Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast, I'm Greg. This is Roger. Goose Island, Bourbon County Brand Stout 2019 bonus episode. I went there last night and I tried them all. So you got a sneak peek of all this year's lineup. We should say we've been getting a lot of questions as the weather gets cooler, people start to ask questions about Goose Island, Bourbon County. It's a Binny's tradition to roll it out on Black Friday, day after Thanksgiving. We will have a big release, our big annual release at Lincoln Park. We will have smaller releases at all other Binny's locations. And we have more details on that coming soon. Keep an eye on the Binny's blog and the Beer Buzz. But since we had this opportunity to get a sneak peek of this year's releases, Roger took really good notes and he's going to walk us through the whole lineup. Also this year, I think I'm going to give dessert pairings. Seriously? Yeah. Like, is this yours? Because they're so dessert-like that I think it's behooves. Instead of a contrasting, I'm just going to suggest you eat the thing that it tastes the most like. So then you can compare how spot on you think my description is. All right. Without further ado, thanks for listening to this bonus episode of Barrel, the Bottle, the Binny's Podcast. Here is Roger's Tasting Nuts, original. You know, it always kind of cracks us up that the original totally gets tossed to the wayside by a lot of people. In a lot of ways, the original is arguably the most delicious. It's definitely the most ageable, I feel. The common theme for this is going to be please, please, please do not age the bourbon counties that have adjuncts in them. They're ready to drink. Drink them now. If you like to age something, we suggest you age the original. All right. This year's original, I would say it was almost pronouncedly decadent this year. In the presentation, I went to the Barrel Tasting Room. We had a chance to try these and it's a really neat space. Keith, the brewmaster, was going over that this year, he felt in particular the original. It's always been a big beer, but it's very rich. He described it as having a fudge-like quality to it. Nice. The nose was incredible. It reminded me of pecan pie, so that's going to be my dessert pairing for original. Wow. Nice slice of pecan pie, which is ironic because there's a prop this year actually has pecans in it, but brown sugary, big vanilla notes. On the palate, it was very creamy and rich with pronounced vanilla. The finish, big chocolate caramel reminded me of a pecan turtle because it had that chocolate caramel pecan thing going. Surprisingly nutty was the theme on this. And again, just beautiful complexity for something that was really just the product of the stout and the barrel, as opposed to additional ingredients. Wheat wine. So wheat wine is back. I was happy to see that. It was definitely a brewer's favorite. It was sort of mixed, I don't know, it was received with not the greatest fanfare with some people. Other people loved it. Last year was the first. Exactly. But they just wanted a barley wine. Yeah. I think that was part of it, was that people were a little mad that the original barley wine wasn't there. The barley wine that they released last year had coffee in it. So wheat wine kind of snuck in. And what I like behind the wheat wine, Mike, the R&D head for Goose Island was emphasizing that this has an extremely paired down malt bill. It's two row barley and malted wheat and that's it. So it undergoes an extremely long boil. It's like over a three hour long boil. So that gives it a chance to bring out some of the caramelization aspect to it. What you're left with, one way that I like to describe it is that it kind of tastes like an old fashioned minus the bitters. So big bourbon character. Ironically, a lot of people that drink bourbon county don't drink bourbon or aren't the biggest bourbon fans. And I can't tell you how much I get annoyed when people go, It's too boozy. It's too hot. It's too boozy. So this one, not that it's even that boozy, but I mean, this is the bourbon drinkers, bourbon county. It is showcasing the barrel and all the beauty it brings. On the nose, there's caramel, golden sultana raisins, orange peel vanilla. The palate is just big caramel, a little bit of cherry. There's almost some pineapple character that comes through too. So my dessert pairing for this one is going to be pineapple upside down cake. But yeah, it's a really cool beer. It's something different. Maybe I just like that it's, it completely goes off the track here. It's not a stout. It's kind of describing fruitcake. Yeah, it's kind of fruitcake us too. I mean, it's got a bread pudding kind of character to it too. If you've ever had sticky toffee