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Elk Head Brewing Company

 

32oz medicine bottle growler courtesy of THE man (on ratebeer), bvc. I owe you Brandon. Thanks for sending this my way. Pours clear deep gold with thin white head. The aroma has thick graininess, apples, dates and raisins as well as a thin layer of musty earthiness. It smells a little like wet dirty date skins. The taste is pretty sweet and becomes fruity with apples, pears and dates and then picking up notes like modest graininess and honey sweetness. Tasty interpretation.

Regrettably, not even the high alcohol content of this barleywine can save it from the systematic sanitation issues endemic to the vast majority of Elk Head beers. Deep, burning proto-alcohols and ETOH combine with corkscrew bittering to accent a harsh, medicinal profile. The warm topaz color is serene and the flaccid body is not inappropriate. Yet the beer is bitter and biting where it shouldn’t be and is ultimately painful to consume. And there would appear to be no core identity of any substance worth cultivating with a year in the cellar.