Sleeman Oak Aged Ale
Sleeman Breweries Ltd.

 

 

341 ml bottle poured into a shaker pint glass. Geez, Sleeman beers can stink and this one is top shelf in this regard. I am already getting a pungent wet and stale grainy malt aroma and my face is nowhere near the glass as I pour. As can be seen through the clear bottle, this beer is a light bronze color and there is actually some head, about a finger of lacy white foam floating on top. Does not smell much better up close, more rank pale malts along with a little vanilla caramel. Light-struck bottle, which does not help this beer's case one little bit.

Tastes like a neutered poor man's Innis & Gunn offering. Little if any wood character except for a faint tannic note laced with a splash of vanilla and cherry, discernible mainly in the finish. Some old sweet apple and light toffee. No real hop aroma or flavor. Buttered popcorn? I suppose I am getting a tepid whiskey character. Body is medium-light I suppose, skewed more towards the light. Carbonation is at least in the right ballpark for such a brew, on the gentle side. Finish is malty sweet with a slight wood note, as described above.

Although I try to keep an open mind, there really is no legit reason to produce an Innis & Gunn facsimile even more toned down for the masses. The genuine article is widely available and palatable to someone with a passing interest in craft beer.

 

Had this on tap.

The nose and the palate of this beer both tasted like a mess of artificial flavours were used to emulate barrel aging. Almost cloyingly sweet with an off-putting artificial vanilla presence. Difficult to finish the whole pint.

Brown spirits adopt their colour from the wood with which they share extended contact. Sleeman Oak Aged Ale, though it's never seen the inside of an actual barrel, sports a pale honeyed tone as if spent decades in one. Nonetheless, brilliant clarity, energetic carbonation, and vibrant highlights expose its true youthfulness.

There's a good possibility this slightly enhanced complexion is attributed to the addition of caramel malts, but there's a better chance it's the result of added caramel colouring. One thing's for certain: it's not likely to be the oak and cherry wood chips. The term "oak aged ale" really ought to read "ale aged on oak". There's a difference, and colour contribution is just the first way to tell.

Let's begin with the fact that most oak barrels used in the brewing industry contained something previously (i.e.,some type of wine or whiskey) and hence impart all sorts of characteristics that make the wood itself rather secondary. New oak barrel, which are far more expensive, will still add strong flavours and phenolic compounds that may be too intense for Sleeman's average customer.

Hence instead the use of wood chips. These leave a softer, cleaner impression, something more akin to the wood shavings used for hamster cages and less like a musty, mildewed old piece of furniture that's sat in a damp basement for years. Now, all this information is inconsequential here anyhow since the presence of oak (in any capacity) is basically negligible.

So far as I can tell, Sleeman has consciously tried to emulate Innis & Gunn, whose flagship Oak Aged Beer is very popular in the Ontario market. This ale very closely resembles that one, right down to the cloying vanilla and buttery popcorn flavours (a taste heightened by this brewer's habitual use of corn syrup and typical absence of hops).

An ale that's had any kind of contact with oak should be distinguishing. The dubiously named Oak Aged Ale is an utterly unremarkable beer that fails to provide any additional character than Sleeman's standard brands. Despite sounding different, it stays very much within the brewery's wheelhouse and hence challenges neither its customers' comfort zones nor its critics' contentions.

Sleeman Oak Aged : Second review for this beer. No one tasted yet ?
So the look of it: Looks really like the Sleeman Honey Brown. Very light. No head whats so ever.

Even the smell , smells like the Sleeman Honey Brown. Actually I had to double check the bottle to make sure that I didn t took the wrong bottles. But no it was really the Oak Aged

Now the thing that is different from the Honey Brown is about that taste. There is some similarities but the Oak Aged have a hard punch on the taste and on the after taste. It is really sweet. It is grainy and corny with that sensation that it feels like a old beer.

So Overall would I recommend it ? On a BBQ date...absolutely ! On a regular day ... No .

341ml clear as ever was bottle, a refugee from its starring role in the current Sleeman Selections mixed-pack, and aged 'with' (key word there), in their words 'a generously toasted selection of rich oak and cherry wood'. I'm getting a home-brew sort of aura around this one.

This beer pours a clear, medium copper amber hue, with three fingers of puffy, frothy, and somewhat creamy off-white head, which leaves some decent splattered Swiss cheese lace around the glass as it slowly and evenly recedes.

It smells of gritty, grainy pale malt, a twinge of bready caramel, a certain corny sweetness, stale apples, an ethereal damp and fibrous woodiness, hints of further orchard fruitiness, and a bit of dank mushy leafiness. The taste is plain woody, um, wood, hardly astringent at all, which I'm gathering is the point, over a grainy, bready, and underwhelming caramel malt, a touch of vanilla, and some wandering generic fruitiness and toothless leafy hops.

The carbonation is soft and lilting in its well-understated basic support, the body medium-light in weight, and a tad clammy in its otherwise straight-ahead smoothness. It finishes off-dry, the fading bland woodiness seeing a kind of competition from the lingering banality of the bready malt.

Meh - while the various sorts of wood chips/spirals/dust that Sleeman must have tossed into this one at least leave an imprint, it's at best on par with the weak and ineffectual malt, and damned near non-existent hops. 'Traditional', sure, in the sense of having missed the last few decades of North American craft ale development.