Bourbon County Brand Stout 2011 (Goose Island)

Being a beer geek not only entails drinking beer and using fancy wishy-washy words to describe how yummy it is (or not, depending on the beer), but also finding new brews to sample. Sometimes, however, the brews find you.

After many a frustrating delay, yours truly and the elusive Dennoman finally met face to face, and swapped a couple of beers. A word to the wise: if a fellow beer geek announces he "went for quality rather than quantity", expect some pretty spectacular slosh to end up in your cellar.

Dennoman is (among many other things) an avid stout lover.

That little translingual pun never gets old.

One beer he's been raving about, and which he generously donated to me, is the Bourbon County Brand Stout, Goose Island's flagship stout. You can read about beer as much as you like, and get stoked up when the praise piles up, but it's just not the same thing as actually tasting it. Never more so than with this one.

Ready or not, here it comes.

Awful lighting and that sacrilegious glass again.

It pours like pitch: black and oily and viscous. That tan head you see in the pic? It didn't last a minute: it got eaten by the lurking darkness beneath.

Like theLaBrea tar pits, only wthout the trees. Not sure about the mammoths.

Weird carbonation, with a lazy swirl of beige bubbles trying to breach the surface in magma-like eddies.

You can literally smell this beer from across the room: Big Fat Chords of Bourbon.

Booze, but in a good way.

Angel's share in a glass: that ethereal breeze of whisk(e)y and wood you find in the stillage of a distillery.

And when you bring the nose closer and really start smelling the beer...oh my... Otherworldly layers of yumminess, with booze and vanilla and a hint of petroleum-like solvents (which doesn't sound nearly as yummy as it really is). Delicately interspersed, you'll find blackberries and other dark forest fruits. Not that I know that many other dark forest fruits but you get the idea. An understated whiff of coffee, some humus (not hummus, I'm talking last-year's-fallen-leaves-turning-into-topsoil), a bit of smoke and some faraway peat.

Not-far-enough-away Peat.

Really, if a beer smells this good, then it's allowed to do some pretty bizarre things in your mouth and still be a winner.

And sure enough, the Bourbon County does many weird things, but none of them detrimental to that phenomenal first impression.

Without exaggeration, I sat back for a good five minutes after my first sip. Even words could not rise up from underneath the decadent, otherworldly smooth flavour and mouthfeel of this beautiful monster. Rather than be poured, it insinuates itself out of the glass into your mouth, where it explodes, languidly and lazily and looooooong-lastingly, in a myriad of flavours, each toppling and leaping up off from the other, like an organoleptic chain reaction.Thick and viscous, creamily boozy like pralines (good ones, not those horrible cheap-ass granny bonbons), Bourbon and soft soft wood. Fenoles and sweet strong Irish coffee, only with Bourbon and stout.

A perversely long aftertaste, endlessly lingering like (du-uh) good whisk(e)y. Bourbon, sorry. Note to Self: study up on Bourbon because if it tastes half as good as this beer, then it's a worthwhile acquaintance if ever there was one.

One might wonder if this is still a beer. It's got so much more going on than just beer (for the record: there is no such thing as "just beer"), and it even pushes those vaporous boundaries of the Imperial Stout-genre clean off the map.

Oh. Turns out there is such a thing as "just beer" after all...

The oak-ageing and the Heaven Hill Bourbon (Goose Island must be using pretty damp barrels to achieve the staggering 14.5% ABV) combined transform the original product (which probably doesn't qualify as "just beer" either) into an entirely different thing. As different from each other as porto and wine, and very much like rillettes not being, strictly speaking, paté anymore.

But it would be a crime of stellar proportions not to call the Bourbon County beer. A beer which transcends the boundaries of its definition, even those of its oak-aged subgenre, and boldly but stylishly places a 16-ton markerstone deep into what used to be the no-man's-land beyond the beer border. I know, I wax prosaic, but Saint Arnoldus bless my beard, this is truly an entirely different ballgame.

Dennoman, my perpetual gratitude goes out to you. If ever you're away on a holiday, I gladly volunteer to guard your cellar.

Rest assured: your babies will be looked after :)

Beer: Brand Stout (2011)
Brewery: Goose Island
Style: Barrel Aged Imperial Stout
ABV: 15%
IBU: 60
EBC: -
Served: 500ml bottle

Until then,

Greetz

jo