Old Guardian - Extra Hoppy (2015)
(Batch of Old Guardian - Extra Hoppy)

2015 Odd Year Release

This one-time-only release, part of our “Odd Beers for Odd Years” series, takes a downright excessive brew into uncharted, extra-hoppy territory. We did this by dry-hopping it with Azacca hops, essentially turning an American barley wine into a triple IPA. Azacca adds big candied-fruit character plus pineapple and citrus aromatics to the base beer’s onslaught of toffee, tropical fruit and vanilla flavors and robust bitterness. Like its Classic counterpart, this delicious oddity will evolve into an even more glorious beer with age, challenging your ability to wait any longer to drink it.

2015 is an odd year, so we followed our five-year tradition of brewing a variation of the classic Stone Old Guardian Barley Wine recipe. This year we decided to focus on an extra-hoppy version, using the classic recipe as the base. We dry-hopped the beer with a new hop variety, Azacca…a dwarf variety with a name that sort of sounds to us like an all-powerful genie who lives in a bottle (coincidently enough) that was recently developed in Yakima Valley, Washington, and formerly known by the decidedly less genie-like name of "13-AD-483." We’ve used it before, most notably in our collaboration beer Beachwood/Heretic/Stone Unapologetic IPA, but this is the first opportunity we’ve had to really showcase the Azacca hop at this level.