(Chicago, IL) – Goose Island Beer Co. recently unveiled its schedule for next year.

It’s certainly a growing list. Readers will be happy to know that Goose Island Bourbon County Brand Coffee Stout will be returning for one thing with a new coffee blend. Bourbon County Rare was a one-and-done beer and won’t be back. Bourbon County Vanilla appears to be out as well in 2011. Here is more commentary from Brand Manager, Adam Jones Lilly, on Beer Advocate this past weekend:

“Big John is a new imperial stout the brewers have made with cacao nibs.

King Henry is a barleywine aged in bourbon barrels.

Bourbon County Brand Coffee Stout will be different in 2011 as it will be made with a different coffee from Intelligentsia – Los Inmortales blend. The brewers plan to change the coffee every year so the beer will be different every year.

Fleur 4 packs will be out starting in April, and will immediately become a staple in at least my fridge.

Pepe Nero is a black Belgian style farmhouse ale that comes out in January, everyone at Goose Island is very excited for that one to be a year round offering. Some of you got to try it last year when we released it in draft, more of you will get a chance to try it now.

Madame Rose, Juliet, and Lolita release dates will be announced when the brewers tell us they are ready. Due to the complexities of aging in wood with wild yeasts and large amounts of fruit we have no easy way of predicting how long the beers will take to reach the maturity and flavor profile the brewers expect. So instead of creating undue stress for everyone by putting a release date out and then blowing past it we’ll just let everyone know when they are ready.

Beyond what’s on the published calendar there are a handful of other beers that have been considered for packaging or kegging but there are no hard and fast details I can share with you yet. As details become solidified for anything else I’ll share them with you.”

And there’s even more…

“All three of the beers [Madame Rose, Juliet, and Lolita] were bottled. We only kegged a small amount of draft for our own promotional uses, not for retail sale. If you are looking to drink the beer in the on-premise channel, it will be in 650ml bottles.

The 2010 vintages of Madame Rose, Juliet, and Lolita will be available in on premise bars and restaurants. The beers just started shipping out of the wholesalers at the very end of the work week this week. In the interest of letting people know where they can go drink these, on Monday we intend to add a list to our website of the on-premise accounts that we know have the beer for sale [ed. note: there is no such list up as of Tuesday afternoon]. At this point the only one I know for sure that has received them is Jake Melnick’s as they have all three listed as available on beermenus.com as of yesterday. Good excuse to go get some barbecue this weekend.

As to bottles showing up in the off-premise this weekend I really can’t say why it happened only that it wasn’t supposed to. I’m guessing it was just an honest mistake due to a failure in communication somewhere. All the same I’ve notified our sales management for the region, but since it is a holiday weekend our folks are taking a well deserved rest and they won’t get into really solving anything until Monday. Mistakes inevitably happen, some more may leak out before we can fix the leak or they may not. Hope that clears things up with regard to what has been happening this weekend.”