Michelob Celebrate Vanilla Oak

Brewed by Anheuser-Busch InBev
Style: Spice/Herb/Vegetable
St. Louis, Missouri USA

Bottle, Vail Beer Fest. Head is mostly diminishing. Body is medium amber. Aroma is moderately malty (caramel), with notes vanilla, candy sugar, and DMS. Flavor is moderately sweet. Finish is lightly sweet, lightly bitter, unclean. Medium body, watery texture, lively carbonation, lightly alcoholic. If you’re even slightly meticulous, you will find the macro-swill smell underneath the sugary and vanilla notes. That’s a shame, really...why use a shitty base beer to make a special brew? Oh, right, this is A-B we’re talking about. God forbid they would actually avoid shortcuts and adjuncts for a fancy packaged celebratory beer. That would cost money.

Nice dark amber color,small tannish head that had a decent hangt ime then faded to leave a bit of a lace behind.Malty sweetish aroma ,some hints of maybe some bourbonesque or wine like smell coming through as well as maybe some caramel or toffee.The flavor is sort of unbalanced you get a little malt up front then it turns thin and alcoholic with a funky sort of vanilla taste and some earth tones coming through in the middle some oak notes but mostly i just get that sickening vanilla taste and alcohol.This seems more like a cheap high octane ML then anything to me.It’s not worth the $20 to try but hey gotta go once around .

(bottle) Nice amber red with off white head. Aroma of vanilla. Flavor is vanilla and oak. Blech.

Well, I tried to have an open mind on this beer, but it simply is not very good. Mahogany color with a thin white head. Licorice, vanilla and cotton candy dominate the aroma. Very sweet flavor, almost cloying. One dimensional vanilla flavor that lacks balance of any sort. I am glad that a friend got a bottle of this for free, because it is certainly not worth it’s price.

On tap at EBF.... What is that shit.The representative of anheuser-bush explain to me that beer was old in oak barrel and taste vanilla flavor and he sayed to me he love Montreal and blablabla..So i try the beer with a lot of enthousiasme.Humm that beer taste like a crap malt liquor..Corn and alcohol..Thas is a crap beer like the other Anheuser-bush beer....

21-Nov-06 (24 oz bullet-shaped bottle, part of Celebrate gift pack: $17.99 at BevMo in La Jolla, CA) After sampling the Celebrate Chocolate, things can only get better with the Vanilla Oak, or at least I’m hopeful that’s the case. The beer pours a deep copper color with perfect clarity. The light-tan head, however, is small and short-lived, fully dissipating in under two minutes. Without even bringing the glass to my nose for a full sniff, the fragrance of vanilla is pretty overpowering, almost like a vanilla-scented candle. It’s extremely sweet with a bit of alcohol coming through. And in the flavor, the sweet vanilla is also achieving a extreme level of dominance that makes the beer so out of whack, it’s not enjoyable. Couple that with a harsh, astringent bitterness, and this beer is almost as disappointing as Celebrate Chocolate. Underlying flavors are more or less lost on me. A modest butteriness emerges in the finish as the beer warms, but the astringency picks up considerably as well, so I think this beer is best when served at mid-30s temperature. Actually, it’s probably best when not served at all. Light-medium in body with plentiful carbonation, but the astringency of the mouthfeel is a significant issue. While this half of the gift pack is more enjoyable than Celebrate Chocolate, it’s poorly constructed, simply a vanilla bomb to mask the underlying beer.

I had this at FoBAB 3, and not on my own ticket. The aroma was a strong, sweet vanilla, a cloying caramel, and a whiff of alcohol. It was more like drinking a candied copy of beer, the caramel and vanilla blending in the taste like something one might pull out of their Halloween bag. The advertised bourbon barrel aging really made no impression. I was just glad that there were so many great brews to move on to.

<font size=-4><a href=http://www.ratebeer.com/events-detail.asp?eve Third Annual Festival of Barrel-Aged Beers, Chicago, IL 11/12/2005<font size=-1>

I had this bottle before it was released. I had a sample at the FOBAB in 2005, didn’t bother rating, but when the fest was over, the A-B rep let me have an unopened bottle (or did I just lift it? Who can remember?) This gem sat in my cellar for a year until I broke it out at a tasting. Here are the notes from 2006. Golden color. Aroma is primarily vanilla with some spice, but mostly vanilla. Taste is very sweet with lots of vanilla & wood on the finish. This is so cloying that it is hard to drink. I remember not liking this when I had it a year ago, thinking it was cloyingly sweet with too much vanilla. A year has not helped.