Quick Sips: Fegley’s Bourbon Barrel Insidious

Those in Allentown and Bethlehem, PA know Fegley’s as The Brew Works, a pair of great brewpubs in some of Pennsy’s finest non-Philly towns for hanging out and enjoying great beer. When bottled, those beers get the “Fegley’s” label – but they are no less awesome than they are at the pub.

Insidious is their big imperial stout, a chocolate forward brew that can be a bit hot on the alcohol when fresh but that ages into itself very nicely after about 12 months in the "cellar" (or cupboard). 

The Bourbon Barrel version? A twist on that delightfully dark beer, following the trend of stuffing everything possible into a barrel. Trend or not, though, it works. Fegley’s version has less up front bourbon than many bourbon barrel aged beers, making this an approachable (but still imposing!) take on the barrel-aged style.

Black as night, rich as a Rockefeller, and surprisingly drinkable when compared to others of the same style, enjoy this sipper of a beer with a big steak or spicy nachos.

NOTE: Portions of this post originally appeared in The Philly Weekly. 

Touring the Weyebacher brewery

I may be a beer geek, but to my great misfortune I don't tour a lot of breweries.

Part of that is because New Jersey just plain doesn't have many breweries to tour (though not a big complaint now thanks to Kane and Carton) and part of that (the bigger part) is that I like to build days around such tours, and those days involve BEER. The issue is that my region has awful public transportation options, and I prefer to play it safe whenever I can. Unlike, say, those in New York or San Diego or San Francisco, I have to get myself home but can't be expected to be helped along by buses or trains or taxis.

But when I got together with my co-host of the Year of Hitchcock podcast in the spring, we knew we were going to tour some breweries, have some craft beer, and do it all in the name of promoting our book on Alfred Hitchcock.

The weekend took a turn away from writing and a turn towards beer, however, thanks in part to Weyerbacher. How could we do any different in the wake of these amazing tanks?

Needless to say, we ended up doing very little promoting (read: zero), but plenty of beering. A quick glance through this blog will show you that I am a big supporter of Weyerbacher, so I shouldn't need to say more about whether or not I liked the tour.

But I will. How about, the people were super friendly the beer awesome, the location easy to get to, and the price of cases of limited edition beer at the time (thanks ENTIRELY to stupid Pennsylvania law) was so absurd they lost about $200 in business from my brief, visit? I hear the law has changed since then, so that's cool, but check in advance first. I loved how they'd keep pouring you samples of whatever beer they had, no matter how rare, as long as you asked. And if they didn't have it on tap, they'd open a bottle and pour it. Awesome!

Plus, check out their cool barrel-aging system:





It's not a lot compared to larger craft brewers like Firestone Walker, but when you yourself have only made a small number of beers in a whiskey barrel it sure is impressive.

Fun trip with some great people at the brewery. How could you NOT have a lot of fun going to a brewery that makes beers you love? Which is what makes me say, damn, why don't I do this more often?

And I should. If I'm to be a real beer geek, I should see where it is made more often (even if it is often made in my own home).

HOMEBREWING: Whiskey Barrel Imperial Stout

Last year, a friend and I put the whiskey barrel I bought to good use and brewed an imperial stout designed to be aged in said barrel. The recipe was, to say the least, intense. Easily the most expensive beer I have done to date, using a TON of specialty malts and in the end (thankfully) tasting comparable to Firestone Walker's Parabola, but here's the thing: It might also be the most delicious beer I've ever done. It's certainly the prettiest:

Looks wonderful, doesn't it? That's my co-brewer in the photo, and the beer is just a few weeks old (after a long primary and then secondary in the barrel). If you want the recipe, just ask. It's extract with specialty grains, so anyone can make it.

After the imperial stout, I did a honey porter in it, and the barrel currently contains a lambic, which will stay in the barrel for about a year or more. My plan is to blend small parts of that batch into future lambic and sour batches. (I currently have seven vessels with various sour beers, so the blending opportunities are endless!)

So here's the thing: Barrel-aging your beers is easy.

1) Buy a barrel! Just Google various phrases, there are TONS of sources. Spend between $70 and $120 (before shipping) for a 5-gallon barrel or you're getting ripped off.

2) Don't worry about cleaning it out. All that booze will keep it sterile. Just brew a big beer and put it in the barrel!

