Karl Strauss Golden Stout is back for 2026, the seventh straight year for a 7.5% beer that drinks like a stout and pours like something else entirely. The release landed as San Diego Beer Week opened, a 10-day run the San Diego Brewers Guild lists as Nov. 6–15, 2026.
Karl Strauss calls it a Ridiculously Limited Release, and the trick is in the mash. The beer skips the roasted malts that usually turn a stout dark, then builds the rest of the profile with coffee, cocoa and vanilla. In the glass it looks golden. On the palate, the brewery promises rich coffee, bittersweet chocolate and soft vanilla in a full, smooth body that finishes just sweet enough.
What’s in the 2026 Karl Strauss Golden Stout
The 2026 edition uses coffee from San Diego’s Better Buzz Coffee Roasters, plus Ghanaian cocoa nibs, vanilla beans and Columbus hops, according to the brewery’s beer page and a Nov. 6 announcement published by Brewer Magazine.
How To Beer reports that earlier editions were brewed with Bird Rock Coffee Roasters, another San Diego roaster, and that 2026 is the switch to Better Buzz. Karl Strauss’s own Golden Stout page lists Better Buzz but does not discuss the change.
The same announcement says Karl Strauss Golden Stout won a bronze medal in the Coffee Beer category at the 2026 World Beer Cup, after a silver in the same category in 2024. Those are brewery-reported competition results; the beer page lists Coffee Beer awards without spelling out the years.
Where to find Karl Strauss Golden Stout
Karl Strauss says the beer is on draft at its nine Southern California brewpubs and in four-packs of 16-ounce cans at the brewpubs and at retail in California, Arizona and Nevada. The San Diego County brewpubs are in 4S Ranch, Carlsbad, downtown San Diego and Sorrento Mesa. The other five are in Anaheim, Corona, Costa Mesa, downtown Los Angeles and Temecula.
The brewery will donate 1% of the beer’s California retail sales to Restaurants Care, a program it describes as helping California food-and-beverage workers in crisis. To hunt down a four-pack of Karl Strauss Golden Stout, it points people to its beer finder at karlstrauss.com/find-karl. Limited seasonal beers do not linger, so if a golden stout that refuses to look the part is the Beer Week pour you want, it is worth checking stock sooner rather than later.
