Goose Island Bourbon County - 2024 (Chicagoland)

It has been drinking fantastic for 5 years. The first year is the only year that I found it harsh.

if you want a beer to be perfect when released, it is going down hill from there. If you want a beer to have longevity, I assume you need it to hit its peak sometime after release, whether that is 1 week, 1 month, or a year later. You can’t have it both ways. If it was perfect at the onset and not as good the next year, you’d complain. Something has to give.

 

I'm going to disagree about Vanilla drinking fantastic for 5 years. Had my last one in 2020 and thought it sill tasted overly sweet and artificial. But that was my experience.

I think once a barrel aged beer is packaged that means the brewer is happy/pleased/content with the beer and believes it is ready to be consumed. Can it and does it change over time? Of course. Sometimes for worse, sometimes for better. But my mindset has changed when it comes to barrel aged beers; I don't let anything age for more than 2 years. Covid made me realize a couple things when it comes to barrel aged beer: 1. I was hoarding more than I was consuming and was at a point where I didn't know how I was going to get through everything in my cellar and 2. most beers start to fall off after 2 years. There are exceptions to #2 of course, but I just don't see the point in aging things that long anymore.

 

Sadly, this isn’t always the case. Brewing schedule, space, distribution obligations, marketing, etc. can contribute to releases before the beer is ready. I believe it was the Vanilla Rye in 2014 during a black Friday tasting the Goose Island brewers said wasn’t ready and needed to sit for a while more despite that being the day it was released (not to mention GI usually bottle BCBS a month or more in advance).

 

I am probably an outlier. I don’t know if I have ever enjoyed a Vanilla BA stout fresh. I think they generally all benefit from some time to oxidize. That is both in the bottle or in the glass. I think about it like “off-gassing”.

I am with you on a lot of points. I let regular BA stouts age longer than anything with adjuncts, and generally try to drink adjuncts stouts as fresh as possible, since I think they generally do not benefit from age. The exception to that is vanilla. Sometimes I think the coffee in benthic also calms down compared to the coconut over time, which is assbackwards, but there are always exceptions.

 

Hard agree.

I've been tricked twice over the past few years by the "oh it's actually really good now!!"

Every time I've tried it, I've thought it was poorly executed. Rubbish beer from the start and hasn't gotten any more drinkable for me. Not buying it's suddenly gotten good now.

 

I’m pretty happy with the prospect of VR redux, even if it’s not a complete knockout (and I don’t expect it to be). It seems like the past couple years they’ve really listened to the broad consensus of criticism and put together a nice mix of barrel treatments, returning favorites, and out of the box dabbling. I don’t expect to like everything, but I’m confident I’ll like something and with so many other solid options these days that’s ok.

 

They should do a vanilla treatment on a 2yr reserve.

 

What they should do is take a year off, possibly two, and make everything a "special rare reserve" or whatever.

That or send all this shelf clutter to other markets. You can find a dizzying array of Bourbon County at stores all over the city, some vintages going back 3-4 years.

 

It shelf turds everywhere. Even on the other side of the country.

They need to price regular much better, like sub $20 for a 4x12. And whatever they want to do with the variants they also need to dial the price down or radically reduce production. If they're going to move variants far from their home market they need to be a "value" brand because they don't have any prestige and are thought of as a bought brand. I doubt they'll ever move volume off bottles priced over $30 unless they hit one out of the park.

The weird variants like cola or whatever obscure dessert shouldn't be more than $15 for a single bottle if they're trying to move out of their core market

 

It was $20 for a 4x12 almost 2 decades ago. So, sub $20 is a bit of a stretch, but $25-30 / 4-pack is pretty spot on.

 

So how can they do Kaleidoscope, Anniversary, and Dapper for $20 4x12? All are outstanding (better than regular??) and Dapper is DBA. They put the BC label on it and now it's $40 4x12. Doesn't add up.

 

If I had to guess the 4x12s for $20 is because they sell a chunk of it directly from the brewery with no distro overhead. I believe these beers are only sold in Chicagoland in a pretty small quantity. BCS is a global release comprised of a ton of labor across thousands of barrels.

 

Distro overhead (across the world) + Labor + PR

 

I think the reserve bottles have been great but price per oz is a road block. I wonder how much they are spending on that packaging??? I bet you it’s not cheap for these special boxes that I could care less about. Drop the box and price … the reserve price point is just too much for me to buy more than one. Move some of your other BCS production to reserve (cheaper cost per oz). Higher margin product and I think there would be plenty of demand for reserve.

 

Exactly. BCBS is supposed to be a premium product so they put premium pricing on it. It should be a $20 a 4 pack beer. And to anyone saying it isn’t, I would refer you to the $5 a 16.9oz bottle clearance annually. As I’ve been saying for years, stop paying the early adopters fee in the 1st month of release and save a shit ton on it a few months later. GI prices it so high because they make a killing on the margin when they Black Friday hype is up. The big thing is that BCBS was supposed to be a reward for retailers for moving GI product, but we’ll see how much of a reward this becomes for retailers when the product continues to bring in less money for them.

 

20 years ago BCBS was an astonishingly unique beer made by an innovative, small, local brewery in Chicago.

Now, BCBS is a solid example of a bourbon barrel stout that you can find on any decent liquor store shelf for a decent chunk of the year across much of the country. It's actual peers (among which it is really competitive) sell for significantly less and the other beers that it's priced comparably to generally blow it away.

As an example, the local bottle shop that has a number of varieties and regular from 22 and 23 sells single 12 oz bottles for $11. Right next to them for the same price is a couple barrel aged offerings with either flavoring adjuncts or specialty barrels from Pohjala. There's zero question in my mind which of those I'm grabbing.

Meanwhile, willetized, ba narwhal, or ba most most premium from Gigantic brewing, are widely available and generally 1/4-1/2 the price. BCBS is probably typically the best of those options, but it's not reliably 2x or 4x the quality of those.

So it's stuck in this purgatory where it kind of depends on it's cultural cache to justify it's price.point, but it's widely offered in places where it doesn't have that cache.

So, either drop the price to compete with other nationalish ba stouts or cut production and focus on competing where you have the cultural credit to give a premium bump. Personally, I'd love to see them make the base competitive with those cheaper ba stouts and focus on producing actually premium limited variants that they want to ask a premium for. I've heard good things about some of the special barrel treatments they've put out recently. No reason to cheapen that side of the program.

 

they should also stop sending this shit to Los Angeles

Nobody wants it and the shelves agree

 

They're competing with parabola, same price point but Firestone has the local love. Almost no one is going to take BCBS over parabola at the same ticket.