Founders KBS

KBS 11.2% ABV
American Imperial / Double Stout
Founders Brewing Company

Last year I had the chance but didn’t, this year I grabbed two which was the per person limit.

One I’m drinking now, one I’ll age for at least a year or two to come.

Highly hyped is this brew, let us see if the high praise is true.

As per usual I start with the nose.  The beer has a most potent aroma that hit me as soon as I popped open the cap.  The nose is enchanting as the bourbon aroma wafts through the pollen laden air into my waiting nostrils.  I would expect nothing less from a beer that is “cave-aged in oak bourbon barrels for an entire year.”

Smooth…smooth…all other words escape me… except smooth.  My first taste produces not so much taste as a mouth feel of silky smoothness that embraces my tongue more than any flavor.

At the finish of my first sip I begin to sense with my taste-buds ever so slight chocolate notes.  My second sip brings with it the coffee flavor, if only in the finish.  I can’t wait for this beer to warm up a bit as I drink it, so as to allow the flavors to hit me in different places.

Did I mention this beer is smooth?  Almost too smooth, but most certainly not.  The high end ABV is imperceptible if not for the ever present pleasing bourbon aroma.  Maybe it’s this aroma that makes the bourbon flavor most omnipresent to my taste-buds. The chocolate and coffee hit, but in subtle ways.  This beer has met and surpassed my expectations.

I never thought I would say a stout let alone a bourbon barrel aged double stout is an ideal Spring beer, but this one truly is.  Sitting outside on a sunny day, with a nice cool wind flowing now and then, the sun warms my skin ever so slightly.  Neither cold nor hot, the temperature is just right.  It is a day of leisure and this is a leisurely beer to drink.  You do not want to drink it fast as the experience would be at an end far too soon.

I sit and enjoy nature.  The pain and cold ache of winter still fresh enough that I properly relish this most glorious day sipping on an outstanding beer and letting my mind wander and drift, no focus needed, no work or labors to ponder.  Just me, on my day off from that job, a phenomenal beer in hand and a jewel of nature’s offering on this spinning orb that gravity clings us to.  Here I am not even a fifth the way into this beer already speaking like a lover in post coital bliss.  

I now bid adieu to you the reader, wishing only that I had a hammock to sink into, as I finish off the last half of this brew.

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