Hello, Commentists! Sorry for my absence these past two weeks, but I was out wandering the woods with Hillary Clinton last week and couldn’t find a signal. Did you know she wrestled a grizzly bear out there? Mainstream media won’t talk about it. I don’t know what they’ve got against her.
Losing can be hard to process. Because all of us here are dumb enough to care about football, we know that. Many of us have already seen our teams eliminated from playoff contention. Most of the rest—everyone, really, except probably for the goddamned Cowboys fans—will see our teams either miss the playoffs or get knocked out of them. In that spirit, this week I’m bringing you a review of Contemplating Waterloo, a gin barrel aged saison from Adelbert’s Brewery in Austin, Texas, and one of my favorite new beers of 2014, when it first made its debut.
But hold up a minute: Gin barrel aged? That’s not a thing. You don’t put gin in barrels. It’s a clear liquor, and if it aged in barrels, it’d be brown. Except! The Treaty Oak Distilling Ranch, also in Austin, has put its Waterloo Antique Barrel Reserve Gin in bourbon barrels. I’ve sampled the gin on its own in the past, and it tastes like a sort of bourbon-gin hybrid, a mixture of gin’s botanicals and the smooth, woody goodness of bourbon.
Contemplating Waterloo itself pours translucent gold, maybe just barely shading toward reddish. The head’s fluffy and airy immediately after pouring, but it soon pulls together into a dense white layer that leaves an intricate and sticky lacing on the sides of the glass when it’s tipped. The scent is strongly suggestive of pineapple, with a bit of white chocolate underneath. The white chocolate, probably a product of aging on oak, is still there when I sip, but what seemed like pineapple to the nose opens up into a more complex array of flavors: Lavender, sweet orange, clove, and of course juniper from the gin. That juniper is definitely the featured player here, as it probably should be if you’re going to advertise your gin barrel aging. Going from gin to whiskey barrels and from whiskey barrels back out into beer has softened it quite a bit; it’s not like I’m drinking a martini, but it still gives the saison a little extra zing. Here’s the thing about this beer: Despite the out-there concept, there’s nothing incredibly unusual about the way it tastes. This is, at heart, a very smooth and easy-drinking barrel-aged saison and a downright dangerous delivery system for a hefty ABV of 9.1%.
lady snow says: God, the juniper in this!
make it snow says: I know, right?
lady snow says: It’s so good! And I’d love to get one of those hoodies that has a pouch for your cat. But that doesn’t have anything to do with the beer. They only do Belgian styles, right?
make it snow says: Yeah, only or almost-only.
lady snow says: I’m so curious what inspired them to age a saison in gin barrels. [reading label] Oh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I agree, I think the citrus flavors from the saison really work well with the juniper. And the whole thing’s just so herbally soothing. I want to take a bath in it.
make it snow says: The lavender, right?
lady snow says: Yeah!
tl;dr: Gin in whiskey barrels. Gin out of whiskey barrels. Beer in whiskey/gin barrels. Do not buttchug.
Grade: Saisons can be hit-or-miss for me, and barrel-aging them can be tricky, but this is an all-around success and I’d recommend it to anyone who doesn’t, like, hate juniper or some weird shit like that.
make it snow is an alot of beer and holidays enthusiast. If you’re not done shopping, get done shopping! (make it snow is not done shopping.)
I wish there was a better way to categorize (or maybe sub-categorize) saisons. It’s such a vast range of tastes that it’s almost as generic as just calling it beer.
I’m late to the party but a wandering group of us DFOers hit up The Bruery in Placentia on Saturday and my surprise winner was the Rose Gose.
I was introduced to the Gose, a sour style of beer by my god son who is part owner of El Segundo brewery and a certified cicerone during a beer knowledge class and I was intrigued.
The Gose was my first intro to the sour style of beers, later to be familiarized with the Belgian farmhouse style of brewing and the organic yeasts.
As a recent wine dabbler I was really taken with the grenache style of red, particularly the vintage of the Joel Gott grenache that I’m pretty sure I personally drank into extinction but when I saw the offering of a gose beer that was infused with grenache grapes I was intrigued and definitely not disappointed by.
