. That would be more modern Mexican hot chocolate, whereas we're talking about the Aztecs, really, really old, fiery, spicy, not very sweet hot chocolate. Kind of also evokes mole, if you ever had mole sauce, because typically these stouts, which are sometimes referred to as Adamole stout, they're also incorporating other spices. So cinnamon, nutmeg, all those things are in here. There's some chili peppers, like I said, also coffee. There's vanilla beans, kind of the kitchen sink, which is what American brewing at times is all about. Give this a taste. It's a pretty interesting stout. It was birthed out of a homebrew competition that Stone holds every year. This was the winner in 2014. There's so much going on though. It's like hard to even know where to start between all these different flavors popping around. Jalapenos. Mint, spice, chocolate all day. I like that the pepper spiciness is restrained. So don't be afraid that this says it uses peppers. It uses Pistaya, which is a milder pepper. It's not like there's habanero in here or anything. It peaks out on the finish. A little lingering heat that then disappears because my spicy palate is dead. I love the vanilla. This makes a great, if you want to really go, Pastry Boy 2018. This makes great beer floats. If you double down and put some ice cream in this, it's pretty outrageously good. I've been looking for a way to gain like 60 pounds. So is this beer readily available? This seems like one of those beers where I have to stand in line or something. It's another beautiful thing about this is that it's readily available. Stone listened to their customers, which is very admirable of them. A lot of breweries should learn from this. People loved this beer. When it first came out, it just came in bombers. It was a very limited release. It became one of the most requested beers that they've ever made. They amped up production massively. So now it's available in a six pack at a super affordable price for a big adjuncty stout over 8% alcohol. You're getting a six pack of them for under 20 bucks. It's tremendous. Yeah. No line waiting. You can just walk in, grab it off the shelf. So definitely something you need to check out. Is there cinnamon in there? Yeah. It's got to be, right? It's not for me. Really? I will never put this in my mouth again. Seriously? Wow. This is like, lotted. This is like great beer. I think it's an acquired taste. You got to be. But I just don't like the pepper. So this also, like we said before, great aging potential with imperial stouts. This is actually last year's vintage of Xocoveza. So this is after it's had a little time to mellow. So that pepper is going to be hotter, fresher. Would a new one be more bitter then? Not so much bitterness, a little bit spicier. Both the sweet spice component and the pepper spice. And more sweetness. It'll generally have more attitude. So last but not least, we have a bourbon barrel-aged beer. And not only just bourbon barrel-aged, but adjuncts to boot. So this is by far the most requested and sought-out style right now among the craft beer community. Thankfully, because it's so popular and because there's so many breweries now, this type of style used to be the kind of thing you'd only see once or twice a year. Leads to the waiting in lines. There are some excellent examples of beer that are available sporadically throughout the entire year. So you don't have to just wait till, you know, the one glorious day anymore. There's some great beer out there. And Central Waters produces some of my favorite barrel-age beer. And I brought today their Cassian Sunset. Cassian, of course, referencing Cassia Bark, which is essentially cinnamon. If you really want to nerd out, it's not true cinnamon, but it's the 99% of the cinnamon you use as Cassia Bark. In addition to that, you have coffee and vanilla beans. This beer, when it first came out, or first saw distribution in Chicago, was extremely limited. We absolutely fell in love with it. The first feedback we gave the brewery was, we need more of this next year. We bought a ludicrous amount of it, more than we thought they would allow us. I think they called our bluff. So, we have this on the shelves right now, which is crazy. I'm buying some on the way out. It is some of the most sought after barrel aged beer out there, and is readily available at Binny's. So, you have to pick up this beer while we still have it. It's made again with vanilla bean, cinnamon. They hand select the coffee. It's from a place up in Stevens Point, I believe, Wisconsin. It's called MEJ's Roasters. Holy cow. I've never had