Another edition of Barrel To Bottle with Binny's Beverage Depot, always here, is Kristen Ellis. Kristen, how are you today? Very well. How are you, Jeff? Very well. I am Jeff Carlin. We'll get some really cool this week. I'm really excited about this. Me too. I think everyone's going to be excited about this podcast this week. I think everybody you know has a beer friend. They're texting you as soon as a new beer is unveiled. I have that friend. I think we all do. Everyone's got somebody who loves. I don't hear from him apart from the day after Thanksgiving. Right. And in Thanksgiving specifically because it's Goose Island. It's the Goose Island release of Bourbon County Stout. Which is everybody and their mother is in line waiting for Bourbon County Stout from Goose Island. It's amazing. You've not done the release unless you've done it in a banana suit. I'm just telling you. That might be a story for another time. Yeah, for sure. After hours maybe. But we've got help as per usual. When we are talking about beer, we have our big guns, Roger Adamson. Welcome back, Roger. Happy to be here. Happy to have you. You're a staple here and we enjoy it. So thank you, Roger Clark. I won't forget. Indeed. And then of course, our special guest, we've got Mike Siegel here from Bourbon County Stout from Goose Island rather. How are you, sir? Welcome. Good to be here. Tell us about yourself. What's your role over there at Goose Island? R&D manager. Short for research and Development. That's on the brewing side. I started out as a brewer six years ago at Goose Island. And I've been in this role for about four and a half. Really what that means is facilitating new beer development. It's a pretty fun job. I think I've got the best job in the world. So part of that, I work on on Bourbon County Stout quite a bit. Obviously, Bourbon County Stout has been around for quite a long time, about 25 years. As we'll get into some of these other beers, we like to have variants as we call them each year. And that's just to keep it fun. It keeps our brewers excited, keeps beer drinkers excited, people that are really asking for this. So we have a lot of fun with the variants that we're going to get into here in a few minutes. It does sound like the coolest job in the world because you're researching and developing beer. I mean, I couldn't think of a better job, and I work in radio. Yeah, it's pretty much exactly what you expect. What you're thinking it is. I'm imagining you drinking lots of beer. We talk beer, we drink beer. I think for about the first year that I was coming to the brewery daily to work, I was kind of pinching myself, you know, that this is where I actually work. When was that? When did you start, you said? 2011. Okay. Yeah. I actually used to work next door. I was in IT prior to brewing. So I made my transition through some beer education and started at the bottom rung, worked my way up. They say you will work overnights, weekends and 12-hour shifts. I said, sign me up, I'll do whatever it takes. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of work. We run a fairly manual brewery at Fulton Street. Well, so one aim we have today, Mike, is to taste through the release from this year and kind of give people a glimpse into the bottle that they are not willing to open, right? So that's kind of what we're here to do. Roger, do you have anything to get us started before we jump into the tasting? I'm really excited to do this. I'm also excited that we're going to be talking about Barley Wine because I feel that is one of the most underappreciated, asked about, talked about of this whole lineup. Obviously being the oddball is that it's not a stout, but I thought that this last year's was particularly fantastic. I think Roger's right. It's a bit of a sleeper. I think there's a lot of excitement about Bourbon County Stout and the variance of the stout. Barley Wine came on the scene. Obviously there was King Henry in, I want to say 2011, and then Barley Wine came about after that. It's very much the same recipe. I think there's a slight tweak, but it's an English style Barley Wine, so it's not hopped up like an American style Barley Wine. So it's really about the malt, a rich body, much like Bourbon County Stout, but without the roast malts. Like Roger said, of the six that we're tasting, it's the different recipe, right? So we've got the stout recipe that goes into the barrels for all these other five, and then we've got Barley Wine. So that's what we're going to taste first. Okay, cool. Let's do it. Walk us through. So starting last year, we went to entirely first use Bourbon barrels. So we used to do a blend of first and second use. So what you get when you are only going into fresh bourbon barrels, of course, is a little bit more booze, but certainly more of those vanilla notes. This tends to have some dried fruit