The holidays in review

Okay, so now for the rest of the holiday roundup.  There were a few oddballs here that were sort of interesting, but I mostly focused on barleywines and three of Stone’s Vertical Epic beers.

I promise to keep more up-to-date so there’s fewer of these unsightly wall-of-text, ten-beers-at-once reviews in the future.

Barleywines

Two of the barleywines I had over winter were fairly odd themselves: Robinson’s Old Tom and Samuel Smith Yorkshire Stingo.  Both English imports, and both fairly new in the states, these are also among the weakest barleywines I’ve had.  The brewers don’t really call them barleywines, but that’s the closest label I can peg on them.  Otherwise, I just call them “good beer.”

Old Tom poured completely flat---there wasn’t even a hiss when I pried the cap off.  Flat beer is generally old beer, so I looked for a bottle date but could only find the cryptically meaningless phrase “L2366 20:24.”  It had the brown color of cola with some ruby around the edges.  The aroma had some prominent sweet barleywine flavors (raisins, molasses, and toffee) which carried over to the palate, where things started to get a little weird.  It is very rare to taste chocolate or cherries in a barleywine, and it also had a strange sarsaparilla flavor.  All very appetizing in spite of its weirdness.  It was much, much thinner than any barleywine I’ve had, but the lightness almost makes it feel like an everyday sipper.

Samuel Smith has been around forever, and are most prominently known for their oatmeal stout, imperial stout, and porter.  In the last few years they’ve started releasing an oak-aged strong ale called Yorkshire Stingo.  They reuse their barrels and actually go through the trouble of individually replacing each stave in the barrel when needed, giving a very smooth oak character.  Some of the barrels are apparently more than a century old.

Stingo basically tastes like a blonde barleywine.  I noted flavors of bright caramel, white grape skins, pudding and apples glazed in toffee.  Yes, that specific.  Maybe even taffy apple.  It tastes like what I would expect/hope a lighter barleywine would taste like after five years’ worth of cellaring, except this was only a little over two years old (brewed in 2010 and oak-aged for a year).  The English continue to make the best barleywines.

As if to illustrate that point, when I got out here to DC I was surprised to find a six-pack barleywine for under $10: Old Dominion Millennium Ale.  It is allegedly an English barleywine brewed with honey.  It is unfortunately very hoppy for an English barleywine, covering up whatever malt character there should be.  The honey is earthy and somewhat vegetal, not sweet, as if they fermented all of the sugar out.  The beer doesn’t taste bad, just unremarkable.  It has the sort of least-offensive mediocrity one can find in a barleywine, where the malt is present but forgettable and covered up by lots of (in this case, equally forgettable) hops.

Stone Vertical Epic (2010-2012)

A vertical tasting is when you have multiple consecutive years/vintages of the same beer or wine.  The idea is to compare how it changes year to year.  In 2002, Stone had this idea of brewing a special beer for each year from 2002-2012, changing the recipe each time.  Each beer was allegedly designed to hold up until December 12, 2012; on that count they seem to have planned the series poorly, as the earliest beers were IPA’s and white ales (imagine what a Blue Moon would taste like after sitting around for 10 years….yikes!).  In reality, the series was just an excuse for them to goof around with weird recipes.

I only tried three of the eleven beers in the series, but each one was a microcosm of Stone’s approach to brewing.  Stone’s approach is “what the hell, let’s pull some random **** and amp all the flavors up to 11.”  Vertical Epic 10-10-10 was a Belgian triple/pale ale malted with triticale (wheat/rye hybrid) and fermented with chamomile plus three grape varieties (Muscat, Sauvignon Blanc, and gewürztraminer).  And when it was fresh, it was perplexingly disgusting.  I noted flavors of rotting grapes, dead plants, plastic, and King Cobra.  It even looked like King Cobra.  I wasn’t expecting much when I opened this on December 17, but age treated it pretty favorably. 

The carbonation picked up in the two years I held on to it, leading to a much bubblier beer.  Head formation is still poor but what does form stays there a while.  It looks less pale and more orange than I remember it being, more like a Belgian witbier.  The color could just be different lighting conditions, but the carbonation definitely changed.  The aroma was still weird, but not off-putting.  Must, wet leaves, rosewater, flowers and white grapes are all there (there was something else I can’t describe that was familiar).  The flavors are now all about the additives and nothing about the malt or hops.  Huge white grape flavor, huge grape skin flavor (tannic), tea flavors, some specific white wine flavors (I could definitely place the Sauvignon Blanc).  Juicy semi-dry texture.  This could have used less tannins and by the time I was finished I was wishing I had a second bottle to try again in a year.

Vertical Epic 11-11-11 sounded so bad on paper that when I bought it in 2011 I didn’t bother trying it fresh, just got one to save for the big day.  It is a Belgian triple/pale ale brewed with cinnamon and Anaheim chile peppers.  Knowing their penchant for overdoing everything except sugar was the main reason I decided not to bother trying it fresh; I was worried the peppers would just obliterate everything in their path.

So, I don’t have any way to compare it to fresh.  But at least with a year on it, it turned out surprisingly well.  It had an amber-crimson hue to it with decent foam retention.  The smell was earthy and lightly spicy, not at all what I expected.  Very mild.  The taste had a prick of chile heat upfront with a slightly tangy middle, while the finish was where the cinnamon shined.  A bit of hop bitterness peeked through at the end too.  Once I got to the bottom, the sediment added a fruity dimension to it.  Texture was too thick for a Belgian, but they clearly weren’t really going for a Belgian beer here.  I thought it was actually pretty tasty.

Vertical Epic 12-12-12 was a Belgian dark ale brewed with a smorgasbord of spices, in the sort-of-tradition of Belgian holiday ales.  It looked more like a stout than a Belgian dark ale, and it didn’t really smell like a Belgian beer either.  The aroma was all oranges, cloves, vanilla, cola/root beer, and coco.  The flavor was basically a clove bomb, though I also appreciated some root beer and orange flavors.  The finish was mostly cinnamon and nutmeg.  Apart from the 10 megaton clove explosion, I was surprised at how dry this was.  It was overall enjoyable even if it should have been sweeter. 

Don’t drink it if you don’t like cloves though.

So, I had a nice holiday season beer-wise.  One thing I noticed recently is that I really stocked up on barleywines and stouts last year (October-December), so my next few winters should even be better given how well these things tend to age.

Cheers!