The PastryArchy Edition #16: Oatmeal Cream Pie
DuClaw Brewing Co.

 

 

 

-hazy, tea-colored can pour with a 2cm foam cap and an aroma of cinnamon and nutmeg.
The flavor is sweet with pumpkin pie-like spices most prominent.
The is is a very sweet, light-bodied brew. It does not nearly match some of the better pastry-style brews I have had.

16oz can poured into a snifter.

A: Golden color with a red-orange hue. Great clarity. Tight, fine-bubbled white head settles relatively soon after pouring. Thin rings of lacing.

S: The nose hits hard and fast with a lot of spice. Very heavy on the clove and cinnamon. Because of this, it initially smells more like a pumpkin-spiced beer than anything else. Underlying ginger as well, and that builds as things warm. Very subtle brown sugar. Quick, very out of place whiff of vanilla. Coarse wheatiness. Some herbal, green, and lemony hops too. I'm not going to sugar coat it. This is a flat-out weird nose that misses the oatmeal cream pie mark by so much that I honestly can't believe they went ahead and released this beer at all.

T: Follows the nose. Huge hit of clove and cinnamon up front, and it feels like it's going in a pumpkin beer sort of direction before veering off into all sorts of unpalatable weirdness. Some warming ginger. Coarsely wheaty. Oily and herbal hop bitterness does not fit at all. Traces of brown sugar and vanilla gum up the works and just do not mesh here. Long pumpkin spice, steely, and bitter finish prolongs the misery.

M: Medium-light mouthfeel. A mild sense of heft, but it sits easily on the tongue with a lot of fluffy creaminess. carbonations brings a gentle scrub and a bit of lift. Overall, not a bad mouthfeel and just about the only thing they got right.

O: Wow. I haven't had a beer this bad in a very long time. It tastes absolutely nothing like an oatmeal cream pie, and it's laughable to me that they tried to market it as such. Beyond that, it's also a wholly unpleasant experience from start to finish. I can't believe they went ahead and released it into broader distribution. It's probably the most memorably bad beer I've had in the past few years that did not suffer from an obvious brewing flaw/off flavor. It's just a bad recipe or bad scaling, if I had to guess.

Canned 3/11/21

Well this was the first beer in this series I picked up back in July, but forgot about it until now. Oops. Always a fun and interesting line of beers, this one seems like it could be overkill with all that's been thrown in here, especially on top of a wheat ale base. Let's see if it can make a cohesive beer

Pours a "clear" orange gold with 3 fingers of dense off white head that slowly fades to a cap and leaves decent lacing. I put clear in quotations because there is a ton of particulate in suspension

Some of the spices used in here are more obvious than others but it's not necessarily out of balance. I'm picking up on aromas of ginger, brown sugar, honey, bready malt, overripe banana, light vanilla, nutmeg, and a touch of cinnamon

For the relatively spice forward aroma, this is just kinda flabby in taste unfortunately. On the front end of the sip I'm tasting honey, orange rind, earthy wheat, ginger, and light brown sugar. The swallow brings notes of soft wheat, allspice, brown sugar, molasses, and light clove

A medium body pairs with gentle prickly carbonation, resulting in a refreshing yet rich beer. Finishes slick and a bit sticky

This one isn't bad but it doesn't really do it for me. Just kinda average

Pours hazy, gold in color with one quarter inch head. Taste is vanilla, cinnamon, honey and clove. Medium body, moderate carbonation, slightly sweet. Very m'eh. Not horrible but nothing that sticks out. More like weak pumpkin pie. A pass in the future.

 

 

Agree with others floaties in the glass are not very attractive but it does have a nice full inch of frothy foam a top a very lighter color brown than I would expect. Smells of mostly cinnamon and Ginger can't really tell that it's a oatmeal cream pie which should have a Aroma of chocolate and marshmallow. Taste is all over the place Ginger honey wheat mild cinnamon and then some vanilla in the Finish. If you were to tell me that should taste like an oatmeal cream pie I would say a total miss. Overall it's not too hard to drink not super offensive in flavor but probably another forgettable entry in this series.

 

 

Bright coppery golden body, nearly crystal clear, but with tons of sediment out of solution - including some unattractively large floaties. Head production is excellent; retention and lacing are decent.

