Top Shelf: Stone Farking Wheaton w00tstout

What does it feel like to have a beergasm and a nerdgasm at the same time? Probably something like slaying a dragon with a lightsaber and being rewarded by grateful villagers with thirty barrels of magic ale and your very own personal holodeck. I’m guessing.

But to achieve such a sublime double nirvana IRL you need only sit down to a glass of sweet, fruity, oaky, nutty, bourbon-laced, hoppy-finishing, high gravity Stone Farking Wheaton w00tstout.

If you listen to Episode 7: A Brew Good Men, you will hear Steph exclaim with utter jubilation, “Mari’s has w00tstout!” At which point she dispatched her husband, Rich, to this local brew purveyor to procure a bottle post-haste.

This became the piece de resistance of our tasting segment in Episode 8. (Not that there’s no love to the other beers we sampled, they were all fantastic.) It wasn’t long before we knew we had found the second beer to receive our rarely bestowed “Top Shelf” honor.

This incredible brew is the result of a collaboration between Greg Koch, Drew Curtis and Wil Wheaton. Greg Koch is CEO and Co-founder of Stone Brewing Company. Drew Curtis is the creator of alternative news website Fark.com. If you don’t know who Wil Wheaton is, you may want to re-evaluate your life. All you really need to know is that bright-eyed boy-genius Wesley Crusher grew up to be, among many other things, an avid craft beer fan and homebrewer.

The origin story of this collaboration is a series of coincidences so uncanny they could only be the result of the reckless use of Infinite Improbability Drive.

Back in 2004, Wil called Stone Brewing to ask if it was cool to use the Arrogant Bastard logo on his blog and Greg Koch just happened to answer the phone. (How many times have you called a company and had the CEO just happen to pick up on the other end?)

A few months later Greg reached out to the 10,000th subscriber to the Stone email newsletter only to find that it just happened to be Wil Wheaton. At this point the space-time continuum chuckled – probably. The two became chummy through their shared beer passion and have been friends ever since.

Wil started his first website in the early naughts around the same time Drew Curtis started Fark.com. Being two freshly minted webmasters (does anyone use that term anymore?) with similar interests they naturally gravitated toward one another. Before creating w00tstout, Drew had never brewed a beer before in his life. Though, he has “never met a beer he didn’t like.”

And so, by their powers combined, the universe was gifted the sweet nectar of the gods that is w00tstout. It’s a unique imperial stout brewed with rye, wheat malt and pecans. One quarter of the batch was aged in bourbon whiskey barrels for two months then blended back in with the unoaked portion. The result is as delicious as it is complex.

In color it is beautifully dark, brown just shy of black and almost totally opaque. What light does penetrate comes through with that wonderful deep red of maltiness. The head is an inviting creamy mocha hue that says, “I am freaking delicious” right off the bat. The aroma serves as a precursor to the complexity of the taste. It’s coffee, chocolate and fruit with hints of the bourbon oakiness and vanilla.

Then the taste…just wow. It’s like with every sip you find something different. My first thought, strangely, was the hint of those root beer barrell hard candies I used to eat as a kid. You find that chocolate, the coffee and nuttiness then the wonderful burnt oakiness of the bourbon, with heat and sweetness, all rounded off with a hoppy and dry finish. Each sip goes down with full-bodied, satisfying thickness.

This beer has gotten rave reviews all across the interwebs and rightfully so. It’s said that it matures very well and only gets better with age. Unfortunately, we finished the whole bottle. I suppose we’ll just have to get another. And, hopefully, keep our hands off of it for a while – which won’t be easy.

barrel aged, Fark, Stone Brewing Company, stout, w00tstout, Wil Wheaton