Old Stock Ale 2012:
Greetings friends and fellow beer drinkers and a hearty welcome back to my attempt to wrap a koozie around the ice cold world of beer.  Today let’s look at another beer from that nice little brewery in California, North Coast Brewery and their Old Stock Ale 2012. This beer, an Old Ale style beer, is brewed with imported malts from England and is designed to cellar for several years to mellow and mature like a fine wine.  The beer pours a nice cloudy amber color with a fizzy khaki colored head, a nose of dark fruits and caramel.  The beer’s initial taste is heavy on a metallic roasted malt flavor that develops with the aid of carbonation fizz to a flavor similar to over ripened fruits and bread undertones that end in a heavy malt back end.  The aftertaste is similar to a caramelized sugar with spots of sweetness and burnt notes lacing together very well.  A very nice beer that has what seems like limitless possibilities with some aging behind it.  This particular beer made it almost a 6 months so the flavors and malts really had no chance to develop themselves but we can look at this as jumping the gun on the beer or establishing a baseline for future aging bottles that are to be acquired.  I prefer the latter but that’s just me. Schol, y’all.