The aftertaste kills this... A bit like fake pound cake. To be fair I had significantly better stouts today - eight of them.

Like a Mounds. Quite sweet, bordering on fake, but sits very well on the light, cola-like porter base. Actually works because of its lack of heaviness.

Berry is more of a hint, up front. Dry, clean sour, mild florality of pine and not a whole lot of gin that I could detect. Very, very nice!

Starts out like a hoppy+malty amber, backbone is strongly caramel and mellow. There's definitely a florality here, but it kind of fades into the hops. More present is the toasty smoothness of tea on top.

Quite tart and citrusy. I think lychee and pear come through more as a clean flavor to the fruit than they do as themselves. Uncomplicated, but very clean.

Smells 100% like floral perfume, off-putting at first. Flavor is light, like a rice lager but with lightly tart fruit and lemongrass florality. Over several sips the fruit came through stronger, and this ended up really quite pleasurable.

The opposite beer - pungent and sour, hints of dark vinegar and more than a little whiskey to top it off.

Quite delicious. Light tartness, slightly herbal, slightly smoky, which I imagine comes from the oolong tea. Not sure how much cognac I got in between the other flavors, but this was very, very nice.

I've forgotten the details of this beer after the more interesting beers that followed, but I do remember it quite a good hazy IPA.

Gave off a skunky smell while pouring, but it wasn't evident in the taste. Belgian pale with light spice notes, white pepper, but with a dry, grapey, vinous tartness.

I don't like raspberry very much in general, but I think the dry tartness of the fruit made the best match for the lactic sweetness of the base beer, resulting in the best beer of the batch.

After the mango, this was almost annoyingly sweet. Realistic peach pokes through the sugar but otherwise the first few sips were not great. After I got used to it it was better, but still outclassed by the other two flavors.

Mildly tart mango flavor to start, followed by a rather sweet and hoppy IPA. The fruit does seem a little tacked on here, and the rest too sweet. But I like mango, and this was okay if you take it for a novelty beer.

Significantly worse from a can. A lot more of a tacky feeling in the throat afterwards that I don't remember from Thirsty Hop.

Possibly one of the best hazy IPAs I've ever had. Clean citrus/grapefruit/pine flavors with a clean, mellow, completely non-bitter finish.

A medium-bodied, smoky porter with a bit of sourness. Lots of roast and coffee, and a buildingly bitter finish.

Very sweet, boozy, young tasting. But in a charming way, if that makes any sense? It's not thick, it's got a bit of rye bite. A little too raw to truly love, but it was fun. Maybe in a couple years it could even be great (but it seems like it would still be a little too sweet).

Cider-like, with a bright, gingery opening. Gets dry pretty quickly, but not very sour, in a way that is pretty pomegranatey. I liked the ginger, not so much the finish.

Let's be honest, this wasn't going to make an impression at all after the other two.

Very smoothed out, with a kind of caramel honey sweetness on top. Fairly prominent wood smoke flavor. Would have been interesting to compare with a young bottle. Very tasty, though!

Whiskey forward, inky black porter with quite a lot of bitter roast. The bitterness builds up strongly over time.

Yum!

Malty, strong amber with a prickle of hops on top. Well balanced.

My memory is not good here, but I recall this being a blah, generic IPA.

Definitely a Belgian IPA, has those faint peppery spice notes underneath the expected hops. It's an odd style that somehow always makes me think of rubber tires. Not as good as what I think of as my paragon of the style, Stone's Belgique.

Nicely round oak and caramel to open. More than a little piney hop but clean and balanced pretty well. Tastes less boozy than you'd expect at 11%+ ABV.

Syrupy and yuck.

Jammy blueberry sour, with a little more of a musty finish than I like.

Also tastes young. Blending this with the Midnight Orange makes an orange cream stout that is probably better than either component beer. This is interesting because I first got to know Goose Island through their excellent orange cream sodas in the ‘90s.

Strong orange. Almost perfumey, but just avoids that mortal sin by a hair. Tastes very young.

A forward, sharp tartness, some followup chocolate, and a whole lot of authentic blackcurrant flavor. This was very good. I don't quite remember what the original Tart tasted like, but I have the strong feeling that this was better.

This was really good, although all told it was more red wine than beer. The stout was pretty hard to detect through all of the dry grape and brett funk. Rounded, only slightly bitter, with a lingering grapey fizz. This split opinion, but I liked it.

A bit raw in its hit of whiskey but otherwise a pretty good barrel-aged scotch ale. If it's reminiscent of anything it's Goose Island's Cooper Project Scotch.

Bracingly tart, but clean; emphasis on dank pineapple flavors with some sweet wheat funk right at the end.

This was really, really good. Not bitter at all, dry, grapey flavor very like a brut IPA but with a much more intense fragrance. Different from most wet hop beers I've tried, and really fantastic.

