On Friday, my friend Beau and I got together to try some new beers, one of which I will review in great detail very shortly. Since you can't just taste one beer at a tasting (even if it is a fantastic beer), we got a few others to try, one of which was Great Divide's Oak Aged Yeti. Great Divide makes four versions of their Yeti Imperial Stout- Yeti, Oak Aged Yeti, Espresso Oak Aged Yeti and Chocolate Oak Aged Yeti. I plan on trying all of these eventually, but as of Friday, I had only tried the Chocolate Oak Aged version. Since the Oak Aged version is the best reviewed of the bunch, I decided that it should be the next up.
Oak Aged Yeti pours a jet black color with a pretty huge head that eventually settles to about two fingers worth of head the color of hot chocolate foam. I was pretty surprised by the first smell I picked up-hops. By law every beer must have hops, but it's rare to find a stout that has a large amount of hops and even more rare to find a stout in which the first aroma you pick up from it is hops. Along with the hops, I got some more familiar stout aromas- wood, a pretty big charred aroma, roasted malts, a bit of blackberry and some cocoa powder.
The taste was pretty big and (in my opinion) far better than that of the Chocolate Oak Aged version of this beer. There are big flavors of espresso and dark chocolate and some good hop bitterness upfront. The finish brings a descent into dark roasted coffee-acidity and a slight charred bitterness. The bitterness on the finish was pretty big, but it wasn't overdone or overly bitter and left you wanting more. I haven't had a lot of beers from Great Divide (yet), but so far this is the best I've had from them. This is definitely worth picking up.
Final Grade: A
Top 100 Beers Tasted: 21
(Sadly, Edmund Fitzgerald Porter left the ranks of the Top 100 this week, dropping my number of Top 100 Beers I've tasted down to 21. Not to worry. A few beers should be popping up on here shortly that won't be leaving the Top 100 anytime soon.)
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