Avast, ye bilge rats! Come witness mine grog tastin…. ok, I can’t really keep that up. Speaking in what I’m sure are apocryphal and historical dialects is just not my strong suit, even if last Saturday was International Talk Like a Pirate Day (more appropriate for me would be something like “I don’t feel like paying for Photoshop.” anyway). Plus, I drank this on Friday night not even realizing that Saturday was that most hallowed of holidays. I’m the worst. No, wait, what I am I talking about? You’re the worst. Why are you giving me crap about not drinking this beer on a ridiculous, made-up “International Observance”? You are totally the worst. Instead, I celebrated World Water Monitoring Day by drinking fermented sugar water aged in barrels previously used to store fermented Jamaican sugar water that was then distilled. I monitored the hell out of my water intake on Friday, rest assured.
Um, anyway, Prairie has a whole series of Noir beers, each a pretty standard imperial oatmeal stout tagged with different treatments. The standard is bourbon barrel aged, but there’s also coffee, vanilla, and even apple brandy barrel aged variants. Pirate Noir is the Jamaican rum barrel aged version. Shiver some timbers, torrent some new releases, and get ready for Pirate Noir:
Prairie Pirate Noir – Pours pitch black, with just a cap of light brown head. Smells of brown sugar, vanilla, oak, molasses, booze, really nice. Taste is very sweet, rich caramel, molasses, rum, vanilla, oak, a little booze in the finish. As it warms, I’m getting coconut and something along the lines of anise or liquorish too. Mouthfeel is rich and full bodied, a little boozy, a sipper, sugary but not cloying, and the finish is surprisingly easy going. Not going to gulp it, but it doesn’t feel as heavy in the finish as it does up front. Overall, this is a very nice rum barrel aged stout. A-
Beer Nerd Details: 12% ABV bottled (12 ounce). Drank out of a snifter on 9/18/15. Bottled 18815 (so that’s 7/7/15, not sure which batch, but this is long after they stopped waxing the bottles).
So perhaps I should try more of these barrel aged Prairie beers, eh? I’ve got another one in the pipeline somewhere, so look out for that, but what I really need to find is a Prairie Pirate Bomb!