• An empty bottle of 2014 Dark Lord on the festival grounds. This is what you might call “status litter.”

This year Dark Lord Day, the annual beer and metal festival that’s also the only place (and the only day) that Three Floyds Brewing of Munster, Indiana, sells its famous Dark Lord Russian imperial stout, fell on Saturday, April 26. Readers with eidetic memories will recognize that as the same sentence (with the exception of the date) that opened my Dark Lord post last year—and if you haven’t been keeping up, I’d recommend you go back and read it now. I’ll wait.

I’m not going to pretend I could get anything like a head count in my Dark Lord bottle line (Group C, for the record), but compared to the past few years, it breezed along. I’d gotten a ride to Munster with my friend Ed Knigge (you may remember him from his long tenure in Bloodyminded), and the two of us waited for just shy of an hour and a quarter.

I didn’t manage to try 2014 Dark Lord at all, in fact—not even the straight-up plebeian version (though the 2013 is still tasting great). Your golden ticket used to get you a short pour of the current batch once you’d made it back outside, but that didn’t seem to be the case this year. To be fair, I can’t remember if I was asked to surrender my ticket at the bottle-sales table or if I just lost it like a doofus. Your opinions are welcome in the comments! (Your opinions of this year’s Dark Lord, I mean, not about whether or not I’m a doofus.)

  • Fortunately the wind carried the grill smoke the other way. Smelling it would’ve made the long line feel even longer.

The wait for barrel-aged Dark Matter coffee was likewise insane, but I don’t have anything to compare it to—I can’t recall seeing that stuff for sale at DLD before. (The Chicago roaster’s offerings included bottles of Black Hole Necromancer, an iced red eye aged in cognac barrels and dipped in the same blue wax as this year’s Dark Lord.) Entirely by coincidence I’m sure, 2014 Dark Lord was brewed not with the usual Intelligentsia coffee but instead with Dark Matter’s Unicorn Blood espresso.

And a public-service announcement: Don’t carry your four-pack of Dark Lord by the handle on top. Not unless you don’t care if the bottles fall out the bottom.

  • Eyehategod front man Mike IX Williams with new drummer Aaron Hill (RIP Joey LaCaze)

Attentive readers will recall that I mentioned three pours and only named two. I’ve been holding off on the third because it was my favorite beer of the day—and yes, I realize how silly it is to have a “favorite” at a festival like this. My palate was shot from seesawing between syrupy adjunct stouts and dry, fruity sours, and I drank far too little of most of the beers I tried to form a reliable opinion.