Something magical happens when a brewer lets a beer sit in a wooden barrel for years. An ordinary beer can become extraordinary, taking on the flavors of wood, bacterium, and, quite literally, time. These are beguiling beers and this weekend Seattle’s drinkers have access to one of the best collections of wood-aged beers in the country.

Brouwer’s Café in Fremont is currently hosting their 13th annual Big Wood Festival, a weekend-long party that takes over the famous beer bar’s taps with over 50 barrel-aged beers. Some of the best breweries in the world are represented on this weekend’s remarkable tap list. Are you ready for 15-percent Imperial Stout aged in whiskey barrels? Or a sour wild ale brewed with sumac, elderflower, and elderberries?

The answer, of course, is yes.

I visited last night’s opening and recommend you loosely follow my itinerary: start with low-alcohol funky beers, move on to fruited sours, stop for a palate-cleansing IPA, and then finally take on the boozy barrel-aged monster stouts.

I started with Arthur, an exquisitely balanced saison from the Vermont brewery Hill Farmstead. It had notes of lime and grass that were wrapped in a musty barnyard funk. Up next was Upright Brewing’s Ives Blend, a Lambic-style open-fermented sour that was tart with note of cedar.

Then I moved on to fruited sour territory, with North Fork’s Electric Strawberryland, a tart sour with a fresh strawberry flavor and perfumey berry nose. Next was Propolis Brewing’s Keir, a barrel-aged brett saison with black currants that was musty, spicey, a little bit hot with alcohol and dried berries. I would avoid getting DCB’s sour, which was curiously brewed with corn, pineapple, cloves, and cinnamon. It was dripping with the flavor of butter, a sign that either the beer had gone bad or perhaps it was just a bad idea to begin with.

Before tackling a barrel-aged stout, I took a palette cleanse with Cloudburst Brewing’s Flash in the Pan IPA, which was served on cask and had the fruit flavors of hops, the mellow smoothness of a cask beer, and the cleaning bitterness I needed before my Big Wood journey continued.

Then on to the dark beers, starting first with Burial Brewing’s the Extinction of Useless Light, a sour quad that had been aged in both a rum barrel and a wooden foudre (a type of massive wooden barrel). It was thick with the flavors of dark fruit, vanilla, brown sugar, and molasses. Then on to Holy Mountain’s bourbon barrel-aged Bonne Nuit, a Belgian holiday ale that every single person at my table hated. They detested it. But I slowly grew to like it. It was nutty, sweet like candied sugar, and heavy in bourbon sweetness. It was far from the easy-drinking beers that most Americans spend their life drinking, but that’s the point of Big Wood.

I encourage you to visit with a few friends who you don’t mind sharing glassware with, as the real fun of Big Wood is getting to taste as many of the festival’s small pours (which range from $4 to $10 for a small glass) as possible. Order a big pile of Pommes Frites, surround it with these cute little glasses of aged beer, and explore just how weird beer can get.