Nutista — a new and innovative stoneground nutbutter company in Carlsbad, California — is releasing a new product in collaboration with Escondido, California’s Stone Brewing.

Nutista / Stone w00tstout Nutbutter is the nutty counterpart to Stone Brewing’s revered summer seasonal and Comic-Con tribute beer, Drew Curtis / Wil Wheaton / Greg Koch Stone Farking Wheaton w00tstout. The 11.5% ABV imperial stout is made with pecans, wheat and flaked rye and aged in bourbon barrels.

Echoing the ingredients of the beer, Nutista/Stone w00tstout nutbutter is made with raw pecans, dry roasted peanuts, Belizian chocolate, bourbon-soaked malt, dry malt extract, Brazil Oberon coffee, malted rye, roasted barley, brewer’s yeast, coconut, and Himalayan sea salt.

This dark brown nutbutter features a thick-cream texture, a rich chocolate aroma, and flavors of bourbon and chocolate. It has notes of coffee, coconut and roasted malts on its finish, and takes on a fudge-like consistency when refrigerated. Nutista / Stone w00tstout nutbutter is now available for purchase at nutista.com and shop.stonebrewing.com.

“Our company’s goal,” says Nutista co-founder Tristen Cross, “is to make nutbutter much more accessible, fun, and delicious. So we make innovative, nutritious flavors that have never been done before, that have culinary flair and are super clean. The w00tstout version checks all of those boxes for us.”

Stone Brewing Executive Chairman and co-founder Greg Koch is also a co-founder of Nutista, and Koch says this new nutbutter fills an important role. “We created the w00tstout beer,” Koch notes, “in honor of all things geeky and nerdy that go with Comic-Con. Now we have nutbutters worthy of geeking out, and this particular one has a geek-beer counterpart. Nerd on!”

Stone w00tstout debuted in 2013 in conjunction with that year’s San Diego Comic-Con. The beer’s other namesakes are Drew Curtis (creator of news aggregator Fark.com creator) and Wil Wheaton (an actor in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Big Bang Theory and other film and TV productions).

This year’s San Diego Comic-Con takes place July 19-22 at the San Diego Convention Center. To celebrate the event, Stone Brewing will host its annual Hop-Con 6.0 at Stone Brewing World Bistro & Gardens – Liberty Station on July 19 from 7-11 PM. Nutista staff will be at the event to provide Hop-Con attendees with samples of w00tstout nutbutter and Nutista’s other small-batch stoneground creations.

This is the third collaboration Nutista has done with Stone: In March the company released a limited-release Nutista / Stone Totalitarian Imperial Russian Stout nutbutter, in May it released Nutista / Stone Tangerine Express IPA nutbutter, which echoed the flavors of Stone’s popular fruit-enhanced IPA.

Nutista sold its first creations in late 2017 and was founded by Cross, Koch and John Huber. A longtime advocate for healthy all-natural foods, Koch began experimenting with nut spreads six years ago. He joined forces with Cross and Huber to do for mass-market nutbutter what Stone did for “fizzy yellow” industrial beer.

“I look at nutbutter with a craft brewer mentality,” Koch says. “We’re making things ourselves and creating new versions that never existed. And we’re doing it with carefully chosen ingredients, creativity, rigid adherence to quality, and a vigorous pursuit of incredible flavor.”

Made in Carlsbad, Nutista creations contain no added cane sugar or palm oil and are slowly made in small batches (about 150 pounds) by a stoneground method. “We do things the hard way, but the right way,” Huber says. “The stoneground method is a time-consuming process, but it delivers a flavor and texture that comes roaring through when you taste it. You can’t get that quality with conventional modern-day methods.”