Port Brewing Co. Old Viscosity
Lost Abbey/Port Brewing Company brew a style of beer that I really want to enjoy more than I have. I’ve tasted a number of offerings from them, and while I appreciate what they are doing, the style of beers that they produce just doesn’t do anything for me. All of the beers that I’ve tried have been loaded with layers of flavor, but at the same time have also been big and rich, with heavy, thick palates. So while I appreciate their depth of flavor, it is offset by their heaviness. I think this is just their house style, much as it is with Dogfish Head, another brewery that produces great tasting, but very heavily-bodied beers.
I don’t mean to take away from the brewery’s beers, as I’ll readily admit that this is just a stylistic approach that I don’t fully appreciate. My preference is generally for beers that are lighter on the palate while still delivering lots of flavor. Therefore, I was surprised when I had Port Brewing’s Older Viscosity at this year’s Extreme Beer Fest and found that it was one of the best beers I tasted at the event. Here was a beer where the big, substantial body worked in its favor, supporting a rich collection of flavors and well-integrated notes from aging in bourbon barrels. The beer was pretty incredible.
Ever since then, I’ve had it in the back of my mind to give Older Viscosity’s younger sibling a try at some point, and so when I ran across it in a shop recently I picked up a bottle. It was only then that I learned just what an interesting beer Old Viscosity is.
This is a blended beer consisting of 80% of the base imperial stout, and 20% of the same beer aged in bourbon barrels. It is produced using two-row, crystal, carafa, and wheat malts, and magnum hops for bittering. The original gravity is 1.092 and the final gravity 1.014, resulting in a beer that is 10.5% and has a nice, viscous texture.
Old Viscosity pours pitch black, with a thick brown head that quickly dissipates leaving a thin layer on top of the beer and a bit of lacing. It pours thick into the glass, but relative to some of the imperial stouts that I’ve had recently (such as the Goose Island Bourbon County Stout) the body appears to be medium-weight for an imperial stout. The nose has flavors of pipe tobacco and espresso, with a bitter bourbon note and a thread of bittersweet chocolate. Picture a cup of espresso in front of you, add a piece of dark, bittersweet chocolate to it and let that melt, and then add a dollop of bourbon, and you’ll get a good picture of the nose on this beer. Bitter,warming, and enticing all at once. The flavors open up with bitter roasted coffee and spicy, black peppercorns. Creamy bourbon and vanilla flavors have a big presence up front but they quickly give way to a second wave of coffee, peppercorns and bitter malt flavors. The body is medium textured, slightly thick with a prickly carbonation. As the beer warms it becomes much more rich and mellow, but the bitterness never fully subsides. I definitely found the ideal temperature for this beer to be between 55-60. The flavors were really most in harmony there. The finish is intriguing with malted milk balls at first, quickly giving way to a lingering flavor of bitter roasted coffee and grain.
I liked this beer, but definitely wanted to like it a lot more than I did. As good as some of the flavors were, I found the persistent bitter notes to distract from the beer’s overall harmony. I wonder to what extent the 20% of the beer that was aged in bourbon barrels had to do with this. I’ve certainly found that aging in bourbon barrels can lend some beers a bitter element that they don’t normally have, which I imagine comes from a combination of the tannins from the barrel and the slightly astringent bourbon flavors. But at the same time, the bourbon barrels definitely added an interesting level of complexity to this beer.
In the end, my impression was that the beer never really hit its stride and never fully came together in the glass. Unlike Older Viscosity, it’s 100% bourbon barrel-aged brother, the sense that I came away with was that this beer was caught in the middle somewhere, one foot in one flavor spectrum, the other in a different one.
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