Brewery 12: Dogfish Head
World Wide Stout. I picked this up recently when I was digging through the cooler at my favorite bottle shop, for some reason they manage to get their hands on aged stuff (particularly DFH). I noticed two different labels for their WWS so I checked the dates, sure enough some were 2019 and some were 2016 so I grabbed a couple of the 16's. Typically I find DFH's higher ABV stuff ages really well (you may have heard me talk about the magic of old 120 minutes) so I was excited somebody did the hard part for me.
Poured this up last night and was a little disappointed. I was wholeheartedly expecting to try this and go back to buy everything else they had, but while I did enjoy it I didn't have that urge. It was good but it had an underlying maltiness that was a little hard to get past. At least they have truth in advertisement with the label "Brewed with a ridiculous amount of barley."
Having tried a few of the other variants (vanilla oak, bourbon barrel aged) I think that this needs some wood aging to round everything out. I find this with a lot of stouts, often without the barrel aged component the amount of malt they need to get the ABV up is overpowering. See: Cerebral above, their Work From Home stout is ok, but the BA version is one of my favorite stouts. I think that's similar here, I won't be going back to buy more but I'll hang onto the extra I have. I tend to grab a bottle of an interesting DFH when I go into a liquor store and they don't have what I want but I want to give them some business so I have a couple of the others with a few years, I'll probably keep buying the BBA version when I see it at a decent price and stash it away
Side note: If anybody sees the Utopias barrel aged WWS please let me know