pudding, it's a very kind of English decadent beer that I really like those styles. So I gravitate towards this. I think it's a really neat beer. A lot of other people feel the same way. I won a medal at Fobab last year. That no doubt probably influenced it. Gave it a little push to bring it back. Mon Cherie. So Mon Cherie. Mon Cherie is, as you would guess, made with cherries. Quinn, a brewer at Goose Island, designed this one. You might remember him from designing the 2017 prop. Bananas Foster. Yeah. So they used 20,000 pounds of tart cherry in these. Montmorency was the majority of them. So that's kind of part of the additional play on words here. That's a mix of both puree and whole fruit. They also added a little bit of natural oatmeal cookie flavor to this. They wanted to emphasize not just the cherry aspect, but capture cherry pie kind of. So to get the crust, there's a lot of oats in there as well. As dessert-like as that sounds, they're still because the cherries added were tart cherries, there's a good amount of acidity. But the key, which I can't emphasize enough, of all the cherry beers I've had over the years, they can very easily taste medicinal. People describe it as like cough syrup or those Lutens cough drops. I'm guilty of using that descriptor before. Yeah. Obviously, everybody's palates are different, but I really enjoyed the natural cherry flavor to this, which was in no way medicinal, which I thought was fantastic. But yeah, cherry steals the show here. The finish is not overly sweet, but it's got a little bit of sweetness. There's some brown sugar notes. It kind of reminded me of if you've ever had like a cherry crumble. So the dessert pairing would be either classic cherry pie or like a cherry crumble with the streusel topping. How do you make a cherry crumble? Kick them in the groin. Classic Greg. You still going on? That's a Moe joke from The Simpsons. It's a peach crumble. How do you make a peach crumble? Nice. Another Simpsons reference. Lost on Roger. Café de Oyo. Okay. So this one, I have to say, everyone usually, I don't like picking favorites or ranking things, but people usually want to know what did you think was the best? What was your favorite? It was this one. And for various different reasons. So one, I think it really was ambitious in the flavors that it was trying to capture. What is that? That's Mexican coffee. Yeah. Hot chocolate plus coffee. Yeah. It's a really interesting. The key ingredients in this are cassia bark, which is a type of cinnamon. For all intents and purposes, it is cinnamon. But if you really want to get down in weird esoteric things. Which we do. I have my known loves of those kind of things. So I like going to spice shops that will probably shock a lot of our listeners. So if you go to a spice shop, like say Penzi's or the one in Evanston's Spice House, you'll notice different kinds of cinnamon. So essentially it's a bark of different kinds of trees. And the cassia tree produces a cinnamon that is more pronounced. It has like that cinnamon red hot kind of cinnamon to it. So there's cassia in it, orange peel, and then pinilla sugar, which is like a Mexican brown sugar. Sounds rad. An unrefined sugar. So really the beauty of this was the balance. The coffee that was introduced to it, they made a toddy. So they're actually brewing coffee and then mixing that into the beer. It still is, you know, big bourbon county beer, but I think that provided just a teeny bit of lift and kind of lightened things a little bit. It was definitely the driest of the bunch, but the nuance of flavor was incredible. It reminded me of like candied orange peel dipped in chocolate. The cinnamon was there, but by no means overwhelming. It kind of, if you've ever had chocolate covered coffee beans, that came to mind. This was really just a truly beautiful, incredible beer. I was very impressed with it. The orange, unless some of you are curious, a lot of people, the midnight orange was sort of a divisive beer less than a midnight orange. To its credit, midnight orange completely captured what they were going for. They were going for that candy where you smack a chocolate orange and it breaks into pieces. Love those. That's what it tasted like. This, the orange is there, but it's more subdued. It's more of like a candied orange peel. And again, with the chocolate there, like it's not as aggressive. So this beer is stunning and you should drink it immediately. Don't save it. It's not going to get better. These things are just going to fall out or the balance is going to get out of whack. So that's something we can't emphasize enough that even if it's, you know, if one thing fades, but not all of them, again, like they design it to be drank fresh. And then it's up to you