this beer before. I get to try it one time, and it's because of this man. This beer is, this is diabetes. Oh my God. This is Hershey's Chocolate, with like a little bit of cinnamon and a little bit of coffee. But that is, you want to make a beer float, you don't need to. Yeah, this is a stout that a big ball of ice cream has melted into. Like, this is unbelievable. Holy cow. I can't believe I slept on this beer before. Ten percent alcohol. Mistakes were made, they will be corrected. This podcast is over. Let's just go buy this beer and drink some. Ten percent alcohol? This is a dangerous beer. I will take the four pack challenge. What kind of stout do you consider this barrel age? But does this kind of taste like a pastry stout, would this fall in that same category? Yeah. Okay. Pastry boy. So yeah, it's definitely... It's like coconutty and all that. It's a Russian Imperial stout, but the additions of the vanilla is adding some sweetness. Obviously, how well they choose to attenuate it, so how much they ferment it out is gonna affect how sweet it is in the end. And this has sweetness because of what we've drank previously. Trust me, they get a lot sweeter. I also love that the coffee is integrated, and it's not like, boom, here's coffee, boom, like... This is not so pronounced. This is the current release, or this came out of the sellers of Roger Adamson? This is the current release. Wow. This really is well-integrated. I'm surprised the coffee is not more on the front. All right. So, with that Cassian sunset, that brings our small discussion of porters and stouts to a close. It's the time of year for them. Go out and seek them out. Everything we talked about today is readily available. Yeah, man. You brought a good line up of beers. A Roger line up of beers, but a good line up of beers. Can I have the extras? That brings us to the Q&A portion of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Reach out to us with your questions at comments at binnys.com via email, or hit us up on social, at Binny's Bev on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tinder, YouTube, Grinder. And we will give you a $20 Binny's Gift Card. Our question this time comes via Instagram. Please send Scotch. That's the guy's handle, or girl. That's the person's handle. I love it. We can all get behind them. So I guess, speaking of Spirit Barrel Aging, the question here is, what is meant by, quote, grain whiskey, unquote? I always thought Scotch was 100% barley, no? Single malt Scotch and blended malt Scotch are 100% malted barley. Grain whiskey is a style of whiskey made in Scotland, made from malt barley and other cereal grains, according to the letter of the law. Usually nowadays, that's wheat. In the past, it's been corn, sometimes it's been rye, but wheat is cheapest and easiest to ferment right now for them. It is made from primarily wheat with a bit of malted barley in it, and that's what gets blended into malt Scotch whiskey, which creates the category blended Scotch whiskey, things like Johnny Walker and Dewar's and famous Grouse, things like that. What kind of percentages are we talking here? You're talking about 30%, 20% to 30% malt on the mid-range size average, and then the rest, the other grain. That's going to vary by distiller. You have to use some malted barley because you need the enzyme amylase, which helps catalyze fermentation, and they can't add liquid enzymes to fermentation in Scotland like we can in America. So you have to have some malted barley. Most blended whiskeys are around 20% malt in the rest grain, 20% to 40% malt the rest grain. Some really high-end blended scotches might be 50%, 60% malt in the rest grain. So, at Please Send Scotch on Instagram. I hope that answers your question. You got a $20 Binny's Gift Card. Good for whatever you like at the Binny's of your choice. Hopefully, Scotch. Hopefully. Yeah, why not? Chocoveza and a half. Chocoveza was excellent. Or the Central Waters. What's it called? Cassian Sunset. Cassian Sunset 4-pack. Everybody else can hit us up with your questions. Comments at binnys.com or at Binny's Bev on the social medium of your choice. So, we'll see you next time on Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Roger. I'm Kristin. I'm Greg. I'm Pat. Keep tasting. Wait, let me do a Pat style question. Yeah? Wow, Roger, where could we possibly go from here? I like what he's doing. All of a sudden, that's a Pat style question. Yeah, you've been asking him softball questions all day long. Do I have to stand in line? This was going to cost me $36. Someone has to respond to the beer he's pouring.