Tap & Growler's Blind Barrel-Aged Tasting

Last week, the Tap & Growler had a bevy of barrel-aged release parties, but the highlight was definitely their hosted tasting, featuring barrel-aged beers from 10 local breweries. I was really looking forward to this.

Unfortunately, the beer didn't live up to my expectations.

Why? 'Barrel-aged' isn't really a good category for a blind tasting. A brewery can barrel-age just about anything - and the lineup for the tasting reflected that. There were IPAs, winter ales, a pumpkin beer, a Belgian-style dubbel, and others. Because of this diversity, there was no real standard for comparison between the beers.

I agreed with 2 of the top 3 selected by the rest of the public. The top beer was Oakshire's - their bourbon-aged Very Ill Tempered Gnome had the best blend of whiskey flavors and a good base beer to soak them up. Second was Viking's sour red (the name of which I wasn't able to find) - I was pleasantly surprised to see they're working in sours. The barrel-aging wasn't really detectable (so I suppose it fails in that respect), but it was a respectable and very tart and bready sour. In third was Hop Valley's Oakeroo - a very sweet, malty winter warmer. I wasn't as fond of it - my third place was Agrarian's Cucurbita Maxima - a pumpkin beer without the usual hit of nutmeg, cinnamon, and brown sugar.

The (perhaps unintended) result? The breweries that did well in public voting are ones we already know can make excellent barrel-aged beer - namely, Oakshire and Hop Valley. The others mostly came off as amateurish and flawed.

I hope that Tap & Growler continues to do these blind tastings - they're a lot of fun and very informative. I just wish they'd stick with style-based flights so there's some way to directly compare the beers.