whether or not, you know, you want to risk hoping that maybe it's going to change over time. Plus people are only going to get a handful of bottles. Yeah. But this is your chance. Drink it. So yeah, this one was really, if I had to pick a favorite, this is my favorite. Designed by Austin Nystrom, former employee of Binny's actually. He's in his time at Goose Island, has actually produced two beers that have made it to market. Other than this, he did the Juicy Double, where they used oranges from Sophie, and he did My Shout, which was a neat, a pale ale that used a kind of modeled inspired by Cooper Sparkling. So Austin, hats off to you. You continue to make great beers. And this one was really, really a pleasure to enjoy. So Cafe D'Olia, I would pair with chocolate flan and perhaps like a garnish of a candied orange peel. Chocolate flan? Yeah. They make chocolate flan? They do, yeah. Where have I been? I've only had the kind that tastes like eggs. I know. I am not the biggest like normal, especially texturally. I'm not a huge like normal flan guy, but chocolate flan is pretty interesting. And sometimes it has like a little spice on it, it'll have like some whipped cream with like some cinnamon on it. Reserve Rye. This one, Goose Island, I have to commend them. This year, there was a big emphasis on talking about the importance of barrels. And this is something that we really like to focus on. You've heard us talk about it a lot on the Barrel to Bottle podcast. We do our collabs with various breweries like Goose Island, Topping Goliath, Perennial, Pollyanna, Brickstone, etc. We are giving them our handpicked barrels, many of which contain some older whiskeys. And that was a definite emphasis for Goose Island this year. So these are unadjuncted. Let's just show you the difference a barrel makes. So the Reserve Rye was aged in Rittenhouse Rye. Barrels, a fantastic rye. The nose here was really neat. It was the fruitiest, I feel, of the offerings. Dark fruits, the oak came through, there's some leather. Even as it warmed up, some licorice came out. Flavor wise, I thought one of the most pronounced flavors was molasses. There was that bittersweet quality to this, but also like a chocolate ganache flavor that was really great. There was pronounced vanilla notes that reminded me of marshmallow. There's a bit of acidity to it, a little bit of that like rye spice. As you can tell, just tons of complexity here. People, again, that aren't big whiskey drinkers, this had whiskey character. You're going to notice the whiskey to this. If you like rye, you're going to love this. A really neat offering and I think I could see this being one of the most talked about ones. Chocolate cake? The pairing for this would be gingerbread because of the spice character and then those molasses notes. Very nice. Yeah, reserve rye, good one. One of my faves. Proprietors. All right. Proprietors this year was interesting. We often throw around the term pastry stout, and when we say pastry stout, it's just an all-encompassing word for dessert, not really necessarily pastry. And more often than that, since a lot of stouts are so chocolate-centric, we really should just say like brownie stout. You actually agree with me. I've been trying to tell you this for the longest time, because it doesn't taste like a donut. It doesn't taste like a pastry. It tastes like the syrup version of those things. Yeah. Just like with Juicy, you always get mad at me. I'm like, it's not Juicy, but it is kind of. You know, it's a shorthand. Yeah. Pastry is a shorthand. Sure. Yeah, I agree. It's not cake, it's not. We've argued about this in the past, but I don't know, it was anyway. But on the other hand, this year's prop. Yeah. This year's prop tastes like pastry. This is the prop to share with your grandma. She's going to love it. It was made with coconut, vanilla, toasted pecans and cocoa nibs. Wait, say that again? Coconut. Coconut. Vanilla. Toasted pecans and cocoa nibs. Why do I have caramel on my notes? It don't matter. Tiramisu is the target here? I don't know essentially what the target was. I think these are all ingredients that have been used in previous Pops. So I think someone just thought I would like this combo. Let's see how that works together. I will say the coconut was very mild, which has been an issue in the past as well, especially the very first prop. They were kind of struggling to get coconut flavor. So the coconut is nuanced. If you want a coconut bomb, it is not. What really comes through is the vanilla and the pecan. The pecan is a nuttiness that I would say it reminds me of pecans. But again, being such a huge fan of pecans and a little hyper aware of the flavor and aroma of them, this actually reminded me more of almonds, which