This collaboration brew with Stone Brewing founder and CEO Greg Koch, was brewed along with Wil Wheaton, and Drew Curtis. You can read more about them here if you'd like. According to the bottle, the beer was brewed with cocoa, pecans, wheat, rye, and 1/4 of it was aged bourbon barrels.
This beer was something I found this past summer on vacation in Delaware. I had this beer on my wishlist on Untappd. While searching out for new brews while I was there, I came across some brews local to the area while finding this by dumb luck. I made sure that I was careful to bring it home. I didn't want to spend $12 for this 22 oz. bomber bottle only to have it break on the way home. It rode along with my wife, shotgun. Thanks for keeping it safe babe! :)
 |
| L for love!!! |
Before reviewing this beer, there are 2 beer lessons to take away from this blog tonight, besides the review of this beer:
1. Always make sure you have clean and proper glassware.
2. Beer profiles change as a beer warms (I've noted this before, in previous blogs, but if you're new, now consider yourself educated!)
I'll speak to each of these while reviewing.
The pour of this beer was an opaque, jet black with a thin, caramel bead of head at the top. The head disappeared rather quickly on my glass, while my brother-in-law (whose glass had laser etching at the bottom) had a glass with a thin layer throughout the hour-long tasting session.
From an aroma standpoint, there was a lot of roasted malts, along with some strong boozy caramel and definite bourbon notes. I also got some brown sugar aroma while my brother-in-law said he noted some cherry, which reminded him slightly of Mad Elf from Troegs.
This beer being a heavyweight, changed flavors from cold to warm. It also changed in aroma slightly too.
When cold, this beer simply had lots of layers, very nondescript ones for me, with possibly some nutty and sweet pecan in the middle of the sip. It was just hard to differentiate between what I was getting from it. The finish was a sweet, candy-like lingering one that coated and warmed the mouth and throat.
As the beer warmed up, I told my brother-in-law that I felt the alcohol was just too pungent and in your face compared to when it was cold. He couldn't disagree more. See point #1 above and the picture below:
 |
| His glass on the left, and my stout glass on the right. Note the distinct difference in head retention. |
I had my trusty stout glass while he used a laser-etched 16 oz. DFH signature glass. He and I swapped and, interestingly enough, there were distinct aromatic differences as well as some taste ones too. My beer was almost all boozy, astringent caramel while his still had some of the more pleasant notes I mentioned earlier. Note to self, make sure glasses are clean when drinking a beer like this. I hand-clean each of my beer glasses, but maybe this one slipped by quality control. Shame on me...
I busted out the thermometer for scientific purposes and 30 minutes in the beer was at 60 degrees.
 |
| ...proof... |
Finally, at the 30 minute mark, there was a pleasant and sweet caramel flavor and the cocoa also came through. The alcohol mellowed significantly with a prolonged cocoa finish.
I checked the beer again and when it reached 66 degrees, it was getting to the point where we just needed to finish it before things turned south. There was still a pleasant caramel and cocoa flavor to this beer at the end.
Sorry for the long-winded review, but there was just a lot here to make note of. All things considered, in my humble opinion, the beer was good, but not worth some of the hype I saw online in different beer threads and reviews. RateBeer has this in the 99th percentile, but I wouldn't put it there for my taste. This is one that you should definitely try, but if you find it and the price point is too much for you to justify spending, I can't say you're missing anything here.
 |
| In honor of cookie baking tonight, a 3.5/5 rating will suffice |
No comments:
Post a Comment