Stouting Off with Founders: Breakfast, Imperial, KBS, + Co.

Image credit to downtownbarandgrill.com

Imperial Stouts are like Ivy Leaguers in at least one way - they're over-represented at the top. For their part, Imperial Stouts make up 6 out of the top 10 and 27 out of the top 50 on RateBeer's 2013 Best Beers list and 8 out of the top 20 on that of Beer Advocate. The corresponding figures for Ivy Leaguers, by the way, are 6 out the 10 schools with the highest number of super-wealthy alumni (>$200 million net worth) and 14 out of 43 US Presidents.

Of the many great breweries in the world, one from Grand Rapids, Michigan is particular well-represented in the Imperial Stout category - Founders Brewing Company. This post draws on both single and comparative tastings of several of their brews in this style, including Founders' Breakfast Stout (8.3% ABV), Founders' Imperial Stout (10.5% ABV), and Founders' Kentucky Breakfast Stout (11.2% ABV). Read on to hear the Founders story and the verdict on which brews of theirs takes the crown.

I know that both I and every single one of my beer-nerd friends has, at least once if not dozens of times, entertained via day dream the idea of quitting our jobs someday and starting breweries. It's brought up in starry-eyed terms sometime right after round three or in the doldrums of some Monday morning Gchat. Get out of the grind and jump into trying to make a die hard hobby into a fulfilling living. Inevitably, these conversations envision the beginning and end quite clearly, but compress all the required hard work into a three second mental montage. Visions of Sugarplum Stouts dance in our heads.

But as with any kind of entrepreneurship, it's not really the ideas that count. It's the execution - designing and making a great product, then pounding pavement and not sleeping until its perfect. With a little luck, a whole lot of perseverance, and a great team, maybe that means not just a chance to bring your ideas to the world - but also (ideally) to make some money doing it.

Mike Stevens and Dave Engbers graduated from college in 1996, worked a year, then quit to chase "the brewery dream". Years of home-brewing had instilled both skill with and a deep love for beer; they combined those attributes with giant loans for start-up funds and set to work. From their telling of it, that wasn't initially enough. Their first batches of beer were "well-balanced, but unremarkable, and that wasn't going to cut it. Faced with a ship sinking into the morass of financial insolvency and boring craft beer, they decided to double down on the "deep love" part of the equation. From them on, all of their beers were big, in-your-face, strongly flavored examples of their styles, catering to "people like us" - in other words, lovers of great beer.

Cue the Rocky montage of hard work.

Long story short, they did it. After not even placing on RateBeers' Best Breweries list through 2005, Founders hit #27 in 2006, ascended to #14 in 2007, then closed at #7 for 2008 and 2009, #4 in 2010, and finally reached either #3 or #2 every year since.

While they've achieved great renown across a wide swath of American styles - from IPAs to Porters, Fruit Beer to Scotch Ales - it's their aforementioned Imperial Stouts that have helped them top the charts again and again. Since I'm on a simile kick, it's like the '95-'96 Chicago Bulls: they were great because of Kerr, Kukoc, Rodman, and Pippen, but those next three titles would not have happened without His Airness. Over the past few months, I've had the chance to try quite a few of them, both alone and in comparison tastings - the results follow.

N.B. - In this post, I use Imperial Stout synonymously with Stout; the only real different between these styles is alcohol content, which is a factor of additional malt and sugar to feed fermentation. Both are dark, heavily malted, highly alcoholic types beers. They derive these characteristics from their malts, which have been roasted in a process similar to that used on coffee beans. Coffee, chocolate, vanilla, oak, ash, and dried stone fruits are all hallmark aromas and tastes for these styles, but the wide array of secondary techniques (from bourbon or brandy barrel aging to chili pepper or cacao addition to coffee or even Rocky Mountain oyster incorporation) that brewers employ on the style can result in even more diversity. On to the beer!