Thick texture, somewhat thin flavor, but sickly sweet. Smells odd, though not quite pizza in my mind. I don't know how different this is from before, but this time it was just really gross.

Smells nice, like a complex saison. That first sip, though, it's like an herb salad that kind of overpowers every other flavor that might be involved. Just a little too weird to get over.

UGH I SHOULD HAVE TAKEN NOTES. This was very delicious though.

Missed logging this at the time and it's way in the past. I do remember liking this very much and that the fig was quite striking.

This was about as good as you could expect of a non-barrel aged stout; creamy, sweet, slightly boozy and roasty. I still don't know what I had back in Chicago, but it could have been this. Who knows?

Watery caramel scotch ale. Bit of wet hay.

Main flavor here is hazelnut, creamy and nutty. It really manages to overcome the sweet umami heaviness that usually characterizes this family of beers. Only real complaint here is that the chili was pretty much a non-entity here. I didn't taste it at all.

Very similar to the pale, but with a fair bit more high bitterness at the end.

A mellow pale with a medium resin-on-the-tongue hop presence. Really drinkable and fairly tasty.

Smells like a fruity red, tastes like a fruity red. Well, with stout caramel on top, which makes it taste a lot like prunes. Tacky sourness lingers in the throat. Maybe this'll get better with age, but ... meh for now.

Sweetish drip coffee but with an unpleasant vegetal flavor right up front. Not so convenient.

This was... kind of nasty. Smells good, but you're hit by a really funky, sweaty-something flavor to open. It goes fairly quickly to a sour, decent peach flavor, but the very next sip starts 100% funky all over again. Unlike many sours, this doesn't get better the more you drink.

NOOOO FRANCIS, FAREWELL I CRY FOREVER

Absolutely disgusting. Sickly sweet, smoke is like a tire fire, acrid and bitter.

Really interesting. Bracingly tart on open, with a hop-bitter-sourness (not at all salty). Finishes clean, and all fresh grape. Each sip was a flinch followed by pleasure. Basically unlike any other sour I've had.

A profound stout. Starts thick and malty, a combination that very often turns to overwhelming sweetness (see: Skookum). This one, though, turns a bit bitter, almost savory. A very nice way to finish. Yum!

Don't smell or taste bergamot, which is most disappointing. Honey-like sweetness, some bready, tripel-like Belgian body. Pleasant but forgettable. And not Earl Grey! For that, try Breakside.

This had turned, I think. Smelled like a scotch ale, but tasted like sour celery.

A middling quad with a little more clove than I loved. But not bad.

They keep making these POG beers, and very few of them taste anything like POG. This continues the trend. The fruit flavors are oily and bitter, and the whole thing ends in a foamy, pithy mess.

Absolutely delicious. Very dry brett bitterness, a vinous, fruity grape middle and clean cereal to finish. This was like a better, much cleaner Pour les Oiseaux, which was a beer I used to love very much.

A hoppy, malty, amber barleywine. I mean, it was beer, and it wasn't bad, but it also wasn't exactly the most memorable thing. And it was priced like it should be memorable.

The utter flatness of the beer is strange at first, but it passes by quickly. Very solid stout, and omg, this tastes like a Manhattan. Sweet and lightly woody, fruit and caramel. This'll knock you out quick, but you'll have a great time while it happens.

This was a lot better than it sounded, but it wasn't great. A lot of resin in this IPA, smoothed out quite a bit with what does seem very much like marshmallow. The sweetness is both weird and appealing, and I can't tell which side wins.

At first I thought this was the best one, although with some more distance between the beers the tequila is a little wooly here. Wooly in a good way for sure! But some moods might prefer the straightforwardness of the Scotch version.

Directly after the brandy version this was a bit dry and a lot bitter, but with more separation this really grew on me. I think this may have been the best one in the end.

Fruity, sweet and very smooth. Really, really tasty. It may not have ended up at the top of the flight, but there's no way to really fault this beer.

A strong banana lager. That's basically my takeaway here. Untappd called this a maibock, which does seem appropriate. Beeradvocate says German Pilsner, which... well, this would be a bad one. Another generic beer from the Costco Advent Calendar box.

Always good. Maybe a little funkier than I remember?

Excellent, mild, creamy milk stout with very light coffee and pronounced coconut flavors. Mildly sweet, not too thick. None of the metallic aftertaste that Belching Beaver's other stouts can have. This was delicious.

Very sour, puckeringly so. Tons of peach, with a kind of coconut aftertaste, which may have been an interaction with the floral flavors, but nothing tasted floral outright. A little too sour for me to love.

Unrelentingly sour, with the most intense peach flavor. A lot to deal with.

Sour enough that I think this bottle has turned. If it hasn't, it's unpleasant.

