Time Waits For No One - Woodford Reserve (Coffee Edition)
Anchorage Brewing Company

375 mL bottle. Pours black with a thin khaki head. Smells of strong alcohol, coffee, chocolate, bourbon, lots of oak, and vanilla. Tastes of oak primarily. Then coffee and bourbon. Chocolate and roasted malt. Back end is heavy oak and really intense coffee. Heavy, boozy, rich, slow to drink. Flavorful up front, but the back end is harsh.

 

L: Dark and viscous like the non-coffee Woodford, but the dark brown ring of a head has significantly less lacing.

S: Coffee (a good one at that) overpowers the soy sauce and molasses on the nose. The booze is more apparent and there is a very sour cherry note here.

T: The soy sauce dominates the front taste and the coffee comes out strongly on the finish. I feel the coffee is of good quality but doesn't enhance the base brew at all. Either it was too heavy in the mix or the base brew was already too bitter and without that smooth cocoa that I'd hope to accompany the coffee.

F: Thicker than most top stouts but we lost that decadent rich motor oil viscosity that was the standard Woodford's best quality.

O: It has it's selling points for those who crave good coffee in their stouts but I feel it wasted an otherwise stellar brew. Still a great rating if I were to forget I'd ever had the coffee-less beer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This one pours a very dark black color, with a tiny layer of film that sort of looks like a "head", and not much lacing.

This smells big and boozy, with lots of coffee, charred malt, heavy bourbon, oak, cookie dough, and some heat.

I think I like the non-coffee version of this better. However, this is still pretty excellent. This is somehow boozier and hotter than the non-coffee version. I wouldn't really expect that, typically. The coffee flavor is very, very roasty, and very, very dark, adding a charred/tobacco like bitterness to the already intense base beer. There's some cookie dough, oak, and a touch of vanilla.

This is super thick. It's cliched to call a big stout "like motor oil" but that's basically what it is. You chould chew this. There's a lower level of carbonation.

Anchorage really knows stouts. This isn't their best, but it's still great.