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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Top of the barrel

Rick Bonino

In 1992, to celebrate its 1,000th batch of beer, Goose Island became the first brewery to put an imperial stout in bourbon barrels.

Today, bourbon barrel stouts, and all sorts of other barrel-aged beers, are increasingly common. But that original Bourbon County Stout remains iconic, with customers camping overnight at Chicago stores to snag some when it’s released each year on Black Friday after Thanksgiving.

“It’s one of the biggest, most sought-out specialty things that we do,” said Goose Island lab technician Matt Cinatl.

Only a very limited supply makes it to Spokane, at Total Wine and other selected accounts. But some will be pouring Friday night at The Blackbird, along with coffee-infused and vanilla rye variations, as Goose Island wraps up its Migration Week stopover here.  

As part of those events, Cinatl and brewer Austin Niestrom led a Bourbon County Deconstruction class Wednesday at Jim’s Home Brew, including liquid samples of the beer at various stages of the process.

The unfermented wort was syrupy sweet with rich chocolate and roasted coffee flavors as well as some astringency from a healthy dose of dark malts.

The fermented base beer, before going into barrels, was raw, boozy and bitter, with the yeast having eaten away much of the sugary sweetness and converted it to alcohol (Bourbon County Stout tops out at 14 to 15 percent by volume).

“The first time I tasted it, I was really confused, to be honest with you,” Niestrom said. “I grabbed a pint out of the fermenter, and ended up dumping most of it.

“It’s not something we ever serve,” he said. “It’s brewed for eight to 12 months later.”

That’s how long the beer spends in barrels before it’s blended and bottled, allowing it to mellow and pick up vanilla and coconut notes from the oak along with the bourbon profile.

The process is enhanced by Chicago’s climate extremes, with hot summers and cold winters. The wood expands and contracts, alternately soaking up the liquid and expelling it back out with additional flavor and alcohol.    

“Around a year pulls out the flavor characteristics that we’re looking for,” Niestrom said.

Since those flavors vary from barrel to barrel, the beer is blended for consistency. “Each bottle of Bourbon County Stout is probably a blend of 500 different barrels,” he said.

Recent improvements to Goose Island’s equipment have made the complex beer easier and more efficient to brew. But it’s still a beast; while breweries typically harvest the yeast from their beers after fermentation to reuse in future batches, that’s not possible with Bourbon County Stout, because it makes the yeast work too hard to go another round.

Since breweries can only afford so much of that, it’s the main reason the beer is so scarce, Cinatl said.

“That’s kind of our limitation,” he said, “as opposed to barrels or warehouse space or desire.”

For an in-depth look at Bourbon County Stout, from the making of the barrels to the bourbon to the beer, check out Goose Island’s “Grit and Grain” video on YouTube or Vimeo.