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!