Thoughts on Goose Island's 2022 Bourbon County (BCBS) Lineup?

I had a 9/5 coffee bottling date with plenty of roasty coffee but very thin. Not bad by any means but gets crushed by Cafe Deth.

 

the 2015 release happened. a majority chunk was spoiled before Black Friday. for some impossible to explain reason, with any honest intentions, GI pushed out a small portion i guess they believed wasn't affected. Barleywine went south immediately too. both variants disappeared a season or 2 after the 2015 debacle.

 

Just drank Cafe Deth. BCBCS wins imo

 

Did you happen to notice the bottling date on your BCBCS? Just curious

 

not sure if trolling, but, it was 9/6. If you haven't been reading this thread religiously, please don't take offense

 

I think they just like to switch things up. They've put out coffee and barleywine post 2015 debacle...and even coffee barleywine. We've had the Cafe Olla variant with coffee in it and I believe another one. They could do vanilla every year, just sells better with more hype if they release every few years.

 

Below is a picture of my haul from Carmine St Beers. Not pictured I also got Sir Isaacs, Biscotti, and Coffee. The 12 oz bottles are the blend.

Looking for some advice on where to start. I’ve had a bunch of BCBS and variants over the years including coffee and barley wine multiple times. Need to start chipping away at these.

I don’t live with my former beer bro roommate so I’m going to have to likely solo these. How do these hold up if I drink half and stopper it? I have one of those oxygen removing pumps for wine that I could use.

Thanks!

 

Ha, no offense taken. I’ve read through it and that’s why I asked, just continuing to selfishly gather data on these date of bottling variances, lol.

 

I would drink a regular first, and then the adjunct ones. The Reserves and Barleywine will cellar very well. Instead of using a stopper I would just drink them over a couple hours

 

I recap BCBS all the time... My specific bottle capper doesn't love the bottle geometry of the BCBS ones, but it does work with a little finesse. But anyway, we will often open one up and recap the other half for another day. Sometimes, as much as a week later.

It always holds up really well and outside of a little loss of carbonation, no issue. Still tastes as good, IMO. Don't sweat it. Just move quickly to recap after you pour your first portion.

 

I stopper stout bombers overnight pretty often and I think most of the time there is completely no noticeable difference. And if there is, it's pretty minor. Don't suck the air out, though, I think that will just work to decarbonate it faster. I do that with mead sometimes, which has been great over the course of up to a week for me.

 

If you drink the 2nd half the following night it holds up great. As people mentioned a slight loss of carbonation on night 2, but for many of the variants with flavors I’ve done this with they have actually shown more flavor on day two than on day 1. Not sure if it gives them a chance to breath and the flavors to bloom.

 

Dude, as I have commented before: cheers to your financial wherewithal. Living the American dream.

I personally do not have any experience here but I have read a number of times where folks opine that the 'regular' BCBS reaches peak flavors with two years of cellaring. Take that FWIW.

As regards the BCBS beers with flavorings the conventional wisdom is to drink them in fresher condition to best appreciates the flavors added (e.g., coffee, etc.) but if you would prefer those flavor additions to be more subtle then aging would be appropriate.

And several folks have suggested that if you have a bottle capper you could open the bottle and drink a portion and then enjoy that beer the following day. As a homebrewer I have a capper but I have no experience using my capper to re-cap these beers.

Cheers and enjoy your bounty here!

 

Barleywine is King Henry 2.0 imo. Finest GI beer I've had in a decade. It's fantastic and really got the King Henry memories going. I know they were made differently...BCBS Rare barrels for KH etc....but it really has that vibe.

 

If they priced it better I would buy like 4 and revisit once a year. I really want to sit on one for a while

 

coffee & barleywine were annual releases. the debacle transpired & coincidentally they decided they'd just like to switch things up. helluva a coincidence.

you are correct, as i said they made other attempts but if i had to guess, i suspect the follow-up failure rates on subsequent attempts was more the deciding factor than them getting frisky on switching things up. given the situation at that time, it was obvious their 3-2-1 method for BW was extremely risky.

 

Thing is, I don’t recall this much variation in the past with the Coffee variant. I thought people rated that highly across the board, but I could be wrong.

