Russian Imperial Stout with Bourbon Soaked Oak - Tasting Notes

A little over a year ago I brewed up a big Russian Imperial Stout which I aged on my own whiskey soaked charred white oak in an attempt to make a clone of the famous Goose Island Bourbon County Brand Stout.  This beer aged for 6 months on oak and finished at a pretty extraordinary 1.046 (close to the Starting Gravity of many of my beers).  It started at 1.130 which puts it at about 13% ABV - it packs a wallop.

I bottled the beer about three months ago with wine yeast and was pleasantly surprised that it has carbonated somewhat.  I've been drinking it quickly (I've got less than half the batch left at this point) and it's been preventing me from drinking my stockpile of real BCBS.

This batch has re-enforced my opinion that duplicating the effects of barrel aging isn't a trivial matter.  Even though I didn't quite capture the BCBS barrel character I think I've gotten pretty close (definitely moving in the right direction compared with the medium toast Hungarian oak cubes soaked in whiskey).  Regardless, it has been a lot of fun!

Tasting Notes:

• Aroma:
• Oak and light whiskey aroma hits first followed by the smell of bitter dark chocolate, roasted malt, and coffee
• Appearance:
• Black and opaque.  Pours with a thin layer of brow foam.  This fades into a thin ring after a couple minutes
• Flavor:
• Malt hits up front - it has a chocolate and caramel character.  The oak (vanilla, roast, and smoke) and whiskey then come through.  They meld very nicely with malt.  In the finish there is a bitter roast flavor - very much like eating a high % dark chocolate.  I suppose some of the bitter finish is the hops as well although there isn't any hop flavor that clearly comes though.  There is also a strong alcohol component in the finish.  The finish has a balance between the sweet malty, bitter roasty, and alcohol flavors.
• Mouthfeel:
• It is a full bodied beer with quite a bit of sweetness.  It drinks fairly smooth - maybe a slight bit of astringency.  Has a warming alcohol presence.  As strong as this beer is it drinks very easily - not so heavy that you feel full after drinking one (although a second would be way too much if I want to get out of bed the next morning).
• Overall:
• This is a big, rich, and complex beer.  The base beer brought a real rich set of flavors which stand up nicely to the the whiskey and oak.  This was intended to be a clone of BCBS but I'm thinking I likely missed the mark a bit in terms of the strength of the whiskey character (will do a final side by side comparison).  Even so I think the beer strikes a very nice balance of it's own.  I'll be brewing another one of these.