Weyerbacher Brewing Co. Heresy
Weyerbacher was founded in 1994 by the husband and wife team of Dan and Sue Weirback, during the height of the craft beer “revolution” of the 1990′s. Since then, they’ve evolved into – in my opinion – one of the country’s most reliable brewers of great beer. In the current beer scene, amidst the fanfare surrounding the release of new beers that all too often don’t live up to the hype, Weyerbacher goes about the business of relatively quietly producing reliably solid, very good beers.
And yet, I don’t drink Weyerbacher beers all that often. I can get as carried away as the next person by one beer release or another, and I often overlook Weyerbacher. But during my recent spate of barrel-aged imperial stouts I learned about Heresy, and was lucky to find a bottle of this difficult to find beer. In doing so, I was reminded of some of the other great beers that I’ve had from them in the past, such as their XIII Anniversary Ale, Merry Monks, Riserva, and Quad. All have been top notch, both on draft and in bottle. This gave me some high hopes for Heresy.
Heresy is their Old Heathen Imperial Stout aged in bourbon barrels. Aside from this one piece of info, I haven’t been able to find much out. So it’s unknown (to me) where the barrels come from or how long the beer spends in them. But the real story is in the finished product anyhow, right?
Nonetheless, it’d be interesting to know this info. Especially when you consider the variability of the different barrel-aged stouts that I’ve tried recently. These are beers that have run the gamut from cloyingly sweet and very, very boozy (Goose Island Bourbon County Stout) to relatively restrained with well-integrated vanilla, oak, and stout flavors (Founders Kentucky Breakfast Stout), with a range of personalities in between. It would be so interesting to know how each individual brewery approached the creation of these beers, and to get a sense of the answers to questions such as: what is the impact of a beer spending more or less time in a bourbon barrel?; what effect does the beer’s alcohol content have on the finished beer’s flavors?; what bourbon distillery’s barrels have more or less pronounced contributions to the beer’s flavors?
So many interesting questions could be asked. It would be so cool to see a brewery produce two (or more) unique versions of a barrel-aged imperial stout, one aged in barrels from one brewery, a second in barrels from another. And how about rye barrels? Such possibilities…
But to concentrate on the beer at hand, we don’t know too much about how this beer was produced. But we know that Old Heathen is a very good imperial stout, and so there’s a lot of promise implied by that.
Heresy weighs in at roughly 8%, on the low end of the spectrum for this style. It was first brewed in 2004, and has been released seasonally every year since then.
The beer pours jet black, and medium thick and viscous, with a big, creamy tan head that leaves a thin film and a fair amount of lacing all the way down the side of the glass. The nose has very strong flavors of whiskey, accompanied by roasted barley and a hint of bittersweet chocolate. The palate is nicely balanced, with well-integrated flavors of roasted and sweet malt, chocolate, vanilla, a touch of smoky caramel, and whiskey. The texture is creamy and full-bodied, sweet without being overwhelming, and the alcohol is scarily well hidden. As the beer warms up the creamy oak, vanilla, and whiskey combination really opens up, yet remains perfectly integrated with the other flavors. The finish returns to the limited spectrum of flavors that the nose displayed, with whiskey again is dominant, accompanied by sweet caramel and vanilla.
This is right up there with the Kentucky Breakfast Stout as one of my favorite barrel-aged imperial stouts that I’ve tried thus far. All of the flavors were so well put-together, and in particular while the whiskey flavors were very prominent, they never overwhelmed the beer’s other flavors. Instead, while you couldn’t ignore the whiskey, it worked incredibly well with the chocolate and malt flavors that it was paired up with. I wonder to what extent the lower alcohol helped to produce such a finely tuned finished product.
Whether it did or not, this is yet another very good beer from Weyerbacher. And while it is not easy to find, it is not impossible either, and I’d highly recommend grabbing a couple of bottles to have around for a rainy day.
I’ve been toying with the idea of other types of beer aged in bourbon barrels, in preparation for perhaps doing some homebrewing experiments. Thankfully, Weyerbacher ages a handful of their beers in bourbon barrels, including Insanity (Bilthering Idiot Barleywine), Blasphemy (Quad), and Prophecy (Merry Monks Belgian-style Tripel). It would be pretty fun to taste the way through these different beers, just to see how each pans out. Because I think it’s safe to assume that Weyerbacher has probably produced textbook examples of how each such beer could be produced.
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