Big Bang - Apricot
Barreled Souls Brewing Company

 

This one pours a semi muddled looking golden brown color, with a small head, and not much lacing.

This smells like slightly tart and slightly jammy apricot, with pie crust, herbal bitterness, honey, and caramel.

This is not exactly my sort of thing, but it’s aged well. There’s still a bit of herbal bitterness and grapefruit pith holding on to the base American barleywine, but most of that is definitely wiped away clean by the apricot. There’s still a decent amount of apricot for this bottle being from 2021. There’s some pie crust adjacent flavors, but maybe that’s my mind taking the maltiness into a pie direction, given the fruit addition. There’s caramel, honey, and breadiness. It’s all pretty intensely flavored – I wonder if the fruit flavor has dissipated a bit over the years, because I think if this had a more full fruit character, it would be clashing.

This is medium bodied, slightly syrupy, but not overly so, with very little booziness.

It wouldn’t be my first choice to put apricot into a barleywine, but it’s been done pretty well here.

 

 

 

 

Fantastic Brew. Full of flavor and easy to drink especially for a BW. The base Big Bang is very good but the Apricot takes it to another level. You get the base up front but then the Apricot shines on the back end. Quite possibly the best Barleywine I've had.