Goose Island Cooper Project

Be interested in trying it out.

 

The target competitors for this beer would be Backwoods ($16/4pack), CW BA Scotch ale ($17/4pack), and Wulver ($27/4pack). Wulver is a great beer and I may give it a slight edge over the other two, but I shy away at that price point given the availability of the other two. I sure as hell hope this GI offering is not $40/4pack.

 

I assume this will a similar supply release to BCBS right? Or are these 12oz vs the 16.9oz for BCBS. BCBS bottles are $11 on the shelves here, so I expect this to be the same.

 

12oz four-packs; check out the link on the 1st page

 

Here's a post from a thread in the regional forum:

 

Why doesn't anybody age Scotch Ales in, you know, Scotch barrels? Seems more obvious. Like a perfect opportunity for GI to use something beyond the typical bourbon adjunct.

Too expensive perhaps? Maybe. But for this special series one might have thought GI would pony up.

 

I don't know any details about this beer, but I think it was supposed to come out around now:

 

Scotch ales and Scotch whisky aren't linked in any way that would make it logical, they just share the name "Scotch".

 

No! YOU SSSSSSSStop it......

 

I have to disagree a little bit.

Scotch brew can have some smoky characteristic. Perhaps even peat in some examples. Seems like a scotch barrel would compliment that much more than a bourbon barrel. It just wouldn't be cheap like a bourbon barrel.

 

Part of the scarcity of Scotch barrel aged beers is that the Scots reuse their barrels until they can no longer be repaired and put back into use. So the brewer has to have something like a partnership of some kind with the distiller to get the barrel in the first place.

BTW, and FYI, technically speaking, bourbon is not an adjunct, nor is any form of barrel aging regardless of the prior contents, even when the barrel is still fresh from being emptied of the prior contents.

 

Which is precisely why using scotch barrels would be expensive, as I said above.

Water, Malt, Hops, yeast, and perhaps sugar. Anything else added for flavoring I would consider an adjunct, or a nonessential ingredient to the beer. Caramel, maple syrup, honey, bourbon, spices, etc... I call them all adjuncts just because they are nonessential.

 

My point was you have to be able to buy those barrels in the first place. If the distillers won't sell them to you in the first place.... So it's not just price but being able to buy them at all.

Well you are free to call anything you choose an adjunct, but if you wish to be accurately understood by others, expecially those who know much more about brewing than do I, there is a distinction drawn by brewers between adjuncts which bring fermentable sugars to the mix and additives which just bring flavor.

 

Scotch distilleries will sell you barrels just like anybody else. You had just better make it worth their while. IOW, they have to make more money selling them than they would by reusing them. Very simple.

As far as the adjunct debate, based on what I've seen fans of craft beer have historically criticized macro beers for being adjunct laden and lacking purity. But because so many craft beers are adjunct monsters some artificial distinctions needed to be made in order to reconcile that contradiction.

But look, my man. Strictly speaking the definition of an adjunct is - "a thing added to something else as a supplementary rather than an essential part" - and nobody gets to change that definition because of what really boils down to pure snobbery.

All the best.

 

Exactly, and since fermentable sugars are an essential part....

Cheers!

 

Triptych Brewing in Savoy, IL recently did a Scotch barrel aged Scotch ale. It had a ton of barrel to it (i.e. huge smokey, peat notes). Talking to the guys there they had to blend it way down, like 25% barrel aged and 75% base beer to tone it way down from what I recall.
https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/30967/259748/

On a related note, Triptych is a killer brewery. Totally worth a stop through if you happen to be driving on I-57 through IL. This beer just wasn't in my wheelhouse. Others I knew loved it.

Also, GI does/did have the Scotch barrel aged BCBS that was supposed to be one of the releases back in Nov., but "wasn't ready yet." As far as I know, no one officially knows what that means yet.

 

Having played around with home whiskey blending a little bit, I can tell you that a little bit of peat goes a LONG way. For instance, a drop of peated Scotch can be really tasty in a glass of rye, but you really only need a drop. It's not surprising to me that a beer would be totally overwhelmed by those barrels.

 

The "smoky" aspect commonly described in "Scotch ale" is an American invention. Peat-smoked barley has pretty much only ever been used for whisky in Scotland (well, also for fuel in the past). "Scotch Ale" is best understood as a colloquialism for an English barleywine brewed in Scotland.

In other words, if you want to have some idea of what a "scotch ale" aged in Scotch whisky barrels would taste like, you could do worse than trying the JW Lees Harvest Ale variant aged in Lagavulin barrels. The only major caveat here is that the base beer is garbage unless it's an 8+ years old bottle, which is extreme even by English barleywine standards. Also, that whisky is one of the more heavily smoked whiskies around. So it's a minor outlier of a beer aged in a fairly major outlier of a whisky barrel.

 

Isn't every business in it for a money grab. They are a "for profit" company. Capitalism bro. Merica.

 

I love BA beer but if it's $10.00 a 12 ounce bottle I am going to sit back and watch.