Last month I visited heaven on earth. It was during a recent vacation, part of which was a day-trip up to Portland, Maine. I’d always wanted to stop at Allagash Brewing, and so we made this one of the first stops of the trip.

All things told, Allagash is a fairly small brewery. They’re located in an unassuming building in a small industrial park, and produce ~4,000 barrels per year, 80% of which is their flagship beer, Allagash White. The remaining 20% is made up of a whole host of beers that includes a mix of year-round, seasonal, and one-off brews. They brew only Belgian-style beers, including the year-round Dubbel, Tripel, Four (a quad), and Black (Belgian imperial stout), seasonals such as Victoria Ale, Victor Ale, and Hugh Malone, and such inventive one-offs as Fluxus (a unique recipe each year), Confluence (fermented with Brettanomyces), Interlude (also uses Brettanomyces and is aged in red wine barrels), and Vagabond and Gargamel (beers fermented 100% with wild yeasts and fresh fruit). They’ve even produced a 100% spontaneously fermented beer, produced a dedicated building they built just to ferment this beer.

Curieux is part of their barrel-aged series that also includes Odyssey, although the similarities between the two stop there. Odyssey is a dark, high-alcohol wheat beer, a portion of which is aged in stainless steel and the other portion in medium-toasted American oak barrels. Curieux on the other hand is the result of taking their Tripel and aging it in Jim Beam bourbon barrels for 8 weeks before bottling. The barrel-aging imparts a profound change on the beer, and if you ever have the chance to try the Tripel and Curieux side-by-side, it’d be well worth it – the comparison is pretty exciting.

But these aren’t the only beers that Allagash ages in barrels. Several others are aged in barrels, not to mention a whole collection of barrel-aging experiments that they have going on at any one point in time. Thus how we ended up visiting heaven on earth.

Specifically, this was Allagash’s barrel room. Or rather, their barrel rooms. Since they are barrel-aging beers that use wild yeasts at the same time that they’re barrel-aging beers not brewed with these yeasts (such as Curieux), they have to avoid cross-contamination by separating the different groups of barrels into different rooms.

One room houses all of the non wild-yeast beers aging in bourbon, wine, or toasted barrels. While we were there this included many barrels of Curieux, Odyssey, and others – I honestly don’t remember them all. One I do remember though, were several bourbon barrels filled with Allagash Black*. I nearly fainted when I saw those. I desperately was hoping someone would come by with a wine thief and offer to pull a sample for us. Holy cow, that would have been amazing!

Anyhow, the other room full of barrels was the one housing all of their wild-yeast beers. There were a lot of barrels in this room, a number of which we’d never heard of and of which there were only a couple of barrels at best. Needless to say, these are not beers that will be bottled, but will only show up at special events. Keep your ears peeled!

The coolest part (ok, besides seeing all of those beers aging in bourbon-barrels!) was seeing how they treated the two sets of barrels. Each room was maintained at a different temperature, with the wild-yeast room being about 15-20 degrees cooler than the other room. I’m sure there are myriad reasons for this, among which are the much shorter amount of time that beers spend in the non-wild-yeast room. Several of the beers in the wild-yeast room had just begun their aging, having been there for a year or less, while others had been there long as two years or more.

On to Curieux! This beer uses Allagash’s house Belgian yeast strain, and is brewed to an original gravity of 1.080. This particular bottle was packaged in March 2010 from a batch that resulted in 789 cases. The final ABV is 11% (some of which was imparted by the bourbon barrel).

Tasting Notes

In the glass, Curieux is a slightly hazy, heather-gold with a tightly beaded pillowy white head 2-fingers tall. The nose has notes of sugared lemons, coconut, lavender, a faint whiskey note, and a hint of Belgian phenolics (think clove, cardamom, grains of paradise, and citrus). The palate is very effervescent, with plenty of carbonation blending nicely with the creamy, velvety mouthfeel. It’s here that your really get the full blast of the bourbon barrel-aging, as flavors of almonds, toasted coconut, vanilla, citrus, sweet malt, and just a hint of bourbon flavor float across your palate. The long, lingering finish leaves you wanting for more, with notes of lemon gumdrops, vanilla, caramelized crust of bread dough, and a whiff of wheated bourbon.