character as well, and we'll get some of that in the stout as well. I think it pops a little bit more in the Barley Wine, because less of that roast to edge it out. What do you guys think? What I think is pretty phenomenal about this is that we're experiencing a time right now in craft beer where the adjunct is almost king, and I think people are maybe leaning on that a little too heavily at some breweries. They're putting some pretty bizarre things in beers, everything to the point of candy, cookies, and cake, and everything else. Human hair. What's kind of nice about this is that there's a complexity to this. It's truly remarkable. I mean, you taste figs, dates, there's a nuttiness to it, there's caramel character, and that's all coming from the barrel and the brew itself, and there's nothing added to it to mimic those flavors. So, I think from the testament of a brewing standpoint, it's really showing both the structure of the recipe, the brewer's art, but then also what barrels can impart. I mean, there's some coconut and vanilla flavors in here that you're definitely getting from the barrel aging. Oak Lactone, et cetera. Yeah, we obviously fall in both camps. We've been doing straight stouts in bourbon barrels for a long time. But we like playing around with the adjuncts as well. I mean, obviously, I see what's going on in the beer world as well. We've been doing the variants for a long time and I think they get a lot of excitement. Even though this year, there seemed to be a little bit more of the pastry stout backlash in the written world, but we love it, we love that it gets people excited, we love that our brewers get excited about creating new variants on a theme that's been around for a while, right? The bourbon-barreled stout's been around for a couple of decades plus, so they're not mutually exclusive. You can do both, right? You can have your straight beer in your barrel and you can also have, again, these are the minority of the volume, you know, really the majority of the volume is just with the good old-fashioned original, bourbon-county stout, which we can move on to How long does this stay in barrel, the original, General? It averages about ten months because we're trying to make a little bit more each year. We start filling a little bit sooner than we used to and that means we need to start, that means our emptying window to empty all these barrels is much larger than it used to be as well, so it just really comes down to scheduling and time management, but we're pretty hung up on that, minimum eight months, but somewhere around ten months is kind of an average, is what we find, and really Greg before us I think, was the sweet spot, where you're getting a combination of of course the boozy-ness of the whiskey, but it could be a little harsh. There's a mellowing that takes place, of course, as well as some oxidation, those nutty characters that Roger mentioned, it's kind of almond notes that come out, certainly a factor of oxidation. And normally that's a bad word, right? Oxidation is not good, but skunked. I think it adds a complexity to such a big, flavorful, multi-layered beer. It just adds another layer to it. Well, it's soft, which I like a lot. You know, there's not any, there aren't any hard edges here. It's really approachable. A lot of stouts I find can be cloying, but it's got a good little bite to it. So I think it's relatively balanced. I enjoy it. And it's not too overpowering with the whiskey. You know, it's there. I mean, it's up front. It's not in the back, but it's not crazy in your face. Yeah. Bourbon County Stout is 100% bourbon barrel aged, right? It is this, you know, there's a lot going on there, but we want that barrel, that bourbon, to really be up front. What's the ABV on this? They vary, as do all barrel aged beers, but this particular bottle, 14.7 on the Bourbon County Stout. So we'll be anywhere from, I think this year we were low 14 up to 14.7, 14, 14.8 was probably our upper range. So yeah, in the 14s. So that's between 14.15 is probably the wheelhouse for most stouts like this? Yeah. This is on the higher end, I would say. That's one of the things that I feel makes it stand out from, there's a lot of different barrel aged stouts out there now, and I would say that a lot of them are probably a little closer to 10. It's very delicate dance that you have once you start to go above say 12 or so, where then you start to feel like a lot of people think it's too hot. Too hot, like you said. Yeah. And it goes into the barrel just under 12 percent, which is pretty typical for us when we do spirit barrel aging. Whether it's tequila, rum, bourbon, we'll usually pick up 2 percent, 2 to 2.5 percent alcohol just from the resident spirit. But it's, you know, this is our Goose Yeast. It's the same yeast as 312 and Honker's Ale and Goose IPA, which is originally an English