When we came back from this summer’s trip out west, I brought back a few gems from our various brewery stops. Since then, I’ve been covetously holding onto these beers, knowing that someday I’d be opening the only bottle of that beer that I had, and in some cases may ever have. Who knows when or if we’ll be out that way again?

As the months have passed, we’ve opened up one or two of these treasures, but there have been a few that I’ve been loath to crack open – I’ve just been too excited to try them. Among these was a bottle of Deschutes Mirror Mirror, the oak aged barleywine that they released last spring. It was one of the beers I was keenly looking for during our trip, was super excited to find, and possibly more excited to try.

I was finally inspired to open it as a result of the work we’ve been doing to plan a series of tastings at Amherst Coffee that will take place over the next few months. One of the tastings we’re going to do is a whiskey and beer theme, where we’ll taste a whiskey alongside a beer that was aged in that distillery’s barrels. So, as I brainstormed the various barrel-aged beers that are available today, my mind turned to the few special beers that I’ve been holding onto, and Mirror Mirror in particular.

Deschutes first released Mirror Mirror in 2006, but then didn’t release it again until April 2009. In 2006 it was the first beer in their Reserve Series, a series that now includes The Abyss, The Dissident, and Black Butte XXI. Mirror Mirror, The Abyss, and Black Butte XXI all have some portion of the finished brew aged in bourbon barrels, while The Dissident is brewed using a couple of strains of Brettanomyces, producing an oud bruin style beer.

35% of Mirror Mirror was aged in bourbon barrels, the other 65% in stainless steel. The beer was brewed to a strength of 11%, with 30 IBUs thrown in for good measure. From start to finish, Mirror Mirror took Deschutes 10 months to produce, with much of this time spent in bourbon barrels.

The beer pours a crimson-orange red with a creamy off-white heads that surges up and then drops just as quickly, leaving a thin lacing in its wake. The nose has rich aromas of toffee, malt, and caramel, accompanied by a trace of mint. The palate is soft and velvety with loads of creamy, viscous texture supported by medium carbonation. Once the flavors kick in you can tell it’s not 100% barrel aged. Instead of being overly sweet, the barrel aging element is well-balanced and mixes well with the big malt body. The flavors are a blend of caramel, toffee, vanilla and spiciness and tannins from the barrel aging, alongside a deeply malty body, bready, rye flavors, and an edge of bitter, piney hop flavors. The finish is soft and mellow, with flavors of caramel, crystal malt, and hop bitterness.

This is a totally amazing beer. I kick myself for not picking up two bottles during our trip (why did I buy just one bottle? what was I thinking?!), but am very, very glad that I had the chance to try it. Excellent flavors all in great balance. If you ever come across this in a shop, pick it up fast. Two bottles. Yet again, Deschutes has knocked the ball out of the park. I’ve really been impressed by all of the beers of theirs that I’ve tried, and once again can only wish we were somewhere that their beers were distributed to.

So this leaves The Abyss, their bourbon-barrel aged imperial stout, as the last of their Reserve Series beers that I have not tried. Given my love of this style of beer, it does give me a bit of a pang to figure I’ll probably not have the chance to try it, simply given the crazy demand for it, and my living on the east coast. But who knows, maybe someday I’ll be out in Bend or Portland on The Abyss release day. That would be amazing.

1. The difficulty of brewing a beer that is drinkable and flavorful while being 8% and greater in alcohol, and most often above 10%.
2. The willingness of American brewers to push their beers to extremes, and this being a style that is already at the extreme.

When you combine #2 with #1, you have a beer that is tremendously hard for American brewers to brew with great rates of success. You have a style which stands at the extremes, leaving brewers a very fine line between success and failure. You also have a style which can be very volatile once in bottle or keg, and which can respond quite badly to ill treatment at the hands of distributors or shop owners.

All of which adds up to a lot of disappointing glasses of barleywine. But – and this is a big but – when you do get that rare glass of barleywine that really hits the nail on the head, what you’ve got is a truly great glass of beer. And this is what keeps me coming back to the style, despite many more truly disappointing glasses relative to great ones.

All that being said, it’s also the case that my tastes in barleywines limits the playing field quite a bit. I prefer barleywines that belie their alcohol percentage – no thick, rich, overly alcohol sweet beers please. I am also looking for a notable hoppiness both in the nose and the palate, but which is firmly integrated with the other elements in the beer. In contrast to my taste in IPAs where a beer having no balance is no problem, a barleywine has to have balance in order to be drinkable. As a result, I tend to not get much mileage out of English-style barleywines, which tend to favor malt-sweetness over other elements, and lean towards West coast interpretations of the style, which aren’t afraid of letting the hops play a role in the beer (that being said, English brewers are much more adept at producing a restrained, very drinkable barleywine).

Unfortunately, there are only a few barleywines that I’ve had and have really enjoyed, and my favorite among these has been Sierra Nevada’s Bigfoot Barleywine. Bigfoot has a strong, West coast hoppiness to the nose, and is particularly bitter on the palate. Yet, the palate has well-integrated malt elements that smooth out the hop bitterness, and give the beer a solid structure that makes it enjoyably drinkable. When the beer first comes out (it’s a seasonal from Sierra Nevada) the hops are very prominent, and they mellow gradually given time. I recently opened a bottle of last year’s vintage and found it to be less hoppy than I remembered, but still not shy. In fact, I’ve got a couple of bottles from each of the past 3 vintages, and am looking forward to a comparative tasting later this Winter when the new batch comes out.

So with Sierra Nevada as the bar that I’ve set for top-shelf barleywines, it was with a real sense of anticipation that I opened the Mad River Brewing Co. John Barleycorn Barleywine (this is also a seasonal, released each November). I’d found their Steelhead Double IPA to be a really enjoyable beer, and so I was mixed with equal parts good anticipation (man, this could be a good barleywine!) and bad anticipation (man, it’ll be disappointing if their barleywine is no good either!). But, intrepid liqui-gastronome* that I am, I forged ahead…

Some specs on the beer:

• Starting gravity: 1.098
• Final gravity: 1.020
• ABV: 9.5%
• IBU: 96
• They once brewed it with spices, but it appears they last did this in 1998

The first thing that I took notice of was the color, a dark reddish brown, with amber highlights, and nearly opaque, partially on account of the sediment that contributed a haze to the beer. Mad River doesn’t filter their beers, a practice which I am in favor of. The nose was a heady mix of citrus and pine hops, raspberries, brown sugar, bourbon, and vanilla, all in equal parts with no one element taking center stage. The palate has loads of brown sugar, caramel, vanilla, and malt, accentuated by a lightly-textured mouthfeel that belies the 9.5%. There is a distinct undercurrent of resiny hop bitterness that plays an accompanying role to the other flavors on the palate. On the finish, the hop bitterness strikes first, gradually giving way to a brown sugar sweetness that slowly fades out.

On the whole, I’m really enjoying this beer. There are enough hops to get my attention, and the sweet flavors are unlike most other barleywines that I’ve had. Instead of being a viscous, malty sweetness commonly associated with high-alcohol beers, the brown sugar and vanilla flavors are most prominent here, which is very good, and allows the many different flavors in the beer to meld together nicely.

So this will join the limited ranks of barleywines that I’d enjoy trying again. I still haven’t tried Stone Brewing’s Old Guardian and Rogue’s Old Crustacean both of which may fall into the range of barleywines that I enjoy best, so stay tuned. Perhaps I’ll be adding another one or two to the list eventually.