Where to buy: LCBO

Price: $5.95/341-millilitre bottle

Food pairings: Dark chocolate, wild game, mole sauce

The verdict: Drink a few and store some

Good things come to those who wait – even beer lovers.

While the adage obviously applies to people who enjoy fine Bordeaux vintages or single malt scotch, it might seem less evident that good beer can improve with time.

In a lot of cases, to be fair, it doesn't. In some cases, however, a year or two in the bottle can do wonders for a beer's flavour (the oldest brew I've ever had was an 11-year-old barley wine from Oregon, and it was stunning).

Just as you wouldn't stick a bottle of a lightweight wine such as a $10 sauvignon blanc into your cellar and get much improvement, you shouldn't expect much positive change from aging lighter beer styles such as pilsners. Instead, again as in the wine world, it's the biggest beers – those which are high in alcohol or heavily hopped – that tend to benefit the most.

Peering into a suds-tinged crystal ball, it seems likely that St. Ambroise Russian Imperial Stout is one of those beers that could benefit from some aging.

This potent, thick brew comes from one of the oldest craft breweries in the country, Montreal's McAuslan Brewing, founded in 1989. It's got a heady aroma of molasses, espresso and vanilla – the latter from the broken-down bourbon barrels which were put into the aging tanks with the beer.

The flavours live up to the aromas in the brew. There's also a bit of a burn from the alcohol (this checks in at 9.1 per cent). Unlike some high-alcohol beers, this isn't particularly sweet. It also has an extremely bitter, almost acrid finish. Some of that bitterness is from the dark roasted malts used in the brew, but much of it comes from the mostly-American hops used.

The beer is a tribute to the strong English stouts favoured by Russian empress Catherine the Great in the 1700s. Those beers were also highly hopped and high in alcohol to withstand the voyage from England to Russia.

Brewery president Peter McAuslan, who came up with the recipe for the brew along with his wife and brewer, Ellen Bounsall, believes it will age well – not that he'd mind at all if people drank it now.

"I think it will become more subtle over time. All the elements will come together into one package a little more," McAuslan predicts.

In many aged beers, time softens the burn from higher alcohol, bitterness and aroma from hops can fade and the beer becomes a more well-integrated whole. Given that this one is already a pleasure to drink, patient drinkers should be amply rewarded.

And, speaking of patience, it's a brew McAuslan and Bounsall waited 20 years to make. "We originally thought about making an imperial stout just after we opened the brewery, but we thought it might be a little radical for the market, so we did an oatmeal stout instead. Now, things have changed."

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josh@thestar.ca