Poured from a cellared 50F 2011 bottle to small snifter glass. Opaque black with light -brown head. Aroma is caramel, honey, floral, burnt molasses, raisins. Flavor is initially sweet with a somewhat astringent finish. Mouth feel is nice but a tad thinner than I expected but the beer opened up nicely as it warmed. Medium-light body with great carbonation. Overall, this is an exceptional brew. I a glad you helped me to remember I had this.
EDIT: Fixed spelling and reduced size of photo.
Whoops, I posted this from my iPhone. I’ll have to reduce the image size when I get home.
Well, it is a big beer 
I love the flavor of Old Rasputin. I’m still slightly bitter that they banned DeMoellen’s Rasputin. I think it made them angry and they stopped importing beer to the US.
That’s funny. I just had a bottle of that last night, too! It was definitely not my first time drinking it, though. But it had probably been a couple of years since my last time, and it seems a bit different to me. I wouldn’t say that it’s ever been a real regular for me, but I’ve drank enough of it to recall pretty clearly what it was like in the past. For one thing, that beer definitely used to be more translucent and less black in color. I used to be able to hold up a glass of it to a bright light and see through it, and it had an intense dark red color, instead of jet black, like now. There’s no question in my mind that I’m not mistaken about that, because that was one of it’s characteristics that really made it stand out from the pack. And there was a more noticeable hop character in the past, too. The overall bitterness now seems slightly lower, and there isn’t nearly as much of an identifiable hop flavor any more. Past bottlings had a more intense West Coast hop flavor, which is just barely discernible now. Of course, the bottle I bought might have been somewhat aged, and that would explain why the hop character would have become less pronounced, but that wouldn’t explain the change in color. Overall, I have to say that it’s still a pretty good beer, but I’m afraid North Coast Brewery has succumbed to popular criticism and has made it a less characterful and unique beer than it used to be, and more in line with classical style guidelines. To be honest, I’ve always thought that they should have identified that beer as a West Coast American Imperial Stout, and not a Russian Imperial Stout, due to the intense American hop character. I guess maybe they heard enough of that kind of feedback through the years and finally decided to address the issue. Now I want the old beer back. 
Oh, well.
Well, i finally picked up a bomber of the barrel aged OR for $20 at Discount liquor(discount? :cheers:
It damn well better be for that price! Holy &%^$! I’ve never had a beer in my life that I thought was worth that much, and I’m an absolute beer addict. Anyway, enjoy it!
I got their add slogan if they send me a case: There’s no disputin’ that’s Rasputin!
in case the infamous Russian car the Lada ever makes it over here I got one for them too: a whole Lada car for a whole little money 
(they can have that one for free as those things are clunkers)