The nose on this beer is mesmerizing, and it does a fabulous job of setting you off on the mesmerizing journey that this beer is. I find the Tripel itself to be an okay beer, but it doesn’t wow me. But man, put it into a bourbon barrel and it turns into a heavenly elixir.

I have the bad habit of overlooking Allagash, simply for the (bad reason) that they’re right here in my background. But on the occasions when I get the chance to try some of their more off-the-beaten-path offerings such as this, I’m consistently amazed at how good the beers are.

*By the way, I recently got the chance to try the bourbon-barrel-aged Allagash Black at American Craft, and it was, as I’d hoped (and surmised), awesome!

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.

Lately, I’ve been been mulling over the phenomena that Founders Brewing Company’s beers have become. Myself, I only really discovered their wares last year, in the fall of 2008. That was when I first tried their Breakfast Stout, and I never really looked back. Since then I’ve tried most any beer from them that I’ve found, worked hard to get my hands on a 4-pack of the Kentucky Breakfast Stout, and am already looking forward to trying some of their newer beers at the upcoming Extreme Beer Fest.

But what’s really caught my attention has been the overwhelming response to their newest beer, Nemesis, a wheat wine aged in bourbon barrels for 9 months. I first saw this announced a couple of weeks ago, although rumors about it have been bouncing about for a while now. Since the announcement of its imminent release, the hype-driven beer culture has gone into full-swing, and more forum posts, news items, etc. have been posted about this beer than I would have imagined, despite it not even being released yet.

I don’t mean to sound curmudgeonly (an awful joke, I know). I’d love the chance to try Nemesis once it’s been released. Whether I’ll be able to, given the high-demand it’s sure to be in, is anyone’s guess.

But here’s the thing, I’m not sure that I’m really so amped to take part in the running around to try and find some of this beer in a shop. I’m sure the beer will be great, perhaps even mind-blowingly incredible. But I think there are three reasons my hesitance:

1. My fridge is full of so many good beers right now, some that we still haven’t gotten to from our trip out West, and I’m finding it hard to get super-excited about chasing down something else new.
2. Even when I do go to the shop nowadays, there is such a plethora of exciting beers I haven’t tried, and none involve me running around and calling shops like a nut-case.
3. Founders themselves are to blame! Their beers are all so good, and some are outright incredible, and while they may not all be barrel-aged wheat wines, they’re super tasty, and much easier to find.

Focusing on reason #3, we can take this bottle of Old Curmudgeon as perfect evidence. Here is a beer that hasn’t been too hard to find hereabouts, and comes in fair-priced 4-packs, as with most of Founders beers. I picked up a 4-pack of it while looking for American-brewed examples of Old Ales, and was surprised to find out when I got it home that it’s also aged in bourbon barrels. Given my unending appreciation for beers aged in bourbon barrels, this was a real coup.

Old Curmudgeon is one of Founders’ seasonal beers, released in late fall/early winter each year. It’s brewed to a final ABV of 9.8% with 50 IBUs alongside. Interestingly, it’s brewed using molasses, in addition to a pretty big malt bill.

A vigorous pour yields a thin head that quickly dissipates, leaving little trace on top of the beer. The color is amber-orange, hazy and nearly opaque. It’s mesmerizing to watch just how slowly the bubbles rise to the surface, like they have to force their way up through the beer. The nose is rich and heady, with notes of caramel, mesquite honey, bourbon, and deep malty flavors. The flavors on the palate are similar, bringing caramel, viscous, syrupy, bready malt, vanilla, bourbon, and smoky honey, with the addition of a subtle hop flavor and bitterness. Very thick and velvety texture, with just a prickling carbonation. The finish has flavors of bready malt, caramel, and bourbon, with no hop flavor but a lingering hop bitterness. Very long, finish punctuated with flavors of bourbon-soaked raisins.

Wow, this is a rich, decadent, dessert-in-a-glass kind of beer. Very enjoyable, but one glass really did it for me. All in all, the flavors just avoided being cloying, instead really leaving your palate coated with layers of rich, warm, sugars. Definitely give it a try, as long as you’re a big fan of bourbon barrel-aged beers.

*Note: despite my detailed explanation of why I won’t be running around trying to find a 4-pack of Nemesis when it comes out, I wouldn’t even be remotely surprised to find myself doing that. In fact, I most likely am guaranteed to do just that, simply because I wrote this post explaining why I won’t…