Stash Killer!: December 2016

Sunday 4 December 2016

Bourbon County

Origin: USA | Date: 2009 | ABV: 13% | On The Beer Nut: April 2010

There was much fuss in the beer blogoshire, and further abroad, about the arrival of this one to the UK recently: just 100 bottles in the country, at £20 a pop. But before the Goose Island brewery was sold to the world's biggest mass-market brewer, its appearance was a far more casual affair. I acquired a couple of bottles of the 2009 vintage back in 2010 and this one has been sitting in the stash ever since.

Slightly worryingly, the cap is a twist-off, peeling away with just the faintest hiss. It glugs out thickly and flatly, giving off a faint beefy Bovril smell as it does so. A proper sniff moves away from that and gives me sweeter hot fudge and butterscotch sauces. The bourbon character comes out on tasting, and rather tasty it is too: sweet vanilla and bitter tar, glowering at each other but neither able to dominate. You get to take your time moving from one to the other because of the massively thick texture. There's also a very real whisky flavour, a pleasantly sweet burn, scorching the gullet and warming the innards: it's one of the truest expressions of whisky in beer I've ever encountered.

This is beautiful, classic, stuff, and completely untroubled by eight summers in my attic. Everything I wrote about it originally still rings true. If you've bought a bottle of the 2016 you probably don't need to think about opening it for a while yet.

What is this?

A floor was installed in my attic in 2008. I've used it to store beer ever since. It's particularly handy in winter when everything inside is kept at perfect drinking temperature. And right from the early days I began hoarding odd bottles, ones I'd already reviewed on my main blog and I thought it might be fun to leave them aside to see how they age, or to drink on a special occasion. The problem is, in seven years, the special occasion never arises. I'm the luckiest fucker alive: every day is a cause for jubilation, and it never seems to occur that I should probably mark this with a celebratory vintage beer.

But no more. The stash is getting out of hand, I'm no closer to actually drinking any of it, and I've begun to worry about fires, earthquakes, sudden death, or any number of other inconveniences that might prevent me from getting to those bottles. So today begins the project to do just that. I reckon a blog is the way to encourage me to keep it going. It won't be as regular as The Beer Nut, it won't cover beers I haven't already written about there, and it's not as open-ended: there is only a finite amount of liquid up there, after all.
-- November 2015