Goose Island's 2024 Bourbon County release review: Everything you expect from one of the best aged stouts

Black Friday is a very weird date on the American calendar.

It marks an annual day of torment for our retail workers, an opportunity for the drunkest of uncles to sleep off the shenanigans of the dinner before and marks the NFL’s latest attempt to colonize any and all gaps in the sporting schedule each winter.

There are good things about it, however. Namely the annual release of one of the best barrel-aged beers in the world.

That honor belongs to Goose Island and its line of Bourbon County stouts. These big, boozy brews have become a fixture of Black Friday, selling out early at bottle shops as dads across a tired nation look for a brief respite from scouring local Targets for $49 televisions. Getting home and cracking a big, boozy bottle of the whiskey-tinged beer was an honored tradition of mine toward the end of Novembers even before I began writing for USA Today — assuming I could find it.

Being a beer writer (of little to no repute) has brought an additional wonderful tradition to my plate; Goose Island’s annual media tasting. There, beer experts hang out with some of the folks responsible for this year’s Bourbon County crop: company president Todd Ahsmann, senior brewmaster Daryl Hoedtke, senior innovation manager Mike Siegel and brand manager John Zadio. Over the course of about two hours, they invited us to drink entirely too much beer and ask any questions we may have.

“I think we’re in a golden age of barrel aged stouts.” Ahsmann told us, not quite tooting his own horn. “There’s a lot more of it out there. There’s a lot better barrel aged beers out there.” 

“Working with the best bourbon countries in America is our goal, and we have been,” added Siegel. “These [beers] are two-plus years in the making across the whole family. We’ve had a lot of discussions and plans. This is very deliberate.”

You can see the prep work in the lineup. The bourbon barrels come from quality distilleries like Buffalo Trace, Angel’s Envy and, for the first time in my Bourbon County experience, King of Kentucky — a big-bodied, high-powered limited release that is wildly out of my price range.

Look, that all sounds awesome. Let’s just get right into it.