I still have the 5 gallon mini keg of the original Dark Lord I bought from Nick on 12/7/2002. We went to the Map room in Chicago the night before as Alpha Klaus had just came out. Back then there was no lottery for DL & it wasn’t bottled. As usual my wife and I were the first ones in the door. I’d ask Nick the night before if he had a mini keg of DL & Dreadnaught. I got them both and it was the last keg of DL he had available to sell. I drank the Dreadnaught about 10-11 years ago at a Christmas party with friends. I still have the DL. You can I have one of the earliest ratings of DL. I’m going to drink it & bottle some next year as it’ll be 20 years old. IMO the holy grail of beer.
Nice, I think I still have a couple of 2004s from the first DL day release, that I just happened to be in the Chicago area for. Got two cases most of which are long gone. Remember the bottom quarter of the beer being green hop/yeast sludge?