Sour. I didn't much like the original Brunch Weasel, but I'm absolutely sure I like this one less.

A concentrated hop juice IPA, plenty of resin and a lot of pine. Relatively smooth finish for such an intense beer, which puts it a step above most hop bombs. Thanks to Nate for bringing this!

A little less overtly enjoyable than I remember; maybe because the growler wasn't fresh? It was still good though.

A great palate cleanser after the stout. Better than I remember, clearly hoppy but also sweet and cereal, finishing cleanly and without overt bitterness.

Pours dark and thick, super umami and tacky-sour. The comment was made that this tastes like Vegemite. The residue in the throat lasts much longer than is reasonably necessary. At any rate, it wasn't pleasant.

Rich wood smoke combined with a light, sweet wheat beer with more than a little unusual florality (as in flower, not hop). The overall effect is both pungent and light, like a chrysanthemum tea. I really found this compelling.

Disgusting, I thought. Very sweet lemonade and cold coffee. That combo wouldn't work for me, even before bringing beer into the equation.

If the peasant king was like a Squirt, this was like an Orangina. Bitter citron. Definitely a double IPA in terms of intensity. Pretty good, though!

Flavor is in the same ballpark as the Peasant King, although less intense in every way.

Very New England. Thick, juicy, opaque, like a beer version of a Squirt.

Fresh tasting and intense, pithy. Undoubtedly this is a legendary beer, but it's not my ideal IPA.

Light, non-descript, caramel-hop amber.

It's like they took the slightly tangy yeast of an American hefe and mixed it into a sweet helles lager. Not estery or spicy, and the dry hops come across as a kind of round, lightly grape-y flavor. Very refreshing light, but bright and tasty.

Smelled like any number of blunt whiskey stouts, but this was a hugely pleasant surprise. Clear whiskey notes that immediately smooth out into a clean, vanilla-caramel finish. No tackiness, sourness, or even moderate roast. Delicious!

A standout, a light dark lager with light, rich wood smoke melting into a smooth caramel finish. Ghost of a peaty scotch in the finish. Really, really tasty.

Tastes a lot like an English or Scottish lager, grassy, wet-hay. Light finish. Pretty good but not especially remarkable.

Very tart, slightly salty on the lips. Clearly recognizable as strawberry.

Very, very hazelnutty. Only issue with this beer is that the base brown ale is very thin, would have liked more creaminess to add some backbone to the pleasant nut flavor. My memory of the Rogue puts it a couple notches above this.

Okay, I liked this? Sweet-ish, light Mexican lager. But I absolutely got no hint of habanero, which, if you're gonna list it on the can, you really need to back up. Right?

Smells like eggnog. Tastes like an eggnog candle. Next.

Tastes like gingerbread. Slightly spicy, definitely smooth. I don't exactly remember what Sam Adams' similar beer tasted like, but I think I enjoyed this about as much, which was plenty.

Yeahhhhh. No.

This was... definitely a double IPA.

Smells deliciously of coconut, no doubt the dominant flavor. This is an unabashedly sweet beer, very dessert-like. Light coffee slightly counteracts it, but it's still very intense. This is a hair less balanced than the basically-perfect coconut B-Bomb, but it's definitely delicious.

Smoother than the Doctor, although there is a subtle bitterness that gets stronger over time. Likewise the chili flavor, which is subtler than in other beers, but was quite warm and lingery by the end.

Delicious, smooth stout with a fragrance of... sesame? That toasted, unique nutty flavor made this a delight to drink. Yummmm.

Semi-flat from an intercontinental trip in a... plastic soda "growler?" Still, very decent flavors, a light citrus-pine-hop opening and a pilsner-like bitter finish. You can definitely see the lager side here, which is more than many IPLs can claim.

I thought the smell was a bit odd. Flavor is more chocolate than cinnamon, medium-thick, fairly smooth and milky. A bit more dry sourness than I was expecting, and a nice roasted / subtly smoky finish. Aftertaste is tacky, unfortunately -- from the lactose?

Unpleasantly sour, like a dry export stout but with a more lasting, tacky finish. The real crime, however, is that this doesn't even pretend to taste like cookies. Or even chocolate.

Listen, I wasn't looking forward to this and it blew my expectations out of the water. A superbly balanced, light IPA, with Bale Breaker's typically fragrant approach to hopping. The mango is not sweet or syrupy at all, just somehow a bright, fruity, realistic, essence-of-mango. I mean, drop the mic. This worked.

I had a less-witty description for this and I forgot that too. Let's just say this Costco box is not filling me with "the holiday cheer," okay?

I had a really witty description for this ready and sometime in the past two weeks I totally forgot it, sorry.

Still a superb beer. Not profound, I think its lightness prevents that, but so, so smoooooth.