Oskar Blues is a well known brewery with relatively wide distribution. The company has positioned itself at the forefront of the relatively recent craft beer canning trend. Their regular lineup is generally good and certainly well-made. However, they elicited some amusingly disparate reactions with their latest addition, Gubna, a big, all Summit-hopped DIPA. Reactions to Summit hops, and, in turn, Gubna, swing from "what the hell is wrong with other breweries for not using this gift rendered unto man from on high?" to "this smells like a poorly ventilated gym full of roided out anthropomorphic onions." I fall in the latter category. On the other hand, Ten FIDY is one of the best rated (not that it really matters, but its overall rankings currently are 45th on Beeradvocate, 66th on ratebeer) beers and has won some well-deserved recognition from more mainstream press, as well. So, let's get to it...
I like Ten FIDY. I like it a lot, actually, though I dislike capitalizing five out of seven letters of its name (apologies if I overuse "it" or "this beer"). When fresh, the beer is a velvet blanket of chocolate and roasted malt foam. It's a soft imperial stout, easy to like and easy to drink, though not lacking in flavor. There's no harsh hop bitterness and little booze. Caramel malt sweetness is definitely present and the beer makes for an excellent dessert, but it's nowhere near the cloying sweet mess of some versions of the style. However, the can sitting in front of me is not fresh.
This particular can has been sitting in a box in my makeshift cellar for more than a year. My best guess is 18 months, but my cellar inventory tracking is fairly weak, and the date printed on the bottom of the can is unreadable, at least I think it's a date. This is the first intentionally aged can of beer that I have tried. Of course, it's still fairly young for a 9.5% abv stout, but I'm trying to limit my nightly dance of beer indecision and grabbed something familiar in a panic. Plus, I had no real intention to age this can longterm and was merely curious to see how it would change after any amount of time.
And it hasn't really changed much. The roasted malt flavor has started to go fruity, and the chocolate has receded a bit. The beer feels distinctly less creamy, but it still coats the mouth in a pleasantly thick layer of flavor. There's a bit less hop bitterness, still enough to keep the sugar in check, but it's unsurprisingly similar otherwise. No complaints really, but it's probably a bit better fresh.
The fruity roasted malt notes give the beer a somewhat generic aged imperial stout flavor. This can won't stick out in my mind so much as it does when fresh, mostly because my favorite part, the chewy chocolate bar quality, isn't as dominant. I'm still getting a good amount of high quality chocolate - I'd peg it close to a ~65% bar - and the combination of chocolate and roasted raisins/prunes holds its own joy. The sweetness tastes of honey fading into black strap molasses. I'm happy to be sipping it out of a pretentiously tiny snifter. This beer remains a decadent dessert.
I'm happy that my patience held for this long and allowed me to see some insight on an excellent beer, but future cans will be drained more quickly. This isn't a bad beer to age, but, at least, short term aging hasn't won me over. Creamy chocolate still defines Ten FIDY to my mind, and that flavor does not seem to be improving with cellar time.
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