This is a barrel aged beer with raspberries soaked in it. It is a bit sour, but nowhere near the scale of Gueuze. I love it. It’s very complex, with notes of earth, dust, barnyard, plant stem, mint, anise, on and on. When first poured, it has a significant sense of grain, then that clears the way for much more distinct barnyard funk (which I love in a beer), balanced by the raspberry aromas, which are always noticeable but never overwhelming. There is great evolution in the glass and on the palate. As with most sours, the lees at the bottom will deprive this one of a lot of its complexity and make it more crass and up front in nature. Up until then, it was extremely enjoyable. Personally, I always want more sour in a beer like this unless it’s lambic-sour, and this was no exception, but it is still outstanding in its own right. God, I hope Anheuser-Busch doesn’t ruin this brand. I will hope for that but not expect it.
So far…AB seems to be leaving the barrel program alone. They added a local only line of beers (kegs, no bottles) call Fulton & Wood
For the next year, Goose Island is embarking on an ambitious project. Every couple of months, it will release a new one-off beer created by a small team of free-thinking employees.
The results — called the Fulton & Wood series (named for the brewery’s location) — will be tap-only beers not usually associated with the Goose catalog. Brewmaster Brett Porter said the three-person “innovation groups” were the product of wanting to push Goose in new directions.
“We tend to do the same things,” Porter said. With Fulton & Wood, however, “we’ve done some things that stretch us.”He has pledged to encourage creativity and censor no one.
The new stuff is fine with me if they will leave the great existing line alone. I think (hope) there might be enough of an audience for such really good beers as they have been making that even a large corporation would realize that there isn’t an easier (cheaper) way of getting those results. We’ll see. For now, I love this beer. I really like pretty much every Goose Island that I’ve tried. It’s too bad the Bourbon County stuff seems to be the only focus of a portion of the beer geek population around here. Which isn’t to say those beers aren’t great, but so are a couple of the other ones, which one can find on the shelf instead of having to know when they’re released just to get a 1-bottle-per-person allotment, which is how it works with any of the Bourbon County beers around here.