December 21st - Boulevard Smokestack Series Bourbon Barrel Quad

December 21st saw a night of beer for dinner. By that I don't mean meticulous menu planning meant to pair wonderfully with the complexity of a wonderfully crafted Belgian beer. I mean I started drinking beer and forgot about eating dinner.


Not that that's a bad thing. Nothing wrong with being extra happy on a Wednesday night. It was actually a two-fer that night (well, maybe one and a halfer) because I started off with St. Sebastiaan Dark.

Admittedly, I do things bass ackward sometimes and it's not usually by choice. This time it happened because of my unstoppable habit of collecting beer glassware. I saw a St. Sebastiaan glass at the Four Firkins a couple few months back and loved it. So naturally I needed to find the beer to drink out of that glass. This night the glass got broken in.

The beer was really nice. Not mind blowing by any means but it was a very nice easy to drink belgian (maybe dubbel?) beer to sip on when you have no agenda and want to utilize a cool drinking glass and pour out of a bad ass bottle.

Next up was a Boulevard Smokestack Series beer and not just any one, probably my favorite one to date. And that's saying a lot.  The first time I had BBQ I thought it was one of the five best beers I ever tried. It was a combination of everything that I loved in the beer world. Quad+Bourbon Barrels+Cherries. What wasn't to like?

Subsequent experiences of it weren't quite that good with a couple of them being downright disappointing (more on that down the road... maybe). I wanted to see how this bottle would treat me.

I was pleasantly surprised. It wasn't as good as that first bottle and I'm not sure if it's because I changed or the beer did. Didn't matter. All that did matter was that it wasn't the same bad experience again  and even though it was a lot boozier than I remembered, I was happy to drink this one down all by myself.