Founders Breakfast Stout (8.3% ABV) vs. Oskar Blues TEN FIDY (10.5% ABV)

This first comparison pitted two chocolaty, malty, coffee-scented, flaked-oat-smoothed-out beers against one another for bragging rights. The differentiating factors between the two were that Breakfast Stout features the addition of actual coffee to the brew, while TEN FIDY boasts a much stronger hop bill to complement the abundant maltiness of the style. Also, Breakfast Stout has a picture of an adorable baby eating oatmeal on its label, and TEN FIDY does not. These facts in mine, I opened both and tucked in.

Breakfast Stout featured an obsidian pour, with the slightest of white ring encircling stray wisps of bubbles. Smelling yielded an assertive and sustained mocha coffee blast. Sipping revealed a round mouth feel. A slight citrus tinge opened, like that found in a lighter roast of coffee, dueling with a much richer chocolaty coffee close on the back end. TEN FIDY poured an identical obsidian hue, but with a more substantial and darker brown coffee-like head floating on the top. Dense chocolate and baking cocoa aromas rose of the surface. Tasting gave forth heavily malted, highly boozy dark chocolate with a bit of unpleasant toasted soy coming through. A final note of vanilla greeted my palate on the close. 

The Breakfast Stout was the clear winner here, earning an overall 4/5 versus TEN FIDY's 3.5/5. It demonstrated superior balance among its many flavor elements, and came across as far more balanced in terms of both taste and texture. Plus - it just smelled delicious. TEN FIDY suffered from somewhat unchecked booziness and a lack of balance in how it threw around its robust malty characteristics. 

Founders Imperial Stout (10.5% ABV)

This seasonal specialty of Founders' only blesses us with its presence every January and February, and given that it had clocked in at #28 on RateBeers' Best Beers Overall list for 2013,  I eagerly grabbed a bottle off the shelf when I saw it this winter at Good Beer NYC (422 East 9th St, New York, NY 10009 - 212-677-4836). 

It poured a perfectly impermeable black, the slightest tan ring hovering around the surface's edge. The second my nose got even remotely close to the glass, an enormous chocolate-coffee wall of aroma greeted it. Each deadly smooth sip and swallow of this silky, satisfyingly robust brew tasted like an entire bar of bitter dark chocolate melting in your mouth. Assertive, but not obtrusive, bitter coffee-ground taste danced around the edges. As it warmed, it wore its high alcohol content well, not at all unpleasantly giving off a heady wafting of luscious, malty chocolate. I couldn't get enough! My palate kept returning to that amazing dense dense dense chocolate body ensconced in perfectly calibrated lactic-coffee bitterness. Any place their could be a stylistic flaw - too heavy, too sweet, too boozy - there was nothing but uniform, astounding quality. All said, it was simply one of the best beers I'd ever tasted, easily ascending into my all time top 5 with a 4.75/5.

Founders Kentucky Breakfast Stout (11.2% ABV) - 2013 Edition Bottle

Now, it was on to the 10-ton gorilla in the room - Founder Kentucky Breakfast Stout, known colloquially in the beer community as "KBS". This year, it cooly checked in at #4 on both RateBeer and BeerAdvocate's Best Beers lists, an echelon that it has habitually inhabited for some time now. KBS results from taking the base Breakfast Stout with its brewed-in chocolate, coffee, and oats, then aging it for a year in oak barrels that once held bourbon. To say that it "sounds tasty" is to exercise extreme powers of understatement.

