Big, Medium and Small Porters at Revolution

The fiance and I went to dinner at Revolution last night with a couple of friends. I've been a big fan of their whole operation since trying their beer at a festival early on and the first time I ate there.

I'm a big fan of their Eugene Porter and it just so happened that they had two additional versions of it available last night. "Hugene" and "Weegene", first and second runnings off of the standard Eugene recipe. Eugene is a substantial beer already at 7%, so the Hugene was in fact "huge" at 10.6% and the Weegene was still a 4.7% beer.

We ordered a couple 4oz pours of Hugene after we'd finished with dinner and our server was nice enough to bring us some small samples of the Weegene as well. (And I still had a half glass or so of the standard Eugene.) It was definitely a unique opportunity to try a vertical sampling of different beers all created with the same grain bill.

The Hugene definitely had the hallmarks of a first running-only beer. Massive chocolate, raisin and roast flavors were supported by an appropriate amount of residual sweetness without any hot alcohols or heavy astringency. The Weegene had some of the some chocolate notes, but definitely showed more of the roast / astringency character to be expected from a sparge. Both were well-made beers, but the big version was excellent. I haven't had an Imperial Porter in the recent past, so I also appreciated the difference between that and an Imperial Stout. The highly roasted and grain bitterness character of the stout takes a back seat to the chocolate and dark fruit flavors in the porter, making for a very drinkable beer...

I love the Chicago beer scene.