Barleywine Appreciation Thread (2022)

The beer looks and sounds great. The label is incredible. Love the smirking toad.

 

2012 Old Guardian canned Seotember 16th.
Holds up great in Crowlers.
No words needed.

 

2019 Sucaba while wrapping hopefully the last of presents. What a long ass day this gets to be.

 

Always tripped me out how my people ( Honduran/Mexican) are gettin ready to open them at midnight while others wrap today.

As far as we are concerned today is Christmas Day.

At least you'll hopefully be asleep at midnight!

 

Endolith by Jackie O's

Notes: Bourbon barrel-aged barleywine, brewed with Maris Otter, Munich, brown sugar, and lots of caramel malt. Ten malts, a long boil, and barrel aging came together to create a complex barleywine with notes of rich caramel, oolong tea, bruleed sugar, and well-aged spirit.

I specifically picked this one up based on viewing the Barleywine thread and a few notable BA reviews. Nod to @Blogjackets and @Beersnake1

The pour is quite still, virtually sans any kind of head action. Looks like the darkest cola brown, semi viscous, with an oily sheen. One of the more darker Barleywines I have encountered. Fairly well conditioned it seems but on the lower side of carbonation/bubbles.

The nose is a bit muted for me at first however spending some time with this one reveals dark fruits, grape brandy, dark toffee/brown sugar, cherry tobacco and a touch of leather.

The taste ushers in flavors of pecan pie filling, fig/date, nougat, crème brûlée and a dash of warming alcohol spice. Everything is incredibly well balanced for such a massive brew. Subtle, lush, and sticky sweet on the palate. Never cloying. Quite impressive.

My biggest issue is this one is it is so darn drinkable BA! Merry Christmas y'all

 

Hopefully somewhere in that ballpark.
How do kids ever wind down after midnight opening? Is it just an all nighter? I could get behind that.

 

Usually everyones up till a lil past 3am or so

 

That’s not so bad, when I consider being up that late pairing beers with assembling toy kitchens anyways. Just moving the due dates a bit.

Hope you and yours are having a merry Christmas!

 

Bible Stories by The Lost Abbey. Cheers to @Nugganooch for the stout-Barleywine blend. Best of the season to all!

 

Decided to do a vertical of 2020, 2021, 2022 Revolution Straight Jacket to celebrate Christmas Eve. This was quite fun to dive into.

2020-Interestingly had the highest carb and light to medium mouthfeel and lightest coloration. Smell was quite muted and mild with no major discerning factors beyond general malt and booze. Flavor had a prominent stone fruit component and oak.
2021-Significantly more vibrant than 2020. Raisin/dark fruit and oak led the way here on the smell and taste. Mouthfeel was a bit fuller than 2020.
2022-Stole the show for me (which I expected having recently had a couple of these and it being fresh). Rich dark fruits, vanilla and oak from the barreling, borderline cocoa component on the smell and taste. Very low carb compared to the others and full mouthfeel. Mild spiciness akin to what would be used in a pie crust.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all advocates out there. Cheers!

 

This is really good. No one else likes it though (they never had barleywine). More for me!

 

SJ is way better fresh than aged. Very strange

 

My perfect beer on Christmas would be Harvey’s Christmas Ale for its theme. JW Lees Harvest Ale would be my runner-up though, and there’s no Harvey’s in the house. Harvest is my favorite barley wine and one of my favorite beers period. The last two times I had a Harvest Ale were also the only times I’ve had it from a can… and it wasn’t the beer I adore. The 2020 can of regular Harvest at two years old was a big disappointment. The 2016 can of the sherry cask version I recently had didn’t float my boat. Was this a case of my shifting tastes or something about the beer?

Harvest cans are a big mystery to me. Who is filling them and when? At first I assumed B United was filling them in the US due to them only showing up when the B United tanker project was becoming popular. I don’t totally trust the quality control of that project. I don’t think B United is filling these though… since I haven’t seen any claims from them that they are doing it. Did JW Lees can some Harvest Ale way back in 2015 (that only saw US distribution more recently)? Could they have been that forward looking regarding the future popularity of cans? That feels somewhat unlikely. I wonder if the brewer has aged stock in storage that they filled cans with more recently. If so, I wonder what container that beer was sitting in all those years before being canned.

With that as a backdrop, I decided to do a blind comparison between a canned and bottled Harvest. Not having a wide choice at my fingertips, I was limited to a canned 2016 sherry and a bottled 2017 regular. This is obviously less than ideal. The Harvest recipe changes each year, and this canned beer was aged in sherry casks. This wasn’t an apples to apples comparison, but maybe it would be interesting anyway.

Turns out there was no need to compare these blind. The differences were obvious and huge. The canned beer was very fruity - stone fruits and apples, a bit sour, had some bitterness in the finish, and thinner than the bottled beer. It was more conventional than the bottled beer, even with the sourness.

The bottled beer was the Harvest I loved (what a relief). It had a strong herbal bitterness, chewy body, background fruitiness, and flavors of black pepper, herbs, cocoa powder, char, and molasses. This was an intensely idiosyncratic beer. For a supposed modern classic in the style, it’s remarkable how American brewers don’t make anything resembling it when making “English” barley wine.

The canned beer was about treble and the bottled beer was about bass.

So… what’s the biggest cause in the difference - container, sherry cask, age, recipe, a perfect storm, other? I obviously can’t say.

I can make some observations though. The 2016 bottles of regular Harvest I’ve had were fantastic and not like this sherry can. The last time I compared a regular Harvest to a bottled cask aged version, there were some commonalities with my feelings on today’s beers, but I didn’t find them to be as drastically different as the two from today.

I am guessing that the sherry cask aging is making the biggest difference, but the can packaging is contributing something as well.

I’ve done a lot of can and bottle comparisons with other beers, but my focus was on carbonation/head differences and/or bottle/can conditioning. In this case, I feel like these differences might not be as applicable. Having said that, there were some differences. The canned beer had a touch more carbonation compared to the stillness of the bottled beer. The bottled beer and the canned beer both poured clear for the first half. (I made my taste comparisons with these pours.) For the second half, the bottled beer had a huge amount of caked sediment. It poured cloudy at first but settled in time. The second half of the canned beer poured opaque and remained that way after letting the beer sit. A very small amount of visible particles dropped to the bottom. Is this difference due to a conditioning difference, container difference, or aging difference? Could this indicate that the bottled beer was sitting in its bottle for most of its life while the canned beer was aged in something else before being canned? I wish I knew… but there’s a good possibility I’m just overthinking this. (shocking, isn’t it?)

Cheers everybody and happy holidays.

 

A multiple present for me! My wife bought me the Grimm glass for Christmas! I bought the Barleywine myself!

 

Can you elaborate on your experiences?

 

I enjoyed reading this, thanks. I’m intrigued by these beers. I typically gravitate towards lower abv beers, but a good barely wine is something special. They are just such a gamble with how pricey they are that I often don’t roll the dice. Perhaps I’ll give one of the bottled jw lees a try.