The Forum

There are few things I would rather be doing that reviewing a barley wine. On a day when you either have nothing to do, or that’s been so bad you have to look down to make sure you’re not in fact wearing a postal uniform, that’s the day to purchase and savor one of these. Sit back, take your time and enjoy all that this type of ale has to offer.

Shoreline Brewing Company has not impressed me in the past with many of its brews. However, their barley wine that I sampled from this collection is a profound exception.

Despite what common myths would have you be­lieve, barley wine is not in fact wine. There are a few circu­lating tales about how this came to be. The most interesting of which is that in order to be served at Eng­lish pubs concoctions of this alcohol volume had to be classified as wines in order to be properly licensed. The other tales sim­ply give barley wine its name based upon its typically over­whelming sweetness or its aging char­acteristics. Either way, this is an excep­tional class of brews that is particularly complex and delectable for all.

Unlike the Belgians who make similar classes of beers (Dubbels and Trippels), the English derived this style from its grain bill alone. In other words, barley wine is just simply beer taken to the next level. It doesn’t employ gim­micks such as candy sugar to spike the alcohol content. This ale is 100 percent pure barley, although it uses roughly twice the amount as a normal batch. Like many other styles, American ver­sions of this ale typically possess a much greater hoppiness, and some uti­lize hops with higher alpha concentra­tion to do so, which results in a citrus-like finish.

To me, when poured into a beau­tiful snifter, specimens of this type are truly art. I accompanied the server to the bar to watch him pour the ale and observed a very cloudy haze, which changed from overcast to partly cloudy. After cascading out of the tap for a few minutes, this gorgeous ale settled into a clearer, deep brownish copper red. In typical fashion, it had little to no head, but a course, lacy white frothy texture just accenting its surface. Overall, it gave an outstanding visual presenta­tion.

The whiff of this ale took several minutes to unravel. It began with a very sweet, candy coated pista­chio or pecan aroma, backed by the essence of caramel­ized oats. The overwhelming sweetness was reminiscent of Boston baked beans and cara­mel cheesecake sprinkled with allspice.

As for its taste, a wallop of sweet barley malt in­stantly struck me. It tasted of a heavily caramelized granny smith apple. The body smacked of sweet coffee candy, such as Werthers Original mixed with the crust of crème brulee. This heavy body was balanced with very sweet li­quor, such as a sweet amaretto or hard cider. Its finish was extremely dry, clean and slightly acidic. In my opin­ion, this was a very well done Ameri­can barley wine across all categories. I highly recommend it.

Chris is a 3L and can be reached at forum@valpo.edu.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Etcetera.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.