Rye Barrel-Aged Orange Giant
Ecliptic Brewing

2021 bottle. Poured at fridge temp. Pours a nice dark red/brown with almost white head. The nose is full of toffee and rye. Some dark fruit, A lot of apricot and bread. Big malts and booze!

The taste is super intense and awesome. Rye is super dominant. Boozy as heck. Dark bread, apple, pepper, figs, and toffee. Some hop bitterness mixes in nicely. Overall, a wonderful barleywine.

 

 

Pours a burgundy-brown with a heavy foggy transparency. Head is two fingers of khaki foam after a moderately aggressive pour.

Aroma is fig, raisins, molasses, and toffee with rye whiskey adding some spicy mild-heat to the back. It certainly leans more firmly into sweet than heat. Barrel character is minimal, although still present. It's enough to develop a faint additional layer, without driving up the complexity or bitterness of the nose.

Flavor profile is figs, raisins, dates, molasses, and caramel. Faint chocolate on the back end, but it leans more into the old school molasses and caramel sweetness than it does chocolate. Rye whiskey comes on in the final third, adding spiciness and mild heat to the finish. Caramel and toasty malts round it out. As it warms, resiny hops come out in force at the finish, with minor notes of grassy hops. Start is sweet, but the finish is marred by an overzealous spicy note, particularly at warmer temperatures.

Mouth feel is medium-thick with a hearty boiled body. There is minor silt to the texture, but it is otherwise smooth.

Overall, a hearty, spicy barleywine, particularly as it warms up in the glass.

Served in a 15.5oz Speigalau tulip from a 500mL bottle. Batch no. 5, dated 12.2020.

Up front this tastes magnificent. Caramel, vanilla and juicy orange are a sweet treat, plus there is a nice mellow whiskey note. The finish is rough, biting oak, earthy hops, and spicy rye. This quite a beast, full of flavor and abrasively assertive Enjoyable overall, I might wait as long as 2 years to revisit another bottle.

One year old bottle, properly cellared. Poured into a Fremont small snifter. Pours a lightly hazy, medium to dark orange with a quarter finger off-white head with good retention and solid lacing. Aroma of dry caramel malt,whiskey that smells like bourbon, orange and plum with a little vanilla. Flavor is caramel malt, rye whiskey, orange and mixed citrus, hints of dark stone fruit, vanilla and oak. Big whiskey in the finish, still pretty hot. Medium bodied with light to moderate creaminess. A big, bad barleywine; like the base Orange Giant, this has some dark fruit notes like an English barleywine, but also the citrusy, hoppy profile of the American version. The rye whiskey character is very clear here, almost dominates the other flavors, but the malt is sufficient to support it. I've stopped aging American barleywines in general because the hops don’t age well for my palate, but the year on this still has some fresh hop notes and it is so massive in ABV, I think it had to have helped mellow it. Enjoyable and I'll get any version of this that shows up here this winter.

Pours a murky thick light brown/amber with a maybe orange-ish tint? Decent little half finger of flan coloured foam that settles down somewhat but never truly disappears.

Nose is sweet leading in. Vanilla and spice and caramel and a touch of citrus. Definitely sweeter and boozier than my notes suggest I found the base beer.

Flavour is similar: starts off with the caramel/vanilla side of the barreling, but then the spice and earthy bitterness and big oak come in to run a counter-narrative to the big sweet boozy start. Finish is big citrus/pine and a bit of rye spice.
It definitely carries its booze with it, but I would not guess 15% just by drinking it. I could easily believe a good 3-5 percentage points lower.

I thought this would be interesting because I felt like the base Orange Giant reminded me of a rye-ipa, and while I know that and rye whiskey are not really the same flavours, I thought it would be interesting to see how they worked together. I think they do decently, and that the barreling does improve the base beer.
I think it's also one that would do well to cellar and revisit in a couple of years, though I did not pick up any additional bottles to test that hypothesis.

A: The beer is a bit hazy dark amber in color and has a moderate amount of visible carbonation. It poured with a quarter finger high beige head that died down a bit but consistently left a thin layer of bubbles covering the surface and a narrow collar around the edge of the glass.
S: Light to moderate aromas of orange are present in the nose along with notes of whiskey and hints of caramel.
T: The taste has flavors of oak with notes of bourbon, orange and vanilla.
M: It feels full-bodied on the palate and has warming from the alcohol.
O: I thought that this beer had a nice balance between the orange and whiskey.

Serving type: bottle