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Saturday, January 9, 2016

The Perfect Nose is the Perfect Wine

Barley wine has always been one of the feast or famine areas in brewing. I think the problem is that the right taste regimen is hard to hit. A lot of times barley wine comes in with a high barley count and I don't like it. Very rarely does it come in with a low barely count and a higher hops (I assume that this is the factor which flavors barely wine) but to do this takes a steady hand on the tiller. So, what are you supposed to do? Cognac.

Cognac gathers together the sugars that are in wine and concentrates over time. While wine picks up the flavors that are around it, cognac gets the deeper flavors and it concentrates them. This is why cognac comes across as a deeper set of tastes. Now what happens when we concentrate cognac and barely wine in the same process? Yeah, its a wholly new set of tastes for barley wine, ones we had written off as not possible in the barley wine barrel. Cognac seems to be the solution for barley wine!

Westbrook Brewing Company (510 Ridge Rd, Mt Pleasant, SC 29464 V: (843) 654-9114 www.westbrookbrewing.com) and Evil Twin (446 Kent Avenue, apt 14A Brooklyn, NY 11249 USA, www.eviltwin.dk) are responsible to The Perfect Nose, a barley wine fermented in cognac barrels. Yeah, Evil Twin, who is responsible for several of these high end beer distilleries, has their hand in it, and Westbrook Brewing Company is their partner in crime. This has 10.2% ABV and no IBUs.

This is a beautiful example of what you can do with a barley wine and cognac barrels. The barley wine is transported past its normal critiques and moved onto a whole other level. No more complaints about the deep barley tastes. This is moved onto how the cognac mellows out the barley wine, prompting a discussion of whether it is even appropriate to be calling it a barley wine at all.  Yeah, it is that good.

Untappd rating: 3.8
My Untappd rating: 4.75

Skal!
Brian

Monday, January 4, 2016

BeerCycling.com - From Pint A to Pint B Hits the Washington Post

Evan Cohan must be running with a lucky star - and we can only hope he is doing just that. BeerCycling.com, the Portland, OR based bicycling based Belgium, The Netherlands and Italy touring company has hit the Washington Post. If you are curious to read in more depth about BeerCycling.com catch up with a review by Diane Daniel (bydianedaniel.com)

The article can be found here in the Washington Post Travel Section: A Self-Propelled Belgium Brewery Tour Through Belgium Let You Bike to Pints

(I wish that this article was found by me, but is brought to my attention by Becki Chall, Development Director, Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science in Portland, OR.)

Skal!
Brian

Sunday, January 3, 2016

Happy 2016! We're Back!!

Hope you all had a rip roaring Christmas and New Year! We certainly did at Jolly Good Fellows and now we are back to bring you some of the beer markets new offerings and well as few surprises along the way. So hang on, it is going to be a wild ride!