Clove and cinnamon are quite potent on the nose, reminiscent of a pumpkin spice ale. The brown sugar and molasses, along with the strong malt base, add enough depth, sweetness, and warmth to somewhat evoke the eponymous cookie, but ultimately the brightness of the spices dominates.

Creamy and smooth mouthfeel; almost flat.

Similar to the nose, the cinnamon and clove dominate on the palate, again much more reminiscent of pumpkin spice than any cookie. The ginger adds some additional brightness that was perhaps teased on the nose, but not as noticeable as the drier spices. Any sweetness they were going for shows up only briefly before being swallowed up by dry bright spices. The spices linger long into the aftertaste, when there's no hint of beer left.

If I were to try to locate the vanilla and the sweetness of the malt, it's there, but only barely. The molasses and brown sugar are mostly a non-factor.

If the magnitude of the spices were to be dialed down - and I mean by a lot, maybe as much as 75% - this might be a really tasty imperial wheat ale, and perhaps even remind someone of an oatmeal cream pie cookie. My favorite pumpkin spice ales are high ABV, with a strong sweetness to match the spices. This one simply lacks that second characteristic: at 8% ABV, it's got plenty of heft, but no impact from any of the sweetness, despite all the additives.

This is mostly a miss for me. Drinkable, and that's about it.

L: Golden color, nice white head with good lacing
S: little bit of honey, not much else
T: some spice, some honey, nothing too distinguishable
F: really nice mouthfeel
O: too much going on for any of it to be good

sweet and creamy WHEAT ALE - THEIR other pastry archy were better

Creamy, malty feel. Smell of malt and oatmeal. Tastes like vanilla cream, fresh baked oatmeal cookies, and a wonderful malt profile completely void of bitterness. Very full feeling and thick. I enjoyed it and will buy more.

Appearance:
Bright orange suffused with haze, as if sunrise over a misty landscape had taken liquid form. Accumulates a tall, cloud-like head. Long, slippery lace starts as a pale beige wall and slowly slides apart.

Bouquet:
A small handful of powdered ginger, dried cloves, and a pinch of ground cinnamon are sparingly dusted over a tuft of hearty, golden wheat.

Feel:
An aqueous, full-bodied ale bustling with bouncy bubbles and warming Belgian spice. The linger is a long, languid dip in a jacuzzi of semi-sweets and baking spices.

Taste:
An abundance of baked, golden wheat steadily rises until it reaches a plateau coated in cloves, brown sugar, and cinnamon dryness. Above this plateau, a quiet rainstorm of ginger-infused molasses patters down, gently shifted to-and-fro by whispers of vanilla. The vanilla is mostly a backstage presence, balancing and tuning those spices, preventing harshness. Although after significant air time, you'll get a satisfying mouthful of vanilla cream in the aftertaste.*

* = Special Note: this is the experience you will get if the beer is on tap. Drinking it straight from the can, you'll more or less only taste the baking spices. The wheat, vanilla and brown sugar will be largely absent. For this reason I lowered its Taste score.

 

After the last couple of Duclaw beers I tried, I was sceptical about this. But I grew up with oatmeal cream pie cookies, so I'm giving it a shot. This imperial Honeywell pours a dark gold with an off-white head. The nose is spicy almost of ginger, maybe an element of molasses. The taste starts with ginger, moves to molasses, and ends with nutmeg. My other half thought this was a pumpkin spice beer in a blind tasting. I can't say she's wrong. The can describes fluffy vanilla cream filling with spiced oatmeal notes and aromas. The only spice I'm getting is ginger and I might taste some of the molasses. I can't find the brown sugar or vanilla bean.

This first review will include some confusion. The label reads "Imperial Honey Wheat Ale", a here to now unknown category. Does that make it mead? Regardless, a pint can has been emptied into a clear Imperial pint glass. No problem, there's no head, nor glass lacing. It is a beautiful translucent bright copper in color. For a flavored desert ale, there's not much aroma, maybe a little sweetness from the honey and some cinnamon. The cinnamon certainly does appear in the taste. It overwhelms any of the other taste treats. One being honey, which in that case is good, for this drinks sweet enough. Once again, wheat proves to provide a poor medium to bring various flavors to enjoy. It also makes the mouthfeel thin. It would be interesting to try this same approach with a stout or porter, two styles much more agreeable to having additional flavors. This isn't horrible, but it drinks like a cinnamon beer, without any nuances. There's no hint of oatmeal, nor cream. It does go down easily for having an ABV of 8 percent.