Caulk The Barrel & Float It Across - Barrel Aged Sour Brown Ale
Hermit Thrush Brewery

From a 16oz can, dated 02/22/23. ‘Travel the trail.’ Served in a Hermit Thrush-branded goblet because #utterlyproperglassware.

Pours cola-brown with warm honey-brown highlights and a scant finger of fizzy beige suds. Surprisingly, the head holds up for better than a minute, leaving a thin, seltzer-like cap and a rousable sheet of thin lacing.

Nose is (unsurprisingly) tart but also sort of smooth and buttery - ‘buttery’ probably doesn’t have a positive connotation in relation to beer, but I’m not sure how else to describe it. The barrel? Warm and woody. Aroma of balsamic vinegar.

Taste is spot-on to the nose: there’s a smooth - again with the ‘butteriness’ because once you get a word in your head - buttery like caramel, or butterscotch, is buttery - I don’t expect in a kettle sour. Tasting balsamic vinegar, lemon juice, malted milk balls and sawn pine boards. The barrel is subtle but amplifies? exentuates? the roasted malt, caramel character of the base beer.

Feel is smooth and slick, medium bodied with bright, fizzy carbonation.

Overall, a fine and tasty barrel-aged sour brown. We stopped into the taproom to pick up some sours for mammosilenus and I ended up buying a four-pack of this for myself. It makes me think of old, dusty wide-pine wooden floors and I don’t know why.