Its label sported Wild West font proclaiming the "The Amazing Kosmicki's Highly Acclaimed KBS - A Flavored Stout - Is Good for Everything a Flavored Stout Ought to be Good For". Between the hype, the pedigree, and this playful packaging, I was more than inclined to buy that claim. As with every single other one of Founders Imperial Stouts, this one poured obsidian, but also exhibited motor-oil-like viscosity that seemed to weigh down on the faint tan coffee ring on its surface. Super-rich dark chocolate and dark roast coffee aromas intertwined gorgeously in the air hanging above the glass. Sipping revealed a heavy, round, smooth, boozy brew, with rich dark chocolate backed up with some wild, spicy cacao nib action. The solid mouth carbonation on display acted as an interesting counterpoint to the incredible oatmeal smoothness. Bourbon-edged chocolate lead into deadly smooth maltiness, ending in a boozy and bitter chocolate-coffee finish. More and more bourbon assertiveness arose as it warmed, which actually slightly diminished the overall balance for this brew. Definitely impressive in many respects - mostly the chocolate-coffee aromatic interplay, the interestingness of the cacao nib flavors, and the multi-faceted pleasantness of its mouthfeel. However, it lacked the head-scratchingly-great balance that the Imperial Stout exhibited and didn't quite stick the landing on the bourbon-derived aromas, thereby earning a 4.25/5.

Interestingly, I also have the chance that same evening to try another bourbon-barrel-aged-Founders-Imperial, Founders Doom (10% ABV). The differentiating factor, of course, was the base style - Doom was an Imperial IPA, a hoppy style not often associated with bourbon-barrel-aging, and not an Imperial Stout like KBS. Regardless, it was interesting seeing how the same technique could have such drastically different end effects on different starting beers.

Doom poured an orange-amber color, with one finger of head recedes to sticky bubbles. Bourbon, butter, and praline aromas dominated the nose, with a bit of apricot-like toffee sneaking through. So far, unorthodox, but certainly not bad. Sipping revealed a medium to heavy brew, with tons of butter and bourbon-y caramel, then rich bourbon-y brown sugar malts on the border surrounding the faintest bitter hop note in the middle. That bitter note was the only evidence that there had ever been anything hoppy about this project. The close was a buttery fade into some slight bitterness. At this point, two sips in, I certainly wasn't enjoying Doom, but I didn't hate it either. But then it kept warming up, and the butter flavors started to dominate, and the whole thing became irreparably foul, drowned in a morass of butyric acid and cringe inducing alcoholic heat. Every place where the bourbon-barrel-aging seemed to have coaxed delicious aspects out in the KBS, there was instead just bourbon-y butter flavor. A very disappointing beer - I paid $16 for a 22oz bottle, and ending up drain-pouring at least $12 of that. One of the only missteps I'd ever had from Founders, but a glaring one, earning a 3/5 overall.

A few weeks later, I got the chance to move past this awful Founders memory by replacing it with a new one - a 1+ year aged version of Founders KBS on-tap at the Downtown Bar & Grill (160 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY, 11201 - 718-625-2835). This draught came from the 2012 edition of KBS, and was 14 months old at the time I had it.

The appearance was, expectedly, the same. The aroma, however, had definitely changed - very oaky bourbon came to the fore, with some toffee, instead of the coffee and chocolate dominated opening salvo that had come through in the fresh 2013 batch. The mouthfeel was round, medium-heavy, with the taste of cocoa flitting around the edges of a heavy, sweet malt. Some dried stone fruit cropped up at this point as well. The bourbon-y booze of the fresh KBS was tamped down here, replaced with more coconut and oak flavors. It swallowed to sweet honeyed malts with some more oak, coconut, and bourbon, rounding out with some dark chocolate lactic smack at the end. All together, KBS had grown more muted in flavor in its 1+ years of repose, but also became more drinkable, smooth, and sedate. While the aged batch was still tasty, I absolutely prefer KBS fresh - those emblematic cacao nib and coffee sparks fade over time, leaving less interesting coconut and oak in their place.

At this point, I've been fortunate enough to not only try most of Founders' Imperial Stouts, but also to find them uniformly excellent. The only "white whale" left on that list is the famed Canadian Breakfast Stout. This maple-syrup-inflected exemplar came off a limited bottling run in 2011 to spark absolute fervor in the beer-nerd community. For two years it regularly ranked as high if not higher than KBS at RateBeer and BeerAdvocate. Someday, I hope to have the chance to try it and see how it stacks up against its clearly quality brethren. Until then, I guess I'll just have to make do with the others...