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Top 10 Beers We Drank in November 2024
Stouts...lots of stouts.
Photography courtesy of Human Robot (on the left) and Bow & Arrow Brewing Company (on the right)
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Last month, we drank a lot of beer, traveling from Bellevue to Yakima Valley, WA, for the hop harvest and finally to Denver for the Great American Beer Festival. So, to be fair, we’ve eased back the gas in November. While this list may look a little lighter than the thirty days before, we still found time to…
Sip on some go-to stouts for International Stout Day…
Travel to a galaxy far, far away to discover the history of one of the Midwest’s most iconic stouts…
give thanks for these beers in our lives…
Give thanks for one of the best brewery memberships in our lives…
And drink rare beer for a great cause.
As the holidays hit us hard, let’s toast to a month of thanks!
Hop Culture’s Top 10 Beers We Drank in November 2024
Mellow Mind Control – Firestone Walker Brewing Company
Paso Robles, CA
Photography courtesy of Firestone Walker
Double Barrel-Aged Imperial Stout – This month, we covered “5 Reasons to Join One of the Best Brewery Memberships in the Country,” so not that you need five more reasons, but we’re going to give them to you anyway.
Firestone Walker’s Brewmaster’s Collective just dropped its latest and last quarterly collection of 2024. Dubbed “the Hook,” this series included five beers from a barrel-aged Belgian-style Quad and sour ale with blueberries and marionberries to the third iteration of Paraboloid and the XXVIII Anniversary Ale.
But by far and away, our favorite beer in this collection was Mellow Mind Control, a wild collab with Omnipollo. Aged in twelve-year Elijah Craig and ten-year Henry McKenna barrels, this double barrel-aged 13.5% ABV stout infuses Omnipollo’s whacky approach to beer by layering in toasted coconut, Madagascar vanilla, and graham crackers, “creating an intense, velvety brew that’s anything but ordinary,” according to Firestone. “With Omnipollo’s flair for pushing flavor boundaries, every sip is a smooth, indulgent ride perfect for kicking back and letting your mind wander.”
Sipping on this stunner, we have to agree. If you want, you can think very hard about this beer, or you can just put your feet up by the fire and let the smooth, thick, luscious liquid slide down your throat and call it a night.
This beer is only available if you’re a Firestone Walker Brewmaster’s Collective member, and you won’t find it out in the market. But if you’re interested in getting exclusive collabs like this in the future, plus so much more, sign up for the 2025 cohort right now.
Manzanita – Fort Point Beer Co.
San Francisco, CA
Photography courtesy of Sarah Chorey | Fort Point Beer Co.
The brewery that eat, breaths, and brews San Francisco reached an incredible milestone this year—ten years.
They’ve been celebrating a decade in style, bringing back some of their most popular styles from the vault for one-off releases almost monthly.
A rainy November in California has proved an epic time for the return of Manzanita, a smoked Altbier.
This year, we’ve covered two of our favorite German styles—Altbier and rauchbier. The former a spellbindingly malty German ale, and the former a smoked beer.
Both from different regions of Germany—Dusseldorf for Altbier and Bamberg for rauchbier—we haven’t necessarily seen the two cozy up next to the campfire together to make s’mores and hear a scary story.
Until now.
Appropriately, Fort Point calls Manzanita an “imaginative take on the classic German rauchbier,” adding charred Manzanita branches to the grist of classic Beechwood smoked malt to get that characteristic smokey essence.
Bamberg kept the tradition of rauchbier alive because of its proximity to the largest Beechwood forest in Germany.
Here in Northern California, the hardwood Manzanita shrub grows at around 1,000 feet above sea level. The indigenous wood makes a perfect addition to Fort Point’s take on a rauchbier.
Drinking this beer immediately reminded us of sipping hot cider around a crackling bonfire after a rainy day of picking apples. Our boots soaked through to our socks, our fingertips frosted over, the hot, mulled, sweet, spiced cider would warm us up from the core (sorry, apple pun).
Apt then that Fort Point calls Manzanita “a beer for a campfire on a crisp fall night.”
We couldn’t agree more, and we only wish that Fort Point would make Manzanita a permanent addition to their lineup.
Deth’s Tar – Revolution Brewing
Chicago, IL
Photography courtesy of Revolution Brewing
Imperial Oatmeal Stout – Gotta love a classic, especially when it taps into one of the all-time sci-fi anthologies of our generation. Not the first, but one of the top three barrel-aged stouts that Revolution made, Deth’s Tar became the cornerstone of Revolution’s barrel-aging program.
“We’re all big Star Wars fans here at the brewery,” Revolution Head Brewer Jim Cibak told us. The Force was strong with the Chicago-based brewery to start brewing its iconic Deth’s Tar, paying homage to the seminal vessel of Star Wars: Episode IV, the Death Star.
