A few days ago Stone Brewing (Escondido, CA) announced that they were going to switch things up a bit. Starting in 2011, and continuing every odd year after, a couple of beers would go “Belgian”. Namely the Russian Imperial Stout, and the Old Guardian Barleywine. Apparently the Stone beer drinking breathren didn’t take that so well. Or, not at all actually. Prompting Greg Koch, CEO of Stone to write this on the Stone Blog:
When we’re right, we’re right. And this, we suppose, is a chance to own up to that. It’s sort of a “They told us so…but we didn’t listen now did we?”
It wasn’t broken. Yet, being who we are, we couldn’t resist the urge to tinker. To mess with the “well enough” and not leave it alone. We won’t apologize, anymore than a lion would apologize for downing a gazelle, an orca would apologize for munching a seal, or marauding space aliens would apologize for enslaving humanity as dinner.
You see, sometimes we don’t notice just how right we are. But you’ve reminded us. And we got the message. Hard.
We recently announced the “Odd Beers for Odd Years” idea that explained the concept that in the “odd year” of 2011 we were going to release so-called “odd” versions of Stone Old Guardian Barley Wine and Stone Imperial Russian Stout. We thought it was a pretty cool and fun idea.
Many of you thought that idea was only slightly preferable to humanity being enslaved by space aliens. Some even wondered if that’s what had actually already happened to us at Stone (to which we say “No, that’s not happened,” but truth be told how can you really know.)
So then, what are we so right about? Well, it turns out we were already right…before the Odd Years idea. Cue: About face. Sorta.
To recap: we’ve now decided to go ahead and release the — dare we say — ‘classic’ versions of Stone Old Guardian Barley Wine (the OG OG?) and Stone Imperial Russian Stout. And, just so we don’t have to embarrass our moms with a complete retraction, we’re ALSO going to release the “Odd Beers” versions, starting with the Stone Old Guardian Belgo Barley Wine in February 2011.
Yes, we realize that some conspiracy-theorist is going to think we had this idea all along and that we were only just whipping everyone into a frenzy to get attention (as if we could do that more than some folks do it to themselves). That’s OK, they’re probably also the ones that think we’ve been commandeered by space aliens.
So, it looks like both. For 2011 at least.
