Oak Aged Braggot
Old Yale Brewing Co.

Tastes of honey, earthy yeast. Sweetish, a bit bready, slightly floral, slightly grapey. Sweet and musty notes come out front, honey and bread up the middle and finishes with drier (though still quite sweet) grape notes. Medium body, medium carbonation. The oak aging did not come through. Interesting, and very solid.

650ml bottle - a blend of wildflower honey (and presumably malt), fermented with an unspecified wine yeast, and 'oak' aged. Yup.

This beer pours a mostly clear, medium golden yellow colour, with four fingers of puffy, loosely foamy, and bubbly dirty white head, which leaves some decent scattered mitochondrial lace around the glass as it lazily recedes.

It smells of musty and musky clover honey (like the fields across the way from where I grew up south of Calgary), bready and doughy caramel malt, some earthy yeastiness, and very tame leafy, weedy, and floral green hop bitters. The taste is semi-sweet, honeyed crackers, a musty yeast essence, grainy and crackery caramel malt, plain apple core notes, and some weedy, herbal and slightly lit-up floral verdant hoppiness.

The carbonation is quite laid-back in its bored-seeming frothiness, the body a so-so middleweight, and smooth enough, I suppose, nothing in particular getting handsy at this point in time. It finishes trying to be dry, but the floral honey character is having none of it.

Overall - the purported oak flavour seems to be lost on me here, but the otherwise heady mead notes have no such problem. Add in to that the more or less well-obfuscated 16-proof booziness, and what I have in front of me is one saucy and enticing offering, which is, sorry to say, a bit of a happy surprise.