Revolution Brewery Owner Josh Deth had fun with this massive imperial oatmeal stout. “Josh killed two birds with one stone: He got a cool Star Wars reference in there with the Death Star,” says Cibak, “and his last name is actually Deth, D-E-T-H!”
Cibak says they also liked how the “tar” harkened to the beer’s jet-black appearance.
“It almost has the appearance of tar in a glass,” Cibak says. “You can barely shine a laser through it.”
Or, dare we say…a lightsaber.
So why do we love Deth’s Tar? What makes this big, bold stout so iconic? And why exactly did this seminal stout blow up (you know, not like the Death Star blew up)?
Hop Culture Content Writer Giovanni Albanese Jr. sat down with the Yodas of Revolution’s barrel-aging program to find out. This is a super fun read, so make sure you don’t miss it!
Funksloth Foeder-Aged Farmhouse Ale – Bow & Arrow Brewing Company
Albuquerque, NM
Photography courtesy of Bow & Arrow Brewing Co.
Farmhouse Ale – Technically, we drank this beer in October but haven’t had a chance to shout it out yet. While in Denver for the Great American Beer Festival, we had the privilege of attending one of the most incredible events—Denver Rare Beer Tasting (DRBT).
Started by cancer survivor Rick Lyke, this festival not only features some of the rarest beer from the best breweries around the country but also donates one hundred percent of ticket sales to Pints for Prostates, with a portion of those dollars going to the Prostate Conditions Education Council, which organizes free men’s health screening clinics across the country.
Lyke started Pints for Prostates to encourage anyone with a prostate to “start conversations about the importance of early detection in fighting prostate cancer,” according to the company’s website.
To date, the organization has raised $74,723, increasing its total to $2,177,055* all-time.
Lyke graciously invited us to attend this year’s event for the very first time.
Walking around, we bumped into Bow & Arrow Co-Founder Shyla Sheppard, attending DRBT for the third time. A brewery we’ve profiled and included in our Queer Beer Box, Bow & Arrow has been at the top of our bucket list visits. Drinking with Sheppard at DRBT will have to be the next best thing for now.
Shyla and her partner and co-founder Missy Begay brought the brewery’s Funksloth. A farmhouse ale with a mixed-culture yeast and bacteria wildly harvested in New Mexico, Funksloth tasted like tart peach skins with hints of hay.
One of Sheppard and Begay’s friends bakes at a restaurant called Los Poblanos up the road from the brewery. “We agreed to take a microscopic picture of some of his bread yeast, and in return, he’d set some yeast traps for us,” Sheppard explained to us.
Additionally, the base beer includes all regional ingredients, such as barley and hops from Southern Colorado.
“Funksloth is a combination of all those things, so it comes off as real fruit-forward funk, like stone fruit with even a little pineapple,” she says. “And that’s all just from that beautiful local, native culture.”
Named after a giant prehistoric sloth in Southern New Mexico, Funksloth captures the terroir and history of the region.
We’d only heard about this beer before, so to try the beer, the myth, the legend, made us stop, pause, and appreciate life for a minute.
*Pints for Prostates currently supports the efforts of the Prostate Conditions Education Council (www.prostateconditions.org), which organizes free men’s health screening clinics across the country. The organization is a registered 501(c)3 charity.
Bourbon County Brand Stout – Goose Island
Chicago, IL
Photography courtesy of Goose Island Beer Co.
Barrel-Aged Stout – We spent six years in Chicago in the mid-2010s, when every Black Friday, people would line up like gangbusters for a chance to purchase the brewery’s iconic Bourbon County Brand Stout (BCBS).
Over ten years later, the brewery invited us to do a virtual tasting instead. After years without a drop of BCBS, we were curious if the beers would stand up to the test of time.
TL:DR—yes…and then some. Which is why we named this series in our piece on the ““Beers We’re Thankful For This Thanksgiving.” P.S. We highly recommend you check out all the picks.
While Goose Island Senior Innovation Manager Michael Siegel, Senior Brewmaster Daryl Hoedtke, President Todd Ahsmann, and Brand Manager John Zadlo walked us through all six beers, a few stood out.
Original Bourbon County Brand Stout
The imperial stout aged in bourbon barrels between twelve to sixteen months, the OG proved timeless.
“Aroma-wise, you get a lot of chocolate right off the bat, a little bit of roast, vanilla, and certainly some dried fruit and berries,” says Hoedtke. “For me, this really showcases what that extra time in the barrel does. I get a little bit more marshmallow character and nuttiness.”
We picked up a super balanced blend of Baker’s chocolate and toasted marshmallow with a building almost Szechuan pepper-like burn. We found this beer very seductive, reeling us into its dark depths.
