Barleywine Tasting

Last month was the fifth annual Barleywine Festival and tasting at the Toronado in San Francisco. Dave Keene lined up 34 barleywines from 31 different brewers, and a number of us gathered on a Sunday morning to pick the best one. The day was also noticeable for its blue skies, which Bob Jones didn’t recognize at first!

This year was the first year that I’ve judged at the festival, and it is run a bit differently than a homebrew competition. The biggest difference is in the scoring. The entries are first broken down into panels of six (or five) beers each. The beers are tasted blind, and no scoresheets are required. The organizer simply needs to know which two or three beers are the best so they can go to the next round. No feedback is provided to the brewers, since that is not the aim of this competition.

A sheet is provided to the judges to help them rank the beers. This scoresheet has four sections: Aroma, Visual, In-mouth, and Overall. Several aspects are listed under each section (except Overall)and you can mark +1 (that aspect is attractive in this beer), 0 (neutral), or -1 (detracts) for each. So you can add up your "scores" in each section and use the totals to rank the beers: 0 is an average beer. This kind of scoring probably takes a little getting used to--I was consistently several points below the other two judges in my panel on each beer. Hopefully consistency counts for something.

After the first beer, I really tried to think of what my ideal barleywine was like. When you try a barleywine, what kind of esters would cause you to give that aspect a -1 vs. a +1? What about body? Color? As a rookie, I began to learn how to judge a commercial beer as a commercial product and not as I would judge a homebrewed barleywine. I think balance, complexity, and smoothness are the most important aspects of barleywines. Many of the ones I tried had malt, hops, esters, and alcohol, but they weren’t blended into a consistent beer for my tastes. Age plays a big roll in creating this blended aspect, and age is difficult and expensive for commercial brewers to provide. Also, many brewers and consumers expect over-the-top hops and alcohol in barleywines, but again, I think balance is the key. Of course, balance is probably the most subjective character in a beer. For what it’s worth, the homebrewing guidelines from the American Homebrewers Association (AHA) require that barleywines be, among other things, light copper to dark brown in color, have low to assertive bitterness, and minimal to very high hop aroma and flavor. That’s not very helpful!

The "winner" of my panel turned out to be Anchor’s Old Foghorn. I’ve always enjoyed this beer, and so I was glad I put it on top even in a blind tasting. But I always thought it would not fare well at an event like this--Foghorn has the lowest alcohol content of all the beers entered, and it probably has the fewest IBUs. But during the judging, I wrote down evident alcoholic warming and a great, smooth balance of hops and malt. Our second place beer was Old Bawdy from Pike Brewing in Seattle. I had the same notes on this beer--smooth balance. The lowest scoring beer in my panel was, suprisingly, Sierra Nevada ‘96 Bigfoot. My notes said tart, quite dry, too bitter and not blended.

You’re probably wondering what the overall winner was—it was #29 by Hair of the Dog Brewing in Portland. Talk about over-the-top. I heard this beer was 18 months old and spent a year in an old bourbon cask. This was a very big beer in the mouth—very smoky, complex, high alcohol. A load of body and malt made it fairly balanced, but I thought it had too much whiskey character. A lot of fusel alcohols were present, and that combined with the smoky phenolic character (from the cask no doubt) were too much for me. If you like a good, say, single malt, you would enjoy this beer.

Some other notable beers included the lone English barleywine, Old Nick from Young’s brewing. Somehow, Bob Jones picked this beer out as an English style immediately. It had a lower body than most of the beers that day, with a low malt character which highlighted the English hops. This beer was one of the few that I would enjoy a full pint. Another beer I enjoyed was Christmas Barleywine from Third Street Ale Works in Santa Rosa. This was a smooth beer, with malt, hops, esters, and alcohol playing equal parts. Black Diamond’s (Walnut Creek) Barley Joy was another good, balanced beer. Marin Brewing’s Old Dipsea, a high scorer two years ago when I went to the festival, was also enjoyable this year. The alcohol overpowered the malt, though which was a little thin. Gilroy’s Coast Range Barleywine was a disappointment. I found it had an unwanted "Belgian" character. It had a low body, slightly sour finish, with a vegetative flavor. Hoptown’s (Pleasanton) Old Snagglepuss was a very nice IPA, but needed more malt and alcohol for a barleywine.

Judging has its downside. I missed a few beers I was looking forward to, like Roger Lind’s Jolly Roger, N’ice Chouffe from Belgium, and Old Crustacean from Rogue in Oregon. The one’s I did try were from the tasting, so I didn’t know which beer was which, and they were generally the one’s that didn’t make it past the first round. After all that tasting, though, I didn’t feel like buying the one’s I wanted. Well, it’s a tough job…