In a recent review of a pretty terrible beer I made the point that I try not to let whether or not I personally like the beer taint my opinion of the beer itself. Instead, I try to consider what the goals of the beer are, whether or not they meet those goals, how well the beer is made, and ultimately how drinkable it is, combine all that into a thumbs up or down on the beer in question, and ultimately leave it up to you if you think it's worth giving the beer a shot.

This beer is a great example of how even though this isn't really "my thing," I was nonetheless very impressed with it and wound up enjoying it quite a bit. I'm a huge fan of everything I've ever had from Great Divide, particularly their stock Yeti, so I shouldn't be too surprised that even with a beer that in the wrong hands could go incredibly wrong, they did a great job with it.

Visually it's a deep, rich black as you can see in the photo, with absolutely no light coming through it at all. On the nose it's very heavy on the raspberry up front, followed by dark chocolate and just a hint of roasted grains that you'd expect in a good stout.

Taking a taste it's all raspberry initially, specifically raspberry jam, but -- and this is key for me with fruit in beer -- it isn't overly sweet. It tastes like a really good raspberry jam you'd get at a farmer's market, and then immediately following the raspberry is a rich hit of dark chocolate that balances out the raspberry with some pleasant, but not too aggressive, bitterness. Getting this as right as they did is pretty impressive.

Basically if you think about drinking a really high-quality dark chocolate bar with raspberry, that's this beer.

After the hit of raspberry and chocolate you get an excellent more traditional stout beer flavor, end it all ends with a light lingering aftertaste of the raspberry and dark chocolate.

Again, this could have gone HORRIBLY awry but they made a believer out of me. I went into this thinking I'd hate this beer but I'm glad I have a second can of it for another night (at 9.5% this was definitely a one-beer night!), and I'm looking forward to trying both the Chai and Peanut Butter Yetis that came in the variety pack I picked up.

What led me down this road is my possibly misguided notion that it's possible to make a good Peppermint Chocolate Stout, which led me to discovering that Great Divide makes a Peppermint Bark Yeti, but unfortunately they didn't have it in my area. But I'm really glad I went ahead and picked up this variety pack because this is a seriously impressive beer.

This also gives me hope that making a Peppermint Chocolate Stout is possible and if anyone can do it well, it's Great Divide. I shall continue to hunt.

Cheers!