strain. And we've adapted it for our use, but it translates to something as you would expect, pretty estery, and it's brewed to a higher bitterness as well. So bitterness fades with time, degrades the iso-alpha acids. So we brew it to, you know, probably 50 BU and it comes down to probably 25. Obviously, you know, you know what the base beer is just from having tasted this. So there's a lot of commonality, but, and we don't release it on its own. I think it really comes into its own because of both the bourbon barrel and the time. I think that again is one of the things that sets Goose Island Bourbon County apart from some of the other people that are doing this, is that some of the stouts going into bourbon barrels might be on the sweeter side to begin with, or don't have enough of that bitterness, that once they come out, they can sometimes just be cloyingly sweet, or just so rich to the point of you want maybe an ounce, and otherwise it's just too much. And I actually think there is a drinkability to bourbon county Yeah, when it's too heavy, it's too much. It's delicious, but just for a short time. You have to move on to something lighter and refreshing. How does this one differ than the second one you offer us today? Or what's the difference here? What are we tasting? What should we look for? So everything about the third one in, which is Bourbon County Stout reserve, is exactly the same except for the barrel. So it's 11-year-old Knob Creek Barrels. As I mentioned before, we're four to six-year-old Heaven Hill Barrels on Bourbon County Stout across the board. We got a small amount of these 11-year-old, because I believe Knob Creek is typically nine. So these were, I guess, some extra aged Knob Creek. And again, we're big fans of those older aged whiskeys. We think seven to 12 years is really a nice sweet spot for whiskey. But getting those barrels is tough. But through our connections with Knob Creek, we were able to get a small amount of these barrels and pretty much treated exactly like Bourbon County Stout as far as age time and what not, so that kind of 10 months sweet spot. So what, if you can taste between Bourbon County Stout and the reserve, really, what you're tasting is the difference between the barrel. So two different distilleries, two different ages. I think it's fruitier. The fruit is much more intense. Exactly. It's more high toned for me. It has a little bit more lift to it in the mid palate. There's a little bit of a almost really dark maple syrup kind of character, almost not as bitter as molasses, but there's a fullness to it. It kind of reminds me maple syrup wise of the difference. If you ever had like a grade B maple syrup versus like a really light grade A one, where it's much southern, more delicate. It's Aunt Jemima or bust. I'm corn syrup and get out, get out. Corn syrup and food coloring. It's A B. Yeah. Treat yourself to good maple syrup. Only Roger would bring up that. Actually, I have the Whistle Pig, the barrel aged Whistle Pig maple syrup. It's delicious. A couple of years ago, we used sugar chalet out in Ohio, a bourbon barrel aged maple syrup. And so we actually just bought the bourbon barrel. So they didn't package it up. They just sent us the bourbon barrels, the actual bourbon barrels with maple syrup in them. And we ended up using about half of what we bought. We kegged off the rest of the maple syrup and a couple of different times now we just give away for employees. So literally like growlers. Like bring your growler in and fill it up. I've got a growler of bourbon barrel aged maple syrup at home. It'll last forever though. Not really in my house. You say that you get to the variants and the prop or what not from maybe 60 different ideas that kind of come and they're generated and you whittle it down to two. Have you guys ever gotten to those two and been like, no? There's always a very lively round table when we get towards the end. Well, usually lively. sometimes there's overwhelming favorites. sometimes it's, no, the room might, people might start to go to other sides and divide and take camps. And I don't know if this is unique to us or not, but it's an internal competition. We've got 37 brewers now. And so everybody that wants to on the brewing side and even some non-breweries get involved in basically making, taking Bourbon County Stout, the base beer, and we give it to them, give them some jars and just say go home, tinker with some ingredients, some ideas, bring it back in. We have everybody, you know, regardless of you bring in an idea or not, you fill out a sheet, score it, really trying to get critical feedback. And I try to get those documents back in the brewers' hands almost immediately so they can look at that and go, OK, people really like this or they really don't. So moving on to number four in the line up, Northwoods, this was Brewmaster Jared