I would love to hear your and Lady Snow’s opinion of this slightly sour but very palatable beverage.
https://untappd.com/b/bruery-terreux-r-rose-gose/1864756
Whoa, whoa, whoa. What’s this about this cat pouch hoodie thing? That kinda got glossed over there.
I’ve never seen one of these in the wild but: http://www.cichic.com/grey-plain-pockets-drawstring-cat-slaves-cute-pullover-hooded-sweatshirt.html?gclid=CJuo57Sd_9ACFRC4wAod-IENOA
I’m pretty sure one of my cats would murder my face trying to put him in there.
The other one would find a wormhole inside and only visit me in my dreams, trying to tell me secrets from the White Lodge using backwards meows.
I had a tequila aged sour at Sanitas in Boulder, and it was excellent.
Also, I’m holding off on drinking this week so it’ll be easier to get drunk around my extended family for the holidays.
I see absolutely no way that strategy can go wrong!
Sour really seems like the ideal style group for tequila barrel aging. Jester King made a good one, Encendía.
Oh! Just remembered this.
I wandered over to Goose Island’s production facility tap room and had a saison of theirs aged in tequila barrels and it was really excellent. The tequila came through mostly on the finish but added a depth (I don’t have a better way of describing it) that style usually doesn’t have.
I also had their Madam Rose which tasted just like a Rodenbach Alexander but not quite as good.
The Hombre Secreto, right? I like that one, although when it comes to tequila barrel aging nothing has come close, for me, to Bottle Logic Leche Borracho. That one’s part bourbon barrels, part tequila barrels, and the tequila presents with a much more citrusy flavor than I usually get. Tequila barrel beers tend to be very earthy, in my experience, and it’s not always the best possible complement to the beer.
I have a bottle of Madam Rose (and Halia and whatever the blackberry one is) that I’m saving. So what you’re saying is that it’s good, but not exactly world class? I am now on the look out for some of that Alexander.
Look, I love you and your reviews, but when will you share a list of butt chuggable beers?
When I do, it’ll be incomplete, hand-written, and accompanied by the sad news of my death by alcohol poisoning.
Beer related aside: I’ve had some bad luck with some barrel-aged beers I’d been saving.
I found a bottle of Revolution’s Bean Gene at a shop near me and the clerk at the counter told me that if I was going to save it, I needed to keep it cool because they were going bad at room temperature and turning into geysers when you opened them. Of course, I had kept one from last year at room temperature and it gushed over and tasted tart, a sure sign some funky stuff got into the beer that wasn’t supposed to be there. I found a lot of other people had the same issue and I’m probably passing on buying their stuff for a while until they figure out how not to fuck it up.
Also, I found a 2015 Bourbon County Barleywine which is just as tart and funky as all the other spoiled ones were. I like tart cherry, so I think I’ll be able to drink it.
Some breweries have absolutely godawful quality control when it comes to barrel aging. I have two or three Dark Horse Bourbon Barrel Plead the 5ths in my closet that are just sitting there because the last one I drank had a particularly ugly infection, all peanut butter and copper. If you want to break the streak, and you can get their stuff in your area, I just tried a couple variants EPIC Brewing put out of their already extraordinary Big Bad Baptist, and they’re positively world-class. Double Barrel Big Bad Baptist is brewed with barrel-aged green coffee beans, and Big Bad Baptista uses Mexican coffee, cacao, vanilla, and cinnamon.
Yeah, Hair Of The Dog is sadly not 100% on their bottling at times, which is a shame because when the bottle aging works for them, it really works, but it can go super soy sauce wrong just as much.
I’ve one gin-barrel beer before: a pilsner from Half Acre. It’s one of the few beers I genuinely disliked from first sip to last. I tasted as if someone spilled gin in my beer.
Doing as saison instead makes a lot more sense since the botanical of the gin and the complexities of the saison can complement each other. I’d also consider a Trippel for the same reason, though the inherent citrus-y of a farmhouse/saison would probably be better.
I can’t see the argument for aging a pilsner in any kind of barrels. A pilsner’s not a hoppy beer, exactly, but it is very dependent on hops for its balance and crispness. Maybe they were hoping the sharpness of the gin would work as a substitute for the faded hops, but it obviously didn’t work out that way.
I think the only other gin barrel-aged beer I’ve had was from Rogue, and it was completely unmemorable.