Mikkel Borg Bjergsø, the famed Danish gypsy brewer who walks the earth, usurping excess brewing capacity at (or collaborating with) whatever brewery will have him, has also made his way through the U.S. on occasion. So what happens when he shucks and jives his way through Indiana and collaborates with one of our country’s finest brewers? We get a series of barleywines exploring different grains. The first four actually seem to all be variations on the Wheatwine style, Hvedegoop being a straight up Wheatwine, with successive releases incorporating other grains such as oats, rye, and even buckwheat. All variants use the “goop” suffix, which I’ll just go with because I don’t really want to know why.
This latest version focuses on rice as the key differentiator. As I understand it, rice is typically a cheap adjunct used to jack up the abv while not impacting flavor at all, the sort of process you typically find in macro breweries like Bud/Miller/Coors. But when you’re making a 10.4% ABV barleywine that is packed to the gills with hops, rice should help dry out the beer, keep the malts in check, and generally make it more palatable. Sounds good to me, so many thanks to Chicago trading partner Joe for sending my way. Let’s see how this one fares:
Three Floyds and Mikkeller Risgoop – Pours a hazy but bright orange color with a finger of white head, very IPA looking. Speaking of which, the nose is all hops. Grassy, juicy citrus, along with some pine and sugary sweet malt aromas too. Taste has a surprising malt backbone. Nothing huge, but enough to balance out the massive hop blast that emerges in the middle and intensifies through the finish, which strikes a good balance between sweetness and bitterness. Some booze hits in the middle and finish as well, but nothing unpleasant. I don’t smell or taste any rice, but I think you can probably tell that there’s some sort of sugar adjunct here because of the mouthfeel, which I wouldn’t call dry, per say, but which isn’t as thick or gloopy as you typically would get in a barleywine (or a beer with “goop” in the name, for that matter). Medium bodied, lighter than you’d expect, but with enough booziness that it doesn’t feel thin or disappointing. Overall, this is really nice, more reminiscent of a really big DIPA (or TIPA, I guess you’d call it) than a Barleywine, but that’s not a real complaint at all. A-
Beer Nerd Details: 10.4% ABV bottled (22 oz. bomber). Drank out of a snifter on 2/15/13.
So yeah, FFF and Mikkeller makes for a winning combo, at least with this particular beer (I have to admit, I’m not a huge wheatwine fan, though I suspect these two brewers could give the style a run for its money). Anywho, whilst drinnking this and perusing my twitter feed, I saw that DDB posted this video and when she sez “You know it’s good beer when it has a cork in it” I found myself wondering, so I performed a little experiment:
I believe she was actually correct. After that point, the beer became redolent of corking.
Flying Fish uses rice in their Exit 16 and it’s actually really good. When you are using rice to dry out a beer and raise it’s ABV instead of just using it since it’s cheap, you can do good things with it. You just can’t make it your primary ingredient since there won’t be any flavor.
Yep, like any sugar adjunct. It’s like light candi sugar in a tripel. In fact, I think The Bruery actually uses rice in their Tradewinds Tripel. So there’s that!