J. cuskies. You know, he didn't get any special treatment as being the Brewmaster. He won fair and square. So this is Berman County Stout Base, of course, like all the variants. And to that, we added blueberry juice and almond extract. And the reason almond extract was such a key versus almonds, which we use in one of the in the proprietors coming up a little bit later. Almond extract, if you've ever smelled it, has a pretty distinct aroma to it, like marzipan or amaretto. Yeah. And it's in that concentrated form. It takes on a different aroma than just straight almonds, roasted almonds or almond slivers have. And so he was a big fan of that combination, and we liked it when we incorporated it. It's delicious. Yeah, that is really good. Like this is... This puts a smile on my face. It is incredible. Picking the idea is the first stage, but a couple months later when we actually have to make these, you're dealing with a large scale, oftentimes hundreds of barrels at a time, you need to take a step back and have a process and go, I'm already... I'm putting things into a perfectly good beer. I'm altering a very good beer in Birmingham County South that's been aging for 10 months. So we're very, very deliberate because if you overdo it, you're in deep water. It's a snafu. Yeah. So we're very... at that point, we were very measured and we were very conservative. We incorporate ingredients in slow and steady. As you never know, almost every single year, we'll deal with new ingredients and some really pop in this beer and some don't. But anyway, the making of these beers is in and of itself is an amazing process. It's great to be around. This one feels leaner to me on the palate than the others. It definitely feels a lot more linear. Yeah, so the alcohol is 12.6 because we're diluting, essentially. Even though it's a positive flavor, we are diluting with the juice. So we're bringing the alcohol down, we're thinning the sugar, the amount of sugar out, so it's not washing over the palate quite as much. Again, that blueberry juice is both tannic and a little bit acidic. Right. Yep, absolutely. When you guys are working towards what the adjunct pieces, you know, everybody's bringing in their own flavor profiles. Really, you ever get contentious between everybody? Someone comes in and is like, oh, this is the best ever. And everyone's like, no, no, no. No, well, at least not facing towards me, there's not a lot of negative energy. It's really very positive. Even if it's critical, we try to keep it on the paper and just say, hey, you know, your ginger chicory root idea really isn't going to fly. Carrot, ginger, get out of here. And bubble gum, it's not going to work. You know, you keep bringing it, but... Because we have to remember, Roger, you mentioned the adjuncts and the pastry stouts and all that. One thing that we always try to keep tethered and keep one hand on is that these are bourbon barrel aged Imperial stouts, right? We don't want to stray too far from that. We don't want it to be recognizable for what that is. It's a bourbon barrel aged Imperial stout. We want to add ingredients to it that are going to really work well with it and get people excited but we don't want to go too far off the rails but at the same time we want to push ourselves to continue to do new things. So it's something that's the tug of war more than anything that we're always having is respecting what this beer is while also pushing the envelope and trying to do new stuff. I love the challenge. It gets tougher each year because you kind of start crossing ingredients off the list or say, you know, we could literally add vanilla to any number of other ingredients. It would be awesome. Sure. We could add vanilla coconut. We could have, you know, this, this, and this, and because everybody loves, well, I think everybody loves vanilla. It's certainly amongst the most popular variants we've ever done. But to me, that's a bit of a cheesy way out, right? So I'd rather push us to new directions with new ingredients. Because that's what every year this is, it's ingredient exploration. So a bunch of mad scientists. Yeah, really. We were talking before, I think one of the most common things with Bourbon County is people talking about cellaring it. And personally, I feel like this one in particular, and probably proprietors, I've been recommending that people just enjoy them now. I think there's a little too much of this mindset right now that older is always better. It's in wine. Things are always going to happen. Something is going to change over time. And this beer is going to go from being awesome to a whole new level if I just Yeah, I mean, jeez, these beers are, we were just tasting them, but these beers are awesome on face values. Yeah, I don't know if the tertiary developments on these kinds of beers that I've had the privilege to try, although