Illinois Brewery Has Best Domestic Stout for St. Patrick's Day

With St. Patrick’s Day upon us perhaps you’ll want to celebrate beyond green beer. You’re more mature these days. Instead of beer with green dye, why not take a more authentic approach to Irish revelry with a proper stout. Guinness would be the standard, and is always a fantastic choice. But Illinois is blessed to be the home of an elite stout that has garnered attention everywhere.

Goose Island brewing in Chicago has created a stout that has been successful enough it has blossomed into a whole line of variations. All delicious and exquisite.

google maps street view - goose island taproom - chicago

Bourbon County Stout was born out an idea in the mid 1990’s to put a Goose Island product in a discarded Jim Beam bourbon barrel and let it age. This wasn’t something that breweries were doing at the time, even small craft breweries like Goose Island. Stout lends itself to the bourbon hints easily and the styles complement each other. There are countless stouts aged in bourbon barrels these days. Goose Island did it first, and arguably still have the best version.

Rick Kern

Part of the beauty of Bourbon County was each year’s product was its own vintage. Some years certain flavors stood out. Other years the smoothness was extra velvet. I knew people that purchased it and let it age in their basement for as much as five years (for peak flavor).

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These days Bourbon County has been so successful that the 2024 versions include: Vanilla Rye, Macaroon Stout, a Special Rare, and stouts aged in Old Fitzgerald barrels (Heaven Hill Distillery), or one aged in Weller barrels (Buffalo Trace Distillery), or even Bardstown barrels (Willet Distillery). Next year it will be something different and inventive that will have fans lined up to by a bottle or even a case.

On St. Patrick’s Day have a stout. Sample what Goose Island did before anyone else and start a new tradition.

LOOK: Best Beers From Every State

To find the best beer in each state and Washington D.C., Stacker analyzed January 2020 data from BeerAdvocate, a website that gathers user scores for beer in real-time. BeerAdvocate makes its determinations by compiling consumer ratings for all 50 states and Washington D.C. and applying a weighted rank to each. The weighted rank pulls the beer toward the list's average based on the number of ratings it has and aims to allow lesser-known beers to increase in rank. Only beers with at least 10 rankings to be considered; we took it a step further to only include beers with at least 100 user rankings in our gallery. Keep reading to find out what the best beer is in each of the 50 states and Washington D.C.

Gallery Credit: Angela Underwood