again reminds me of almond extract, which reminds me of pastries. So this tastes like a sweet roll. It's sweet, it's nutty. This reminded me a lot of the Northwoods of 2017, which they were going for blueberry pastry or blueberry coffee cake. Yeah. Again, that had a lot of almond, straight up almond and almond extract. Right. Those are in there, but whereas they're not in this one, but it reminded me of that. I think like that beer, it's going to have people that love it and people that are not too crazy about it. So this one wasn't for me, but some people might really enjoy this. Goopy prop. Like I said, bring one to grandma's house. Two-year reserve. All right. So this was an experiment in, what can some extra aging do for something? Obviously, when you age product in barrels, there's going to be some oxidative aging there, and this spent 24 months in 11-year-old 25th anniversary knob Greek barrels. 11-year, 25th anniversary. Yeah. So this was by far the driest of the collection. The nose here is nice and oaky, earthy. There's notes of leather, tobacco. Pallet-wise, it's much drier than the traditional. Is your dessert going to be like horse saddle? Yeah, this is definitely the most, I don't know, this again like the wheat wine, this would be tied with it as far as this is for whiskey drinkers. So if you're a fan of bourbon and you drink bourbon regularly, you're going to enjoy this. If you don't drink bourbon, which like we've said before, ironically, a lot of bourbon county drinkers don't. It's so boozy. Yeah, you're going to think this is boozy, you're going to think it tastes like grandpa, like it's an intense more adult pallet on this one. The finish was incredible. Again, the nuttiness here was really pronounced, and what it reminded me of and what would be the dessert bearing is bourbon balls, which if you've ever toured a Kentucky distillery, usually given one of those at the end of the tour, they're essentially like a cream candy, buttercream candy with a pecan on top. Sometimes there's pecans in them as well. This was a fantastic beer. That's one of your favorites. It is. I love those. If you've never tried making them, they're super easy. They're a no-bake dessert. They're basically butter, sugar, and bourbon dipped in chocolate. Vintage Three-Year Vertical Pack. Okay. So the Vintage Three-Year Vertical Pack. This is so cool. And you're saying the theme is Don't Age It? Yeah. So well, as I said in the caveat though, if you're going to age something, age the original because the original does age well, and they recommend up to five years. I've had some older bourbon county. I would say the point of diminishing return, they've pretty much nailed it at five years. Some people really disagree with me on this, but again, I think after five, you're really just picking up. So what they've done here is they've taken a bottle of 2017, 2018, and 2019. So you can do a side-by-side comparison. They put them in a sexy box. It looks really great. They have made my basement stash completely obsolete. So that's not just at Binny's, that's going to be a lot of places. You'll see that one around. Yeah. What's interesting is- Did they gave you a box? Yeah. Best stuff. We'll share it. That's true. Maybe we can extend the vertical. Do you have any older stuff? No. Drink it. We drank it last year. Yeah. I think I have a 16. So what I think is interesting about this is going to prove a couple of different things. One, that even if it's the same recipe from year to year, it's always a little different. And also, the oxidative aging that takes place, it's perceived differently by different people. So some people, I think, will enjoy this and say, you know, I don't taste a whole bunch of difference, whereas other people might. So it's not, again, tasting is a very subjective thing, and there's no right or wrong as far as how long you should age something. So it really, I think, is a cool, like, fun experiment for people to get together with friends. And not have to have the patience to stash it for a couple of years. Exactly. Here's your chance to taste a vertical going back. Cool. So we're going to have our big release at Binny's Lincoln Park, as we always do. More details will be coming soon on the blog, binnys.com/blog, and on our beer buzz. Keep an eye out for the beer buzz. And then another release at all other locations at the same time. As always, it was a great, the lineups is terrific this year. It's always been exceptional. Don't forget about regular. It always gets kind of pushed to the side. And Café de Ollo is my bell of the ball. Café de Ollo. Anyway, another great year of Burbank County Stout. I can hardly wait. We'll see you guys on Black Friday. Till next time, I'm Greg. I'm Roger. Keep tasting.