Rare Bourbon County Brand Stout (2024)
At Goose Island, the barrel is treated as an ingredient as much as the water, malt, yeast, and hops. For Rare BCBS, Goose Island sourced…wait for it…incredibly rare, prized King of Kentucky bourbon barrels.
But as Siegel points out, “When putting the name ‘rare’ on something … it one hundred percent has to mean something really special in this brewery, and this fantastic beer lives up to it.”
Ahsmann agrees, “This one turned out ridiculously delicious and worthy of that name ‘rare.’”
We got notes of vanilla custard, flan, Japanese-style toasted cheesecake, Spanish hot cocoa, and burnt sugar. At 18% ABV, the alcohol is definitely present, with a pleasant, drawn-out burn, with the heat lingering as it enters your bloodstream.
Proprietor’s Bourbon County Brand Stout
Designed off a tamarind spoon candy found in many of Chicago’s corner stores “that you just lick off,” according to Siegel, this year’s Proprietor’s blend includes two different types of tamarind puree—one more watermelon and one earthier—lime puree, guajillo peppers, and piloncillo, a kind of unrefined sugarcane.
“It’s a little spicy, sweet, tart,” says Siegel. “It’s delightful.”
Fun, flavorful, and complex, Proprietor’s sounds crazy on paper but explodes in your mouth.
The brand itself honors the original BCBS. “When I look back at Bourbon County Brand Stout Original in 1992, there was no frame of reference for that beer,” says Zadlo, noting that the beer was even disqualified from the Great American Beer Festival because no category existed for it. “But Chicago didn’t care if it was a written or established beer style. They were willing to take a chance on it, so Proprietor carries the torch year after year.”
Of all six of the BCBS variants we tried, Proprietor’s was the one we kept coming back to again and again.
Kalamazoo Stout – Bell’s Brewery
Comstock, MI
Photography courtesy of Bell’s Brewery
American Stout – One of our favorite series to write about (and from the amount of engagement we see, one of our favorite series for you to read about) is our series on accessible versions of popular beer styles that you can most likely find on a store shelf near you.
To celebrate International Stout Day on Nov. 7, 2024, we refreshed one of our most popular ones—The 10 Best Stouts Available in Most Stores Right Now.
Drinking a Kalamazoo Stout from Bell’s Brewery reminded us that we can find perfectly satisfying stouts everywhere.
This American stout from one of America’s most revered breweries takes us back to the city where it all began for Bell’s: Kalamazoo, MI. One of the brewery’s most classic recipes offers freshly ground coffee and rich dark chocolate notes for a true-to-style representation of a stout.
Curious about what other stouts made the list? Tap below.
Red Sky – Temescal Brewing Company
Oakland, CA
Photography courtesy of Temescal Brewing
California Common – Chances are, when we’re drinking a beer at home, it’s with a good book open in front of us. Honestly, that’s an ideal Friday night for us. One of the only events that will get us out of the house during the weekday is something called Silent Book Club, hosted at Temescal Brewing.
The idea is simple: A bunch of like-minded bibliophiles get together to drink beer and read. You socialize for a short bit before everyone opens their book and reads silently for an hour.
During our latest Silent Book Club, we noticed that Temescal had a California Common (aka Steam Beer®, but Anchor technically has the copyright to that name) on draft. We’re big fans of this uniquely West Coast style, so whenever we see it around (and since we can no longer find Anchor Steam Beer® in the market), we tend to order it.
Red Sky didn’t disappoint. Perfectly malty and nutty with underlying notes of sticky toffee pudding, the amber-hued liquid matched the quickly dipping temperatures. Sipping one in Temescal’s beer garden next to a fire pit while reading Richard Osman’s latest witty cozy murder mystery, We Solve Murders, was just chef’s kiss.
We learned later that somewhat coincidentally, Temescal brewed this beer in collaboration with the release of a new book by Obi Kaufmann called The State of Fire, Why California Burns, with one dollar from every pint going to assist Californians displaced and impacted by the 2024 wildfires.
We’ll admit that when we went to Temescal a week later for Bingo Night and saw Red Sky had kicked, we were a little disappointed.
Rauchschloss – Human Robot
Philadelphia, PA
Photography courtesy of Human Robot
Rauchbier – We’re fully onboard that rauchbier, aka smoked beer, train. Choo-choo. So when Human Robot included Rauchschloss in their latest care package to us, we almost spontaneously combusted with excitement.
Brewed with one hundred percent Beechwood smoked malt from Weyermann in Bamberg, Germany, this rauchbier also benefits from a single decoction mash to really emphasize the complexity of that beautiful grain.
We know smoked beers are polarizing, but Rauchschloss seemed to toe that line of smoke essence as expertly as an Olympic skier setting the line in fresh powder.
Drinking this beer felt like a guilty pleasure.
