Review: 6th Annual Wood and Barrel Aged Craft Beer Festival
By Chuck Sudo in Food on Nov 10, 2008 9:33PM
A glimpse of some of the festival attendees in the HUUUGE Plumber\'s Union Hall auditorium.
Had to take a picture of this glorious mural outside the auditorium.
From Wil Turner of Goose Island Clybourn brewpub comes \"Special Ed.\" This smoked IMperial Brown Ale was aged for 40 weeks in a bourbon barrel and was not for the faint of heart. The malt was really smoky.
From Rock Bottom Brewery in Yorktown: Raspberry Thunder is a Belgian-style stout aged with raspberries for six months in a Woodford Reserve barrel. The dark fruit notes of the barrel heightened the flavor of raspberry.
Bentoon Harbor, MI-based The Livery brewed this amazing Czech doppelbock aged five months in a merlot barrel with naturally occurring wort-souring microorganisms. The beer was then dry-hopped for two weeks, transferred to a Heaven Hill bourbon barrel for six months, then dry-hopped a second time. The name of the beer: \"Hoppelbock.\" Oddly, this beer wasn\'t sour at all.
From The Lost Abbey in San Marcos, CA comes \"Isabella Proximus.\" This is a barrel aged American Wild Ale. Fans of farmhouse ales will be attracted to the extreme sourness of this beer.
Jonathan Cutler of Piece surprised attendees with \"It\'s Something,\" a brown ale aged with sour cherries in a bourbon barrel. Think the beer version of chocolate covered cherries, and you\'ll have an idea of what this tasted.
Another Lost Abbey Selection: Older Viscosity 2007. This is a bourbon barrel-aged Imperial Stout. A good selection, but won\'t make you forget Bourbon County Stout or DarkLord.
From Boulevard Brewing, located on the Missouri side of Kansas City, comes a bourbon barrel aged quadruple with added cherries. This was a sublime tasting beer.
\"La Peste,\" from Court Avenue Brewing Company in Des Moines, IA. this was a Belgian Golden ale brewed with malted rye and oats.Very sweet malts here. the beer was held \"port style\" in Napa valley wine barrels and put through occasional French Oak infusion spirals.
Staff at Delilah's, take note. We love that you put together an annual barrel-aged beer festival, but the size of the bar just doesn't make it enjoyable. Let's take a look the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild's 6th Annual Festival of Wood and Barrel-aged beer, held Saturday at the Journeyman Plumber's Union Hall (1340 W. Washington).
This is how a barrel-aged beer festival should look like. Note the room to walk around, to be able to breathe, even. Gaze at the well-lighted hall and clean floors. With 117 barrel aged selections from 42 participating breweries and brewpubs, they had almost as many selections as Delilah's version staggered over two tasting sessions. Both Piece's Jonathan Cutler and Revolution Brewing's Josh Deth were very pleased with the accommodations of the auditorium, as were many of the attendees. this was the first year for the festival at the Plumber's Union; judging from the smiles of both organizers and attendees, it's a good fit.
The selections tended to veer heavily toward bourbon barrel aging, but there were an increasing number of participants using wine barrels for their aging. Many of the breweries also added fruit and other now-seasonal ingredients to add to the flavor of their entries. Of particular note was a station dedicated to "experimental" brews with heavy aging, fruit infusions and hopping. These beers were not for the faint of heart.
The photos in the gallery have reviews of the beer we chose to highlight.
