Review: Stone Double Bastard

I was excited to see this beer on the shelf at Total Wine & More on a recent visit. The last -- and first -- time I had Double Bastard was at the Oregon Brewers Festival in July 2002 in Portland, Ore.

Stone Double Bastard Ale, photo provided by Stone Brewing Co.

Stone's Arrogant Bastard is the brewery's flagship beer. Double Bastard is the California brewery's extreme version of Arrogant Bastard. Both beers have very funny labels that insult you for not being worthy enough to drink the beer.

Double Bastard is a seasonal beer released each November. It's sold in 22-ounce bottles. Total Wine sells them for $7 each.

The review

It pours a very hazy brown with a short off-white head. The smell is all about hops.

The taste is very hoppy and bitter. This is -- like the name says -- a double version of Arrogant Bastard. Big malt flavors battle with big citrus hop notes. The high alcohol level is apparent, too.  It's excellent, with a body that's almost chewy.

Overall this is excellent, but what else would you expect from Stone. You have to drink this carefully, though, since it's 10 percent alcohol.

What if you don't want to drink a whole bottle at once?

I used a bottle capper (like this one) from my homebrewing days to re-cap this beer so I could drink it over two nights. If you don't want to buy a capper, you can use a lever bottle stopper like this one, which also works well on 750 mL bottles.

Those stoppers come in handy when you can't or don't want to drink a big bottle at once. Just don't use those vacuum stoppers, because they suck out all the carbonation in a beer, leaving it flat.