Maestro

Our bourbon barrel-aged barleywine, Maestro, is as bold, as hearty, and as extravagant as it sounds. Brewed with a mountain of caramel malts, flaked oats and brown sugar, this blend booms with warm toffee and sweet molasses flavors, harmonizing perfectly with toasted coconut aromas and hints of bourbon spice from the barrels. For our third iteration of this luscious blend, we’re striving for balance and drinkability in this 13.2% goliath of a brew.

Every time we recreate a blend, we finesse our work, choosing certain barrels, brewing with specific ingredients and tasting for the exact qualities we want. Learning from the last blend, we continue to grow. As for Maestro, we believe the bourbon barrels have a disproportionately large impact on its final flavors, hence each iteration is intrinsically linked to the barrels we use that year.

This time around, we chose to use all 6-10 year Heaven Hill bourbon barrels. The American oak flavor in these barrels is vibrant, presenting aromas of coconut, vanilla and butterscotch. But with a somewhat mature aging time, the bourbon flavor comes across into Maestro clearly: with a subtle cinnamon spice character.

We’re not always purist, style-or-die type brewers, but we think a bourbon barrel-aged barleywine should have quality oak and bourbon character upfront, followed by notes of caramel and toffee, and just enough hop bitterness to balance the blend’s sweetness, making a quaffable, albeit gigantic, beer.

In this third manifestation of Maestro, we blended for harmonies of hop, malt, and bourbon barrel character that all melt into one another, making a beer that you couldn’t really say is too far one way or another, besides delicious.

Maestro would go great with Belgian liége waffles topped with caramelized bananas because of the interplay of caramel and luscious grain flavors, or with rich blue cheese in which the intense lingering flavor of cheese would dance with the beer on your palate, enhancing the creamy and oaky qualities in in the blend.

This is also a beer that will age with grace. Enjoy some now, in a month and in a year, and see how the flavors subdue to create a sweet ambrosia-like elixir, a beverage that should really only be drunk from a chalice!

Cheers, and we hope you enjoy the 2021 Maestro.