3) How long to age it? Keep the beer in it from two weeks to two years, depending on the beer. A weeks to two weeks is great for IPAs and Double IPAs, two to four weeks is ideal for traditional stouts and porters, four to eight weeks for barleywines and strong Belgian styles, and a month to two years for lambics.

4) Bottle, age, open, enjoy!

Yeah, seriously, it's that easy. I recommend bottling a few smaller sampler bottles so you can taste it over time -- barrel-aged beers tend to need some time to age into perfection, about six months to a year in my experience -- and going easy until it has aged into your taste. After that?

Cheers!

From the Cellar: Dogfish Head Burton Baton

When I pull stuff from storage for the From the Cellar series, I don't necessarily expect much. For personal reasons I'm pulling some of this stuff sooner than I normally would, so a few of these aging experiments are not showcasing the vintages I had hoped to showcase when I first stored them away.

So when I get a pleasant surprise like this one, I'm pretty damn thrilled!

Dogfish Head's Burton Baton is an imperial IPA blend made up of a fresh double IPA and an English-style old ale, both aged in oak barrels for about a month. Though old ales age wonderfully, IPAs are generally not good candidates for aging. Hops and bitterness tend to be among the first things to fade from a beer. In most modern IPAs, being as little as six months out of date can leave you with a beer that tastes like sweet cardboard left in a basement.

With that in mind, on the surface Dogfish Head's Burton Baton, made up largely of a double IPA, doesn't seem like the ideal choice for a beer to be set down for over 12 months.

Still, it's loosely modeled after -- actually, "inspired by" is the more accurate descriptor -- Ballantine Burton Ale, an ultra rare beer that had been aged for decades in oak. This beer may well have what it takes to age well.

And it does. Fourteen months into the aging experiment, pressed for something to drink, I decided to crack one open. The beer did NOT pour as expected. First of all, it poured with a HUGE, thick, creamy tan head that lingered for the entire life of the beer. Completely unexpected for an imperial IPA that was over a year old. The head did not at all dissipate over the course of 45 minutes to an hour of drinking, remaining thick as a light cream throughout that time. Wow!

The aroma, unfortunately, left me worried about how this beer would taste. It was dominated with the musty, faded out hops common to IPAs that are out of date, in this case touched by notes of alcohol and wood.

Based on the aroma, this wasn't going to be good.

I was wrong.

In that first sip you get a mouthful of woody, creamy malt; it's thick and tasting of oak. You then get hit with subdued hops that are nonetheless nicely bitter, at this point perfectly in balance with the sweetness of the malt. I mean, perfectly. It's as if a year turned this into the beer it wants to be. Fresh Burton is a blast of pine hops, quite tasty indeed, but this ... this is just a damn good, utterly balanced beer with a lot going on in every sip. It's delicious. There are hints of oak in the finish, adding a pleasantly astringent edge, and, despite the big 10% ABV, nary a hint of alcohol.

I am impressed. After a little over a year, this. Beer. Drinks. GREAT. In many ways even better than it does when it is fresh. There is another bottle in my cellar, as well as a bottle of a much older vintage. I can't wait to see how they taste with a few more years on them.

Cellar this one? Absolutely!

BEER: Dogfish Head Burton Baton
VINTAGE: April 201l
TIME AGED: 1 year, 2 months (14 months)
NOTES: This aged brew would pair GREAT with a hearty seasoned fish

VERDICT: This aged FAR better than I expected given its origins. Grab a four-pack and put two away for at least a year!

From the Cellar: Founder's KBS

Starting with this post, I'm going to periodically pull something from my beer cellar and report how it has aged. (Yes, you can age beer; check this post for more details.) Sometimes I'll touch on beers that have been aged for several years or more, other times the beers will be as little as a year old. Whenever possible I'll touch on something I've reviewed before as a Quick Sip so as to compare where a beer started and where it ended up.

We begin with a very special beer indeed. Founder's KBS (which stands for Kentucky Breakfast Stout) is a highly sought-after, hugely tasty imperial stout aged in bourbon barrels. Read my initial impressions in this post from last year. This bottle comes from that same batch and was purchased at the same time. It has been stored since purchase, boxed in the back of a dark closet, and kept between 65 and 70 degrees during that time.

So how did it hold up?

Fresh from the fridge, the beers pours with only a faint sliver of head, no more than a thin layer of chocolate tan foam. The beer itself is as black as used motor oil. You might find dinosaur bones preserved in this thick black liquid. The aroma has hints of bourbon, but it falls well short of the overpowering bourbon nose of this beer when it's fresh.

