EDITOR’S NOTE
I FELL IN LOVE WITH STOUTS back in the earliest days of my own craft-beer journey. It was the summer of 1995, and I decamped from the humid mid-south environs of Memphis, Tennessee, to the high and dry landscape of Salt Lake
City, Utah, for a summer research project. I had turned 21 just months earlier, and my host, landlord, and friend for the summer (the lead singer and keyboardist for a Salt Lake City ska band) turned me on to wonders I had never experienced before, such as buying fresh beer from breweries in these vessels called “growlers.” It was unfamiliar and exciting in many ways—adventurous and new—but that summer was one that cemented my love of craft beer.
Part of that experience was trying beers I’d never tried before, from Belgian styles to hopforward beers—and, of course, stouts. My budding palate was not at all familiar with the caramel and coffee-roast notes of stout, but I studiously tried all I could get my hands on. I have fond memories of us downing bottles of Old Rasputin in the parking lot before a concert—it felt like an awfully strange thing to do at the time, pregaming with a 9-percent-abv bitter, hoppy, and dark imperial stout, but those were heady times, and everything felt new and dangerous.
My stout journey took a turn to to the sweeter side after college, when I moved back home to Florida. There, the large Caribbean expat community ensured that beers such as Dragon Stout and Royal Extra Stout were readily available in stores, and they were inexpensive and easy to find at the old-school reggae shows I frequented. While we think of super-sweet stouts as a more recent invention, the trend is much more historically rooted than we tend to acknowledge. And it’s funny how those beers became synonymous with hot, tropical weather—a far cry from the cold weather seasonality we tend to associate with stouts.
This 2020 edition of our annual stout issue takes a look back at those varied stout traditions, from Caribbean to Belgian and the bitter beauties that defined the early days of American craft brewing. The idea is to contextualize contemporary trends and understand the continuity of the style’s development. Like the legendary Bob Marley once sang, “In this bright future, you can’t forget your past.”
The best tomorrow is one filled with beers that both respect tradition and reject it—in which we can learn from and enjoy the experience of those timeless classics but also throw caution to the wind and embrace the new. There’s a certain excitement in that tension, an energy in the argument, and a spirit of relentless movement that has always defined craft beer. Why stop now?
No matter where your stout love lies—in the decadent dessert-driven beers of right now, in rigorous and uncompromising classic examples, or in both, we hope you love this issue. We made it for you.