Now let’s turn entirely away from hops, something I didn’t think beer could do. Deep Winter , a stout from Karben4, uses coffee to entirely replace the bittering function of hops. K4 brewmaster Ryan Koga is a malt maestro, but forgoing the hop yin entirely for the malt yang seemed impossible before my first sip of Deep Winter. It returns on draft early next year, thank goodness.

I was torn which of the dozens of great beer I sampled at O’so Brewing’s seventh anniversary party to make a beer of the year. There were so many great, weird beers pointing the way toward a sour, funky reinvention of what has been a solid but mostly traditional Wisconsin brewery. But I’m settling on a beer I think we might actually see on Madison shelves in 2015: Bourbon Barrel Imperial Night Train . Remnants from the brewery-only bottle sale in November hit shelves in Madison and Milwaukee, and the Plover brewery’s barrel program is accelerating rapidly, so it’s possible we’ll see more bottles brought to us rather than the other way around. I haven’t cracked my bottles yet, but on tap BBINT was a rich, velvety beer that drinks like a classic bourbon barrel stout: dark and roasty coffee-chocolate bitterness balanced by sweet vanilla-bourbon flavor, with layers of dark fruit lurking under all of it. If any of the coconut variant, with a perfect tropical twist on the base beer, turns up in Madison, sell your firstborn to get a bottle.