The taste of bourbon hasn't faded, at least. This is still one potent brew, with the beer immediately hitting your mouth with powerful bourbon, then shifting to a complex mix of rich, roasty malts, and finally finishing on yet more bourbon with hints of vanilla from the oak aging thrown in for good measure. The oak comes on stronger than I recall first time around, especially in the finish. Despite a year to mellow out, the robust 11.1% ABV is still clearly noticeable; this brew is warming, but not "hot." As the temperature begins to rise -- and that will happen, since this is a beer you'll sip for an hour -- the booze becomes even more apparent both in the taste and the aroma.

After a year, Founder's legendary KBS remains a delicious, supremely satisfying beer. However, in my view the fresh bottle was the better bottle.


BEER: Founder's KBS
VINTAGE: 2011
TIME AGED: One year
NOTES: None

VERDICT: It's okay to cellar this, it will hold up well, but don't wait too long before you drink it. It's better fresh, and after a year no new complexities are revealed in this beer.

Weyerbacher brews a heretical stout

Weyerbacher is a fantastic brewery out of Pennsylvania that really deserves more attention, especially since they've been crafting exceptional beers for 16 years now. They do some fine year-round beers, the Merry Monks being my favorite, and also do a large number of small-batch, limited release and seasonal beers.

Among them is Heresy, which is their Old Heathen imperial stout aged in Kentucky bourbon barrels.

And it's a pretty nice one. Just look at that tasty pour! The rich, foamy head so thick you can flat a cap on it!

Thing is, for being a pricier version of their standard issue imperial stout, the oak aging didn't do much for this brew. It has a slightly woody nose with a touch of bourbon, but you really have to be looking for it. Most of this is just nice imperial stout with strong chocolate taste from the roasted malt. Not that there is anything wrong with that! It's a good beer with a great roasty flavor, just didn't seem to benefit much from the barrel aging (which is all the rage these days among American craft brewers).

Comes in at 8% alcohol, but it's a very smooth 8%. You'd never known it was a more potent than usual brew. I've seen reviews that said the alcohol taste was kind of hot, but not in my experience. Maybe it's because I've had it for a while and let the alcohol mellow. (The bottle was about seven months old, stored at room temperature.)

All in all I'd say the Heresy is worth a look, but if you balk at the price consider a single bottle rather than the four-pack.

Chasing down the elusive KBS (Kentucky Breakfast Stout)

Note: I brought this post over from my main blog.

Founder's Kentucky Breakfast Stout, aka KBS, is an amazing, hard to find beer because the once-a-year brew sells out so fast, but it's well worth the trouble of tracking it down. Here's why.



There is a reason why Ratebeer rates it a world class beer and ranks it as one of the top 10 beers in the world based on thousands of reviews. It's quite simply one of the most complex, rich, and flavorful beers you'll ever have. Folks who have only experienced the usual Bud-Miller-Coors style beers are probably unaware that beer can be like this.

I was lucky to even get it. I had been bugging the guys at my local liquor store two months ahead of time. "Do you think you'll be able to get the KBS? Please set a few bottles aside for me!" Turns out my entire state only got 120 cases. Otherwise good liquor stores were #25 or #30 on their distributor's list to get a case ... and those distributors had maybe four cases to dish out. Yikes.

But my shop did get it, and they set aside two bottles for me. (Few shops sold this in the four-packs it comes in. Instead, most imposed one- or two-bottle limits on customers.) I'm glad they did. This stuff was a treat.

This is an imperial stout brewed with huge amounts of coffee and chocolate, both of which are very much a part of this heady, chewy brew's taste and aroma. It's rich and dark and very full-bodied. Founders sends the taste into the stratosphere, though, when they cave age it for a year inside oak bourbon barrels. The result is a beer loaded with flavors that all compete for center stage without crowding one another out.

KBS has a strong, up-front bourbon taste with hints of vanilla in the aroma. Give it a whiff and you'd almost think you're smelling a dense liquor. It's a beer through and through, though. After the initial burst of bourbon at the start of your sip, coffee and chocolate rise up in the middle, with hints of vanilla working to counter the mocha taste. The balance is perfect. As you finish your sip you're left with a lingering, oaky bourbon finish.

All in all, it wasn't just a beer, it was an experience. If by some amazing chance you see some, grab it. Otherwise, be ready to act fast when next year's batch is released. It's already in barrels.