Review: Costco's 2024 Vintage Ale Is Easy On The Palate And The Budget

Costco provides quality at a great price with its Kirkland Signature products. The wholesale giant's private-label brand encompasses everything from paper towels and laundry detergent to Kirkland Signature wines, beers, and liquors. One of the brand's most notable offerings is the barrel-aged Vintage Ale, made in partnership with Oregon's Deschutes Brewery. The product's packaging proudly notes that this community-focused Beaver State brewery produces Vintage Ale for the wholesaler. 

Prominently revealing the real companies behind Costco's alcohol is somewhat uncommon for the wholesaler, as many producers of Kirkland Signature items are kept secret, particularly when it comes to wines and spirits. However, as Deschutes is one of Oregon's premier beer makers — operating a brew pub in Portland, one of the best U.S. cities for beer lovers — Costco includes the producer front and center on the Vintage Ale label. 

Curious to try the 2024 batch of this Kirkland Signature beer offering, I ran to my nearest Costco location and picked up a couple bottles. As a certified sommelier with 20 years of experience writing and speaking about wines, spirits, and beers, I drew upon my expertise within the industry when taste-testing and reviewing Kirkland Signature Vintage Ale. Read on to see if it's worth adding a few bottles of this new release to your shopping cart the next time you are at Costco.

Drinking an aged beer is less common today than it has been in the past, with many modern breweries including expiration dates on the packaging to indicate a beer's freshness. However, aging beer was more common years ago, when beers were held in barrels to mature over long periods. These old ales and aged stouts were dark, bold, and robust, with a slight astringency from the tannins in the oak barrels. It was the kind of beer that could warm you from the inside out, making it one of the best beer styles to drink in winter. 

Of the beers produced in this manner, the stout is a rich and malty brew, with a higher alcohol content than a typical ale — generally over 7%. There are variations on the stout, including Irish stout (with Guinness being the most famous), milk stout, oatmeal stout, and imperial stout. Kirkland Signature's Vintage Ale is an American imperial stout, and this is a type of beer that can get better with age. 

Costco's Vintage Ale is brewed with dark chocolate malt, milled oats, and Dutch cocoa in its mash. After fermentation, the beer ages for nine months in barrels that were formerly used for bourbon. The taste of barrel-aged beers can change and improve with additional time in the bottle, sometimes up to a year or more. Bottle aging allows the flavors to develop further as the beer's proteins break down, changing its compounds.

Kirkland Signature's 2024 batch of Vintage Ale was available by mid-September for $9.99 per 22-ounce bottle at my Costco location near Las Vegas. For the size and price, this is a bargain compared to similarly aged American imperial stout beers. Each bottle comes packaged inside an attractive cardboard box, making it feel like you are opening a gift instead of an everyday beer. 

According to Costco management, the beer is currently being released to select warehouse locations. The packaging does not include the total quantity of Vintage Ale produced this year. However, we spoke with a Costco associate who said that locations should receive several palettes of the product, so it is likely that Deschutes Brewing made a good amount of the beer. Our bottling date was July 30, 2024, indicating that Costco gave the beer a little over a month to settle in its packaging before it was shipped it to store locations. It is a 2024 vintage-dated product, so once this year's bottling is gone, it is gone. 

After buying it, the first thing you want to do with any bottle of stout is to keep it stored upright. The aging of stout can cause sediment to accumulate in the bottle. This sediment is not harmful, as it is comprised of yeast and proteins. However, the sediment may not taste particularly good, so storing the bottle upright will ensure that this material sinks to the bottom of the bottle, instead of flowing into your glass. 

When the stout is ready to enjoy, serve it at cellar temperature, at around 55 degrees Fahrenheit. As the stout's aromas and flavors are essential to enjoying the beer, serving it too cold will mask the heady, rich aromatics. To fully appreciate the stout's full-bodied taste and robust aromas, pour it into a brandy snifter or Burgundy-style wine glass with a large bowl that narrows at the top. This style of glass will allow oxygen to come in contact with the beer in the bowl, helping release its aromatic profile while concentrating these aromas and enhancing its well-balanced flavors towards the top. 

