Every year since its inception in 1992, we strive to honor the original Bourbon County Stout recipe. And, 30 years later, we continue Gregory Hall’s legacy and passion for making the best beer possible, starting with the best barrels the bourbon trail has to offer. This year, our Imperial Stout is aged and blended from freshly emptied bourbon barrels from Heaven Hill, Four Roses, Wild Turkey, and Buffalo Trace distilleries. Expect flavors of vanilla, dark chocolate, toffee, molasses, almond, and dried fruit.

In 2010, we released the first-ever Bourbon County Stout variants and our Goose Island Bourbon County Coffee Stout has been a fan favorite ever since. For the first time since 2017, we brought back a coffee variant this year in partnership with our friends and neighbors Intelligentsia Coffee. Intelligentsia relies on Burundi for some of the cleanest, sweetest coffees in the world that ultimately complement the quality and tasting notes of Bourbon County Stout. The specific coffee blend combined with our Imperial Stout is called Turihamwe, which means “together”, and is a perfect tribute to all the hands that go into making it – from the female coffee farmers in Burundi that produced the blend, to our friends at Intelligentsia, the first brand we worked with on a variant back in 2010. The result of this “togetherness” is another exceptional coffee variant featuring rich chocolate, coffee, and caramel flavors that will appeal to coffee drinkers and beer lovers alike.

For years, brewers at Goose Island have brainstormed ways to incorporate figs in Bourbon County Stout, but faced a daunting task due to their subtle flavor. After fresh thinking from members of the Goose Island E-commerce team, Melissa Alleguez and Ryan Hubona crafted a recipe inspired by Melissa’s childhood memories of stealing fig cookies out of her grandma’s cookie jar during her summers on Lake Michigan. And thus, the fig cookie and graham cracker-inspired Sir Isaac’s Stout was created. Highlighting the dried fried profiles extracted from the bourbon in the barrels, our brewers used Black Mission figs (10,000 pounds of them, to be specific) to create this variant resulting in characteristics of dried fruit, honey, molasses, and citrus, all reminiscent of the classic fig cookie sold on shelves today.