It's hard to be patient but it's especially hard to be patient when you're waiting on a beer's flavor during aging to get exactly where you want it to be. A good beer takes time and a good brewer doesn't release a beer until it's ready. The third beer in the Ibex Rare series, The Variant, is finally ready.

It's been 533 days since The Eleventh Labor, the highly acclaimed Apricot Berliner Weisse, was released as the 2nd beer in what Schlafly then called their Ibex Series. After the success of the that beer, along with the great reviews of the initial Ibex offering, Lazy Ballerina, The Variant has some high expectations to live up to. Schlafly of course knew this and did their best to formulate the perfect recipe:

We established the Ibex Rare series to showcase what can happen when we take a no-holds-barred approach to brewing beer. Ibex Rare beers will be few and far between, but The Variant exemplifies the artistry, ingenuity and passion for the craft brewing industry that lives and breathes within the walls of the Schlafly Tap Room. This rich stout is the result of an extensive brewing process that incorporates blending and barrel-aging. As some of this beauty rested in port barrels, deep within the Ibex Cellar, other amounts of the beer spend time alongside some of the finest cocoa nibs available. The outcome is a beer that boasts extraordinary flavor, body of velvet and a color that will have you doing triple takes. - Schlafly

If the makeup of the beer sounds great, don't dawdle. They didn't produce a ton of it so there is not a lot of this beer to go around (we got bottle 672 of 5,000). A small amount of the beer is earmarked for local distribution and even smaller amounts will make it to the rest of the cities lucky enough to get Schlafly distributed there. Your best bet is to make it down to the brewery on Saturday, April 15th to guarantee you get to take a bottle home because your local bottle shop is either getting very little or none at all. The release starts at 11am and the bottles will be sold for $30 with a limit of 3 per attendee.

Tim and Justin were both lucky enough to try the beer in advance. Check out their thoughts down below.

Cheers!

Bonus Fun Fact: The strip of paper covering the cap of the beer is reminiscent of the old "Tax Stamps" used on liquor bottles prior to 1985 to indicate taxes were paid on the bottle. The release date for The Variant is April 15th...tax day in the US.