It’s creamy with a malty bite on the front of the palate that nicely complements notes of dark baking chocolate, cocoa, and buttery caramel as they evolve across the sip. The palate is less rich than the nose suggests, which is probably for the best, with the Velvet Merkin clearly adding texture to the body but also helping to scale back the booze. True to its name, this thing smells exactly like a salt-topped, chocolate-covered caramel, fresh out of the fancy box. All that carbonation recedes in time to reveal a decadent aroma dripping with notes of fudgy dark chocolate, chewy caramel, sticky vanilla bean, and a kiss of sea salt. The beer pours a characteristic pitch black but with a more generous, coffee-hued head than I’ve encountered in most bottled Proprietor’s releases.

Let’s pop the tab on this one and check it out. As the name suggests, this beer is built around Firestone’s beloved Parabola, which aged for one year in ex-bourbon barrels before being married with a portion of Velvet Merkin milk stout and infused with Madagascar vanilla beans, cocoa nib, and sea salt. For 2022, the California-based brewery has released its first-ever canned Vintage beer, Parabolita.

For over a decade now, Firestone Walker has offered an impressive variety of barrel-aged beers as part of its Proprietor’s Vintage Series, and all of those brews were available exclusively in glass bottles.

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