The flavors of this stout would pair nicely with braised beef or coffee-rubbed steak. This beer could also be used as a cooking ingredient — adding Vintage Ale stout beer can upgrade Irish beef stew by intensifying the flavor, bringing roasted malty notes with espresso and dark chocolate to the classic dish. For those with a sweet tooth, enjoy this stout alongside chocolate lava cake or dark chocolate mousse. The bitterness in the beer will balance with the dessert's sweetness, creating a harmonious pairing. 

Immediately upon opening the beer, rich aromas of espresso and yeasty malt escaped the bottle, bringing heightened anticipation to the tasting. When pouring the beer into the glass, I observed it to have a lighter color than what is often found in other stouts. While it has a dark hue, it was brown instead of inky black, with a subtle garnet color laced throughout the beer. The head was foamy, but not too thick. Similarly, the beer's viscosity was on the thinner side, while still packing a hearty flavor and nice carbonation. 

The first sips revealed layers of roasted coffee beans, dark chocolate, malted milk balls, and sweet toffee. While there was the bitter astringency that the barrel's tannins lend to aging alcohols, it was not overly sharp or biting. The soft palate could be a result of limiting the aging to nine months, or the age of the used bourbon barrel, as the wood's tannins will become more polished and less pungent over multiple uses. There was balance in the beer, but the taste was definitely restrained. At this stage, the beer was not overly concentrated or highly structured. Further time in the bottle will allow the flavors to fully meld as the beer's proteins break down, which could reveal additional complexity over time. 

As the 2024 Vintage Ale is a new offering at Costco, I wanted to compare it to other leading American imperial stout beers on the market — including an option from Goose Island, which was an early adopter of bourbon barrel-aged brews. Goose Island's first batch of bourbon-barrel-aged beer was produced in 1992 using former Jim Beam barrels. These days several variants of Goose Island Bourbon County stouts are offered, and labeled with the year they're bottled.

Comparing the 2024 Vintage Ale to a 2023 bottle of Goose Island's Backyard Stout revealed more similarities than differences. Both showed sweet toffee, roasted espresso, malt, and chocolate notes. The Goose Island beer was sweeter and more robust. This intensified flavor could be attributed to spending a minimum of one year aging in barrel, compared to Costco's Vintage Ale only being aged for nine months; this extra time may have added to the Backyard Stout's overall structure and character. 

Founders Brewing Company did not pour its stout into used bourbon barrels until the 2000s. However, Founders is now one of the best-ranked breweries in the U.S., and a leader in the aged beer category.

Tasting the Costco beer next to Founders KBS was a night-and-day comparison. While both beers showed notes of chocolate, vanilla, and bitter coffee, Founders was inky, rich, and highly concentrated, with malty, herbal, smoke, and roasted coffee flavors, delivering much more bitterness. KBS was the brewery's first bourbon-barrel-aged beer, and over the years it has developed a cult following among craft beer fans who line up outside the brewery on the beer's release days. While both KBS and Vintage Ale have the same 12% alcohol content, the Kirkland Signature ale tastes like a soft porter instead of a barrel-aged stout when sipped side-by-side with the Founders specialty. The KBS has much more weight, power, and texture in comparison.

Kirkland Signature's 2024 Vintage Ale is an easy-to-drink stout with a lovely layer of sweetness that melds with classic stout notes of bitter coffee, chocolate, and roasted malt. If you are a barrel-aged stout aficionado, this beer in its current stage may not deliver the intensity and robustly bitter qualities you seek in an imperial stout. 

However, if you are interested in trying an option that will not overpower the palate — with layers of coffee, caramel, and chocolate interwoven with soft bitterness — this new batch of Kirkland Signature Vintage Ale may be to your liking. As the price is quite reasonable, pick up a few bottles and try one now, before holding on to the others for six to nine months, giving the beer time to further develop. If you go this route, store the beer in a cool, dark, dry place standing upright to best preserve its flavors.