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At 5 p.m. this evening, the Charleston Beer Exchange will be placing last year's vintage of a classic fan favorite on the growler station:  Sierra Nevada's Bigfoot barleywine.

From the CBX blog:

Bigfoot is one of the most popular beers to age and this will be a great opportunity to see how the 2009 is coming along!  Unlike some of our other Tuesday features, this one is quite a bargain, especially at 9.6% ABV!  Both the 2010 and 2009 will be available simultaneously so if you really want to have fun try a growler of both!

Hailing from Chico, CA, Sierra Nevada is probably most well-known for its ubiquitous green-labelled Pale Ale.  That said, they are a great example of how one craft brewery can run the gamut from being a crowd pleaser to getting beer geeks all hot and bothered with their growing variety of smaller batch beers (one recent one of note being Life & Limb, a collaboration with another big name in craft beer, Dogfish Head). Their secret is simple:  just make great beer.

Bigfoot is a release that geeks drool over, but could be a great jumping-off point for the casual beer drinker that wants to broaden their horizons a bit.  It holds impressive ratings, with an A- from BeerAdvocate, and a 99 from Ratebeer.  After cracking open a bottle of '09 over the weekend that I've been patiently aging (or that got lost in the back of the fridge, either way), I can tell you that this stuff is drinking great!

Charleston Beer Exchange is located at 14 Exchange Street downtown.