This is my fourth attempt at brewing a Goose Island Bourbon County Brand Stout Clone. I am using a recipe from the brewery - the same one I've used before. It is a challenging beer to make as the grain bill is more than my mash tun can take and I end up doing 2 mashes on it and then boil for 4 hrs to get down to 6 gal-ish of beer
It started at 1.128 and I had to pitch a second round of super high gravity yeast to get it close to my target of 1.038 (I ended up at 1.042 - although in my bottling I measured it a bit higher than that). It aged on a large amount of oak that I toasted and then aged with ever clear to attempt to simulate the character of freshly drained bourbon barrel (I didn't think the oak had soaked up as much bourbon as I would have liked so I added some of my extra spirit to try to compensate (perhaps this was a mistake)
I aged the beer up in my attic for more than 3 years before bottling a couple months ago. The beer hasn't carbonated in that time.
Anyhow, as you'll see, the beer didn't turn out as I'd hoped and is probably a regression from version III. "You don't learn anything being right" is what I tell myself when drinking this beer. I'll do a head to head comparison of all my beer to confirm this assessment. Still I'm happy to drink it as it is not a bad beer even if a bit off the mark
Tasting Notes:
- Aroma:
- Chocolate, coffee, and a bit of boozy character and toasted oak which very much blends with the other characters I think - it doesn't smell that much of bourbon. It is a very aromatic beer though and smells nice.
- Appearance:
- Dark brown - can't see light through it when held up to a lamp. It pours with just a thin layer of fizz around the edge of the glass that is then gone pretty quickly
- Flavor:
- Chocolate and toasted and roasted flavors up front (once again, for how much oak is in this, some of that toast and roast flavor must be the oak). Get a hint of booze character in there as well. Quite sweet on the finish. It has a bit of bitterness which balances the sweet a bit. There is a fruitiness in there too and maybe other yeast character I just don't get much that I would associate with bourbon in this one
- Mouthfeel:
- Full bodied and very sticky on the palate
- Overall:
- This is a rich and flavorful stout. The boldness of it and the sweetness are lovely but, as a beer intended to imitate BCBS, it is way off the mark. The other flavors are overpowering any bourbon character it might have and I suspect even if it were more muted there isn't that much of the bourbon character to taste. I am going to need to think about what when wrong here before my next attempt
