Stone 6th Anniversary Porter has officially joined the brewery’s 20th Anniversary Encore Series.

Back in 2002, the Stone celebrated their 6th anniversary, not with an India pale ale, but with a porter. In this case, Stone Smoked Porter the brewery kicked up “three notches” with the addition of more hops and more malt. The beer was then aged on French and American oak. The result was a big, bold beer, that was rather scare at the time. In 2016, there will be a little more to go around.

There’s a point in even our brewing lives when we came to realize that no matter how much we wanted to, we couldn’t realistically add anymore hops to our recipe. While our hop threshold is greater than most, it happened on the onset of our 6th Anniversary. Up until then, all of our anniversary beers had been increasingly amped up versions of our 1st Anniversary IPA. Which all of you know as simply Stone IPA. Instead of completely abandoning our set-in-stone stance on making big bold beers, we continued with this theme of making Increasingly more intense versions of our existing line of beers. This time we turned our attention to Stone Smoked Porter -a beer we had in our lineup since our first year. When it came to modifying our recipe. we went against the “less is more” approach and cranked it up three notches. This entailed adding more malt and more hops and conditioning it on French and American oak to add notes of toffee, cherries, dried berries and vanilla. Such noble yet gutsy experimentation doesn’t go without some mishap and at one point this smoky dark·as·night wonder was shooting out of the fermenter like a fire hose because of an unsuccessful attempt to clear a valve jammed with oak chips. Luckily the beer’s fate didn’t entirely empty down the drain, because the Stone 6th Anniversary Porter proved to fans, with its distinctive smokiness and chocolaty, coffee·like complexity, that we can brew a remarkable amount more than just awesome IPAs.

Stone 6th Anniversary Porter is a 22 ounce bottle and draft offering. Recent releases in the Encore Series include 12th Anniversary Bitter Chocolate Oatmeal Stout, and Vertical Epic 08.08.08.

Style: Smoked Porter (Oak Aged)

Hops: Tomahawk

Availability: 22oz Bottles, Draft.

Distribution: AK, AL, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, DE, FL, GA, HI, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, MT, NC, NE, NH, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OH, OR, PA, RI, SC, TN, TX, VA, VT, WA and Puerto Rico

International Distribution: Australia; Alberta and British Columbia, Canada; Germany; Hong Kong; Japan; Korea; Mexico; Panama; the Philippines; Singapore; Sweden; Thailand; United Kingdom

Release: Mid-April, 2016

8% ABV