Session #12 - Barleywine

I have to be honest here. It may get me branded as a heretic in the craft brew community, but I'm just going to go ahead and say it. I don't generally care for barleywine. OK... let the beatings and verbal abuse begin. While you're busy with that I'll explain myself.

Although I am a fan of what I term "big beer", barleywines often strike me as over done. Many I've tasted are just way over the top with hops. I understand this though. There's a lot of malt body there to be balanced.

On the other end, when they aren't overly hopped they're often cloyingly sweet. I understand this too. Nobody wants to make a beer so hopped that the normal person can't enjoy it. I say this as a guy who dearly loves his hops. So I don't make this criticism lightly. Neither on the hops nor the malty ends of the spectrum am I easily offended.

Further, there's a good deal of alcohol in a properly balanced barleywine. In short, these are incredibly complex beers where it's exceedingly easy for one element in the taste profile to overtake any of the others. These are beers that are prone to be brewed in accordance with the extreme behavior and attitudes of brewers.

So now that I've set up such a tentative beginning to my post, I think my choice of a barleywine that I enjoy and that I find well balanced will be surprising to some. I certainly find it ironic, given what some would consider the "extreme" nature of the brewer. While I certainly tend to the opposite general political viewpoint than Chris O'Brien, there is much in his post with which I agree. Hence, even I find it surprising that one of the (what I consider) more well-balanced barleywines comes from a somewhat "extreme" source.

I'm talking about Flying Dog's Horn Dog. I'm sure many of you have tasted it. I hadn't tasted it myself until the latter part of last year. It is a very complex barleywine - as barleywines should be. There were fruity notes plentiful that I couldn't fully qualify. There was a smokey backdrop to it as well. As far as the hops go, I'm going to have to say they were balanced appropriately in that I found the Horn Dog to be neither cloyingly sweet nor mouth-puckeringly bitter. I guess the fact that I didn't really notice the hops nor their lack speaks well to the overall balance. This was a beer I savored, sipping it slowly over the course of a half hour or so.

Likely many of you are aficionados of barleywine and will differ with my appraisal. That's fine. I'm hardly an expert on the subject of barleywines, but I have tried a few in my time. Personal perceptions are going to be as different as we as people are. Life would be pretty boring if it wasn't that way. In closing - to stick with the dog theme - I'll offer a recording I did not long after I got my Roland Fantom. I was playing around with the sound effects, and I figured it would be hard to go wrong with a barking dog. I'm an odd figurer sometimes.



.mp3 link

Beer

Roland Fantom