San Diego Beer Week opened on Friday, November 6, and San Diego’s first craft brewery marked the occasion with a fitting release. Karl Strauss Brewing Company brought back its award-winning Golden Stout for 2026, the seventh consecutive year for a beer that has become one of the most dependable signals that dark beer season has arrived in the county.

Golden Stout is a trick of the eye and a good one. It pours golden, not black, because it skips the roasted malts that give a traditional stout its color. What it keeps is the stout character: rich coffee, bittersweet chocolate, and soft vanilla, wrapped in a full, smooth body and finishing just sweet enough, as the brewery describes it. The 2026 edition is brewed with coffee from San Diego-based Better Buzz Coffee Roasters, plus Ghanaian cocoa nibs, vanilla beans, and Columbus hops. At 7.5% ABV it is a proper cold-weather pour, and the brewery lists it as a Ridiculously Limited Release, so it will not hang around all winter.

The beer has the medals to back up the hype. Golden Stout won a Bronze Medal in the Coffee Beer category at the 2026 World Beer Cup, and took Silver in the same category in 2024. That is two World Beer Cup medals in three years for a beer that looks like a blonde ale in the glass, which is exactly the point Karl Strauss has been making with it since the first release.

This year’s coffee switch is worth noting for regulars. Earlier editions of Golden Stout brewed with Bird Rock Coffee Roasters, another San Diego roaster. The 2026 version moves to Better Buzz, keeping the coffee local while giving the beer a slightly different roast character. The rest of the recipe stays the same, and the brewery is donating 1% of the beer’s California retail sales to Restaurants Care, the nonprofit that supports restaurant workers in crisis.

Finding it should not be hard this week. Golden Stout is available on draft at Karl Strauss’ nine Southern California brewpubs, including the four San Diego County locations in 4S Ranch, Carlsbad, Downtown, and Sorrento Mesa. It is also out in four-packs of 16-ounce cans at the brewpubs and at retail shops across California, Arizona, and Nevada. The brewery’s beer finder at karlstrauss.com/find-karl can point you to the nearest stockist.

If you are building a Beer Week plan around it, the Downtown and Sorrento Mesa brewpubs are the easiest stops for a central San Diego crawl, and the Carlsbad location pairs well with a North County taproom day. Golden Stout is the kind of beer that rewards a slow pour and a second look: golden in the glass, stout in the sip, and gone from shelves sooner than you expect.