Great Waters Bourbon Barrel Brown

Brewed by Great Waters Brewing
Style: Brown Ale
St. Paul, Minnesota USA

Dark Red/Brown with Light Tan Head. Light Dusty Malt Aroma. Very Light Bourbon Notes. Very Subtle Tasting Brew and Easy to Drink. Very Subtle Notes that it was in fact Aged in a Bourbon Barrell. Overall a Solidly Average Brew, if you Accept the Extreme Low-Key Atmosphere of this Beer.

In the cask at the Brewpub. Dark amber-brown in color with a beige head. This beer was kind of a disappointment. There’s not much here. It’s very smooth and easy to drink. Very good malt content. If this was ever in a bourbon barrel, it has no evidence of it.

Dark copper. Sweek malt aroma. Single brown-ale-colored flavor. Light caramel notes. Empty finish. Not fantastic, but a reasonably pleasant session beer.

Rich head, clinging to the glass above a chestnut brown beer. Light bourbon touch, moderate nutty and woody. Very thin (typical brown ale) at cask temperature, smooth, and dangerously easy drinking. Such an easy finish, too bad it is only a brown ale to start with before going into the barrels. Excellent. (cask conditioned, handpull, at brewpub)

Tap @ brewpub. A dark brown color with a creamy brown head. A musty aroma. Smooth malty flavors with a slight hint of the bourbon barrel. A pleasant sweetness and a touch of fruit. A great brown ale.

Cask. Very lovely dark brown color (reminded me of a nice oak table) with a thick head. Kind of a dead aroma, but slight malts are there. Taste is a tasty mix of toasty malts and raw barley, but none of the heavy hitting nuts that I would expect from a Brown Ale. The bourbon is slightly detectable as an alcoholic zing at the front, but doesn’t appear too much in the beer. The cask definitely rounds out the body and makes it insanely smooth. A very tasty brew, but not as stellar as I was looking for.

"Cask"ading action is short lived but impressive gold tones flurry then settling to a nice dark amber walnut color with a steady finger high head of ivory creamyness, continent shaped lacing sticks well. Smell is faint sweetness of fruit, peach and lightly lemony. Unique soft taste of sweet bourbon, an interesting mix of tenderness and rigid ripeness, malts and fruits dance lightly together with a twinge of bitterness, sour-like grapefruit notes. It goes right through and down as far as feel, lightly astringent and velvety textured, smokey and limpid. A wee bit lighter then I was expecting, has a sour drying of lemonyness into the finish thats nice. Worth a try, quite interesting, on cask makes it worth while.

Nice dark appearance, pretty head. Whiskey hints in the nose, and I thought that I was in for a treat (a la Happy Jack Stout from The Bitter End in Austin, TX). However, the bourbon didn’t follow through in the taste and I was a bit disappointed.