Beer Review: Old Rasputin — Take my wallet, just don’t hurt me

This has to be the fiercest beer found in “regular-folks” circulation at grocery stores — you of course can get much odder, harsher beers at specialty stores and Trader Joe’s, but this is as far as you can go into dark cheek-biting beers that are stocked next to the baloney at Ralph’s. So I suspect that this beer is to potent stout beers as Avril Lavigne is to punk rock.  This beer is also the next in my Macarthur-Genius-Award winning series on Beers Whose Artwork Can Kick Your Ass.  And in this case, steal your soul and possibly lead to a communist revolution in your very home.  For those keeping track, this is Part 6 in the series, which includes four malt liquors, a viking, and now an indestructible quasi-priest with a serious beard.

And, I might add, serious cheek bite.  Holy mouth burn, does this beer bite!   You may want to go over your tongue with a pumice stone for a few minutes before drinking, just to warm up.  Certainly it’s not the biggest offender out there — specialty store stouts could bite your cheek twice as hard, I’m sure.  Somewhere, somebody is probably brewing some prototype Nuclear Stout that contains so much hops that not even light can escape, a beer that will blast your cheeks into next October, where they will suddenly reappear after you’ve learned to cope without them, reattach to your face and hurt like hell for the next twenty years.  But as far as beers that you can readily find during a trip to buy diapers, this is pretty sharp.  Not a bad taste, though — I do like stouts quite a bit (Guinness being my all-time favorite beer) and so it was definitely a good diversion from the usual horse pee I drink for entertainment’s sake on this site.  But I must ashamedly admit I bought it more for the label, once again suckered in by soul-less commercialism.  Isn’t that how Rasputin would have wanted it?