Goose Island Bourbon County Stout Goes Year-Round

The calculated risk of innovation has been a hallmark of Goose Island throughout its tenure as Chicago’s largest brewery, and was the driving force behind the development of the brewery’s coveted Bourbon County Stout. The recent lease of a new barrel warehouse on AB’s dime has allowed Goose Island to double the size of its barrel program and will soon lead to Bourbon County Stout being made available available year-round. This news will be received well by beer enthusiasts who sometimes wait in lines for hours just for the privilege of purchasing a bottle.

"We’re growing at a very aggressive rate," reflected Laffler, wowed by the changes that happening around him. "We just got this whole warehouse and it’s already full and we’re saying, ‘Great, now how are we going to double it?’ You can’t go to beer school for barrel-aging. It doesn’t exist. I know, I actually called. We’re always on the edge of knowing what we’re doing. Over time we semi-figure it out, then we expand it radically, which makes it really exciting. We were doing that before the buyout, and now we’re doing it even more aggressively. When I started here, we had sixty barrels. Now we have twelve hundred bourbon barrels and north of a thousand wine barrels."  (Full details here)