are interesting, I don't get the same amount of pleasure out of them like I do after they're recently released or within 12 to 18 When you do cellar things, I think people sometimes have the best intentions, but if you're cellaring something at essentially room temperature and supposed to a cellar, it's going to age a lot differently. So a lot of people kind of just have these scrolled away in their closets. It's not a cellar, people. Not a cellar. Yeah, when people ask me, that's what I'm a big fan of. Just don't wait for that ultimate special occasion that's only going to come around once every 10 years. Like just find a couple of friends, crack open the bottles and enjoy it. What else you got for us tonight? All right, coming up next, we've got Bourbon County Coffee. We change the coffee up every year, but in this case, we went back to the original. Wow, you get like on the nose just straight up. It's just like I walked into a Starbucks or your local coffee. You walk into an Intelligencia. There, I'm sorry, my bad. Yeah, the... Let me roll that back. Like I walk into an Intelligencia. The, our next-door neighbors are of course, Intelligencia Coffee Roasters. And so we always work with them on the coffee. We've got a great relationship with them. They are the coffee experts, literally sourcing over the world. And we've gone with them. We went, Jared and I went down to Costa Rica with them a couple of years ago. He's getting ready to go down to Guatemala in a couple of weeks. So it's very exciting in that regard. I'm a coffee lover. I've been drinking coffee for longer than I've been drinking beer. And just to go to the source is, which of course is nowhere near here, it's an incredible process. So for here we went back to the original coffee, which is their Black Cat espresso. In previous years we've done a lot of single origin coffees. Black Cat's a blend of a couple of different origins. But it's one that kind of like vanilla people have been asking for. When are you going to go back? So we said, okay, sure. It was a favorite. It was a fan favorite. You gotta give the people what they want sometimes. And we tasted it amongst a lot of different coffees and it was our favorite. So we said, why not? This is perfect timing. So for this one, we turn into cold brew coffee makers for about a week. We make basically a double strength cold brew and a lot of it. A lot. And it's a bit of a messy labor intensive process, but I think it makes the beer what it is. So people ask, do you put beans in the barrel? No, it's basically Bourbon County Stout, the aged stout blended with cold brew, freshly brewed cold brew. And so that gets blended into the base beer. So much like with North Woods, we are diluting. Now it's positive flavor in this case, but you are diluting. So we're 12.9% for coffee. So you should feel that in the mouth feel versus the Bourbon County Stout. This one, I would say, has started to reduce and transform a bit in character. Overall aroma, I would say, has come down a hair, and it's transformed a little bit. It's earthier than I remember it a couple of months ago. So that may be to people's liking or may not. I think I'm in the camp for this one in particular to drink it fresh. I think it's still a very nice beer. It's just starting, as we say on the bottle, develops for up to five years. Well, it's very much developing, and that's why we don't say it gets better or worse over five years. It's trying to stay out of that. Some people may choose to sit on it for ten years, and if that's to your liking, then so be it. Cool. Last but not least? Last but not least is our Chicago-only release, Propiators. It's a new, again, starting with the base stout like we do, like for all of these except for the barley wine. This is another one of those that come out of the big hopper of ideas that our brewers come together on. So this was created by Quinn Fuschel, who's actually one of our R&D brewers. He'd actually been working on this for a couple years, and that's why I think what we do is so cool is that he came in it with an idea a couple years ago, got feedback, tinkered with it, and it wasn't picked. Came back another year, same thing, tinkered with it, didn't get picked. And then this year, I think we did four different rounds, and I believe he submitted all in four rounds. And because it's not like a knockout competition, you can submit in one, but you need to be there for the finale, right? So it's not a proper knockout competition. You could submit all four times if you want. It's really more to be like a feedback loop. So banana, roasted almonds, almond slivers and cashew bark, a cinnamon vietnamese cinnamon. There's lots of different types of cinnamon, which I didn't really quite realize when we got into doing these beers a couple of years ago. It's all the different types of cinnamon. We got