Have you ever tried Thomas Hardy’s Ale? If you’re new to great beer and live here in the San Francisco Bay Area, there’s a good chance you’ve never had a chance.

Sadly, it’s been at least three years since this famous English ale, once the strongest beer in Great Britain, has been available here. The importer, George Saxon, of Phoenix Imports says he’s been unable to find a distributor for the Bay Area since Conquistador Distributing folded.

This is the first beer to come out in vintages, bottled once each year with the year on the bottle, whether or not the federal government believes there can be vintage beer or not. I dug out two of my columns on Thomas Hardy, one from the first day of the new millennium and one from two years ago. Check them out here.

What brought this up is that an ace beer blogger and author, Stan Hieronymus did a vertical tasting of a number of “vintage” Thomas Hardy ales, including a bottle of the original, 1968. You can find his report here and a report of an earlier tasting by Realbeer.com here.

Full disclosure. I have a couple of bottles of Thomas Hardy from a ways back, 1988 and 1987. Haven’t opened them, gonna wait some more. These are tasty creatures.