Great Divide Oak-Aged Yeti Imperial Stout - July 2006
There's been a lot of oak going around lately: Barley wines aged in bourbon barrels, oak-aged stouts, even a couple of Anheuser-Busch specialty beers that have gone through conditioning with broken up staves from ex-whiskey barrels in the tanks. Unfortunately, like one of the A-B attempts and the brown ale I recently sampled that was altogether overwhelmed by the heady vanilla flavours the ale developed while in the ex-bourbon barrel, these experiments have all too often resulted in boldly flavourful but spectacularly unbalanced brews.
Thank goodness, then, for beers like the Oak-Aged Yeti Imperial Stout from Denver, Colorado's Great Divide Brewing Company. A behemoth of a brew at 9.5% alcohol by volume and, according to the label, and impressive 75 units of bitterness, the Yeti nevertheless manages to keep all its flavours in harmony, bitterness meshing with strength, coffee and roast meeting sweetness, and all the lovely, vanilla-y notes of the oak on which it was aged blending with the whole. Even though I opened it as an entirely inappropriate accompaniment to barbecue-rubbed, slow-cooked chicken breasts - hey, when you're clearing out the fridge in anticipation of moving your home and office across town, you do some strange things - this lovely stout was a true pleasure to drink.
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