Russian Imperial Stout with Bourbon Soaked Oak - Take III - Tasting Notes

This is my third attempt at making a clone of Goose Island's Bourbon County Brand Stout.  BCBS is a beer notable for it's very agressive and whisky forward character even by comparison with many other Bourbon Barrel aged beers.  Goose Island has generously made the recipe for the beer available for the public (uses a whopping 38 lbs of malt for a 6 gal batch).  The catch, of course, is that that to duplicate the profound barrel character they achieve is not at all straight forward.

My main focus on this third attempt at the beer (after working some of the kinks out on the big base beer in the first two batches) has been to try to replicate the big boozy flavor.  To do this I've used White Oak sticks which I seasoned, toasted, charred, and then aged in a 60% (barrel strength) spirit for over a year.  I did a bit of analysis to determine the amount of oak needed to replicate the surface area of a 55 gal barrel which led me to add a lot more oak than I ever have used before.

I let the beer age in secondary on the oak in my hot/cold attic for almost a year before bottling.  I was a little concerned that it would become over-oaked in that time but that fear was unfounded.  Anyway, it's been in the bottle for close to 6 months now.  So, time for an official tasting.

Tasting Notes:

• Aroma:
• Boozy.  Has chocolate, roast, and coffee very strongly coming through as well.  Also get a pretty strong wood character to it - this is caramel and something kind of like maple syrup rather than vanilla   Sweet smelling.
• Appearance:
• Very dark brown/black in color.  Too dark to see though.  Pours with just a hind of foam which is gone instantly.
• Flavor:
• Booze up front along with roast  and chocolate as well as the caramel oaky flavor noted in the nose.  It has a pretty nice sweetness to it which lingers into the finish.  There is a medium bitterness in the finish as well along with bold alcohol flavor.  The balance is pretty nice - alcohol and sweet malt are most prominent but the bitterness cuts through enough to keep it from being cloying.
• Mouthfeel:
• Full bodied and pretty smooth drinking.  Pretty sticky on the palate after a drink.  Definitely has some warming alcohol presence.
• Overall:
• Boldly flavored and booze forward beer.  It is pretty complex with the rich malt and whiskey/oak derived character.  The oak character itself seems quite a bit different than a typical bourbon - a lot more caramel and no vanilla really.  The oak is certainly very smooth - it is definitely not over-oaked to my palate.  As a BCBS clone I think (and I'll post a proper side to side comparison on this) my beer is very close in terms of boozy presence but the character I got out of the oak was significantly different from the real thing