 

Darwin just posted his video review of his bottle of BCBCS. It seems that he was somewhat conflicted here?

“(WORST Vintage?!)”

But he rates it: “Darwin's Rating: 98/100”.

I suppose that previous vintages were 100/100?



Cheers!

 

Okay finally opened the coffee. This is a 9/7 batch and never had the OG (infected or otherwise). Real solid, would have liked more coffee. It does add another layer on the regular, and more bitter. Probably not worth double though. This guy is too old to do a side by side with the Lagunitas Willit, could barely get this beast down. But cost aside I think it betters the Willit.

 

I never tried any bcbs before like 2019 or 2018 and I've never had any variants. That said, how much more coffee did they produce this year compared to years past? My impression is that they have really scaled up production of this line of beers over the last 5 years.

 

I’m a broken record. His ratings are extremely stupid. An awful beer for him (drain pour) is anything below a 90

 

Is this intended as hyperbole?

I recently watched Darwin’s video review of Brooklyn Crisp Pilsner. He assigned that beer at 84/100 and he described that beer using the verbiage “crushable”. Certainly not a “drain pour” beer.

Cheers!

P.S. And for completeness I am not a Darwin fan-boy. I just watch some of his video reviews from time to time.

 

I suspect they made enough coffee BCBs for the next 5 years until they brew it again. It would be great to know the real quantities behind their scarcity release model, because there is nothing more frustrating than chasing a one off variant and it being sold out everywhere and then just magically seeing huge quantities of it released consistently in the same places over the next 4 or 5 years.

 

Just from what I've seen they definitely seem to build "vintage" sales over the next 5 years into their model with the bcb line. It's honestly a smart move for a program their size that's trying to maintain the kind of premium pricing that is usually contingent on some level of exclusivity

 

regarding bottle stoppers and all that... ive had a beer in the fridge with one after drinking half and nothing happens.

ive also left glasses of veer for 2 days in there lime a half eaten dot dog on a plate and nothing happened.

just drink them however you want!

 

Yes, but not completely. I used to watch his stuff all the time when he was in his basement and was at the peak of the beer snob trend. I remember him absolutely hating a beer and saying he won’t finish it, but gave it an 81. I only remember this because I made a long post on the video asking if he would be able to finish a can of *insert macro lager* and if he could, it should logically get a MUCH higher score. I mean saying “worst vintage” and then giving the beer a 98 score, which should mean it’s better than almost all beers ever brewed, is just silly. You can only have so many 100 ratings (he even used to do 100+ and 100- as a score lol) before it gets over saturated with beers that are rated the highest possible score. Math doesn’t work that way.
I care way too much about this

 

Something we can agree on.

Cheers!

 

The biggest problem with scales is that they become uninterpretable. The most eggregious offense associated being that the entire scale isn’t used, so you can’t tell what the fuck the score means. For example, in graduate school everyone is expected to perform at a very high level. So, I’d everyone gets 88-95, you don’t really know what that means. It needs to be broken down more, for example, perhaps 7-10 is mastery, 5-7 is needs work, and anything below 5 is failure that needs significant improvement.

The same problem plagued beer. Look, on the whole, I can see a number of us on here only drinking “very good beers”, but if everything is stuck between 4 and 4.5, it’s tough to understand what that means. Yea, on the whole, it surpasses the swill at random 3-tap local startup. More information would be better. It would be great to have a score that only considers beer in the top tier. For example, No doubt Rev’s SJ or Goose’s 30th are good beers, but where do they stand among JUST the beers that should be their competitors?

Then, what about value? Why isn’t value a separate score? So many people rate a beer poorly, because although it is good it doesn’t align with the cost. A recent example of this is Side Project’s Derivation16. Even among SP’s members, they say it is a good beer but arguably not worth the high price tag to consume on site. That’s pretty niche, but what about something more available like the GI 30th and the 2yr BW. It would be great to compare someone’s score with where they see the value is.

Rare15 was/is Great. I’ll pay the price of admission, but others won’t think the quality anywhere comes close.

More detail > less.