this from the Spice House, which some of you may know. And we just started picking up whatever they had, little bits of cinnamon. And there's a big difference between a Mexican canela and a vietnamese Saigon. Saigon's got the highest oil content. It really is that vibrant kind of red hot classic cinnamon, whereas the Mexican canela is more of that like potpourri. Like, yeah, I don't know if I want that in my beer. So you really have to, you know, when we get into these ingredients, we deep dive. We try to really blindly taste and let the ingredients themselves be the star of the show. But I think, you know, we'd used nuts before, we'd used cashew bark before, but banana was a tough one initially for us to connect with. Because in the beer world, isolamyl acetate, the ester, is normally associated with bananas, like half of Itzens, right? And this one's kind of like that banana's foster or banana bread. This one's also changed a little bit as well. I mean, the cinnamon is really popping. I think the bananas already started to round off. I was going to say, this tastes like, we did an adjunct podcast previously, and Roger brought in a bunch of different things and had the French press here and was pressing it out. This has almost that like cinnamon toast crunch quality to it. Cinnamon is definitely more pronounced now than it was before. Yeah. What we found a couple years ago when we used toasted pecans is that we got the beer perfectly dialed in and then that was the first element to really start to fade. I assume it's because of the oils, because we're using whole nuts in the case in here, roasted almonds and almond slivers. I think in this beer, it was the first to start to recede into the background. And now I feel the banana has started to round off, and therefore the cashew, the cinnamon, I'm pretty confident will hang on for quite a while. I think that's kind of the endurance. It's the endurance marathon runner of the ingredients here. Yeah, this is my first time tasting it, probably since proprietor's day. Every time we do these, we don't really have an idea of how they're going to age. So, if anything, I tell people, if you have an opportunity, if you really feel like you need to sell it, at least get yourself a second bottle, drink it fresh or go somewhere where they have it on tap. Because when we make, and I'm speaking directly to the variants where we're adding cold side additions, those are made, those are dialed in when we release them. And they will, we know, we don't know exactly how, but they're going to change. Certain elements are going to hang out, and so other elements are going to fade fast, or fade slow. So they drink them, they drink them. Get on them now. That's my recommendation. It's there. They still are all very fine beers as they develop. But I think their optimal flavor with the variants is when they're released. All right, ladies and gentlemen, it's time for our Q&A portion here at Barrel To Bottle. So Mike Siegel from Goose Island is here. And Mike, I hope you don't mind taking this Q&A. So what our fans do is they write in to us at Binny's Bev on Twitter for the chance to win a $20 gift card to Binny's. And if we choose their question, then they get it. So Robert M is the lucky contestant today on the Q&A portion of Barrel To Bottle. And he wants to know if the proprietors is going to remain a local Chicago release or if you guys will go national with that eventually. Oh, proprietors will be Chicago only. There's no talk or any plans of it going anywhere else other than Chicago. This is our thank you to our Goose fans here in the city. And I know a lot of people come from out of town to purchase it. And we had the Proprietor's Day the last couple of years. No, this is a thank you to Chicago Goose fans. I'm pretty pleased to hear that, actually. It's a good answer. Proprietor's Day was just as an additional thought. It was unbelievable. So many people came from out of town. I just was there just kind of walking the lines and serving beer. And people from Canada, people from the East Coast, people from people that were just driving up for this one event and to get this beer, it just blew my mind. So what a compliment. You know, it's amazing. It really is. It's one thing I hope to never take for granted is how much people love these beers. And it still blows my mind every year it happens. So pretty amazing. Good. Well, thanks for coming today. We appreciate you joining us. Really great, great show and good tasting. The beers, the 2017 beers are fantastic. Thank you very much. Great to be here. Yeah. Roger, thanks for sitting in, man. Cheers. Always good to have you. Appreciate that. Thank you. Jeff, I'd say thank you, but you know. My work here. I see you all the time. Alright. ladies and gentlemen, thanks for tuning in and we'll see you next Monday. Until then, keep tasting.