 

Well it’s much more readily available now, so you know…..too thin, too much coffee, not enough coffee, shell of its former (much harder to set) self, etc etc.

 

Seems like you're the only person on here, who can't tell the difference(s) between what this beer once was, and what it is now.

 

The old BCBCS (as far as I know) ONLY used coffee beans. The new version (including since the 2015 infection) uses cold brew. I believe this is the first year since infection that they are using any beans again.

So, yes, it is different. It is going to be different. It’s the same reason that the 2018 BCBVBS (that’s Vanilla 2018, or the redux of 2010 vanilla) doesn’t taste the same as the OG, although I still think the 2018 is Phenomenal. In the old version they put split vanilla beans directly into barrels to age with the stout; in the new version, they basically spin the vanilla beans in a tank with the finished BCBS. It’s a different method, it’s going to have a different result.

What I think @zac16125 is getting at is this: Sometimes people think crime rates are through the roof. What’s actually going on is that the number of occurrences is large, because you’re in a densely populated area, but the per-capita rate is still low. Same thing happens when you look at reviews for well known products. On that latter note, people are way more critical of a brand or item that was once the industry standard, regardless of whether they ever consumed (or used) it, or how recently. A good example is Alienware. An Alienware laptop is selling design not just performance. Despite the fact that they are designed to run hot (the new i7 and i9 intel - and thus loud, due to fan speed), you see people complain. You will see more bad reviews for that than a $3k Asus Zenbook, despite similar capabilities, because of what people expect from Alienware, or because of where it used to stand in the pantheon of computers.

Same thing here. Anything related to BCBS is going to get overly critical reviews. The fact that this year is the first year that they have tried to dial BCBCS back in after the green pepper wars of 2016 and 2017 means that people are going to be even more observant and critical. The fact that Rev’s Cafe Deth and Crushing Mass are now around provides even more fodder.

So, I think the point that @zac16125 was really getting at is that, of course you have to expect that people will say it is bad/worse and cNt live up to its glory. Coffee will always be thin, just like how vanilla will always be thin, compared to the base. And in the days of thicc stouts, BCBS will always be thin by comparison.

 

I’m just impressed with the impeccable memories of so many people. The ability to accurately recall the exact details of a beer they had 7 or more years prior!

 

Also, we all know that there’s zero association between hype/scarcity and subjective beer experiences…

 

curious, where you heard this? i never could get an answer that i'd consider more than "opinion".

i'd thought they aged on beans also but learned from the 2015 issue they were pouring cold brew. the consensus seemed to be they'd always done so (cold brew).

i also had a couple of bags of the beans they used for the 2015 release. IMHO, it was a pretty unique coffee that brewed a great deal of fruity, acidic flavor. just using my imagination, over beer, i could see those flavors alone tasting like potential "infection".

 

Like you, I thought I had read it. I wouldn’t bet my house on it, just what I thought I had read and was congruent with their other adjunct use inclusion methods.

 

I’ll second Highbrow and echo that I thought all previous versions used cold brew. I’m fairly certain GI even stated this is the first time using whole beans when they were introducing this years lineup.

 

This year’s BCBCS was brewed with a combination of cold brew and whole beans. This is the first time they used both formats.



Cheers!

 

From a Good Beer Hunting article from 2013.

“That process came into question this year when the crew had to make the cold-brew coffee for the Bourbon County Coffee Stout for the first time since Laffler's departure. "This year I had to ask myself 'how do we make the coffee?', Siegel recalls. "I don't know, Laffler always made the coffee. But more importantly, how do we make as much as we need this year? It's so much more. So we got some fresh eyes on it, and some fresh thinking, and we made almost forty barrels."

https://www.goodbeerhunting.com/blo...lands-bourbon-county-stout-a-change-in-season

 

So, they have never used beans before, at all, since this is the first time they used both, and OG used cold brew.

Mind blown

 

There goes the theory I've heard that the cold brew made it thinner

 

Has anyone on this thread tried the Prop yet? I was gifted a bottle in a recent Secret Santa box...it sounds like it could be amazing or absolutely dreadful...ive read a couple of reviews, just trying to get some feedback here on it...and if someone posted about it, my apologies for overlooking it