So smooth and full of caramel-toffee flavors. Just enough bite to bring you back for another sip. 4.25/5 stars.
Fair State Brewing Cooperative categorizes this as an English-style barleywine. For those curious about the origins, the name is pretty obvious. They are brewed from malted barley to a strength approaching wine (usually 6-12% ABV). Barleywines were brewed as high-gravity (high alcohol) strong ales using only the first runnings of wort. A typical beer would use both the first and subsequent runnings (essentially a rinsing of the mashed grains) to be less wasteful by extracting as much of the sugar as possible from the grain. When crafting barleywine, the second runnings go into a separate low-gravity beer. That means the wort (sugary pre-beer grain juice, yum!) in a barleywine is chock full of delicious sugars for the yeast to attack and transform into delicious ethanol. The amount of sugar (and resulting residual sweetness after the yeast give up) means that a healthy dose of hops needs to go into the brew as well. What differentiates the English from American barleywines is the amount and type of hops. The English version (unsurprisingly) is not as aggressively hopped as the American, allowing sweet notes of caramel and dried fruit to sing through.
This is a very different style of beer from the currently much more popular pastry stouts. For one thing, barleywines are relatively expensive to make. They use huge amounts of malt relative to a typical beer in order to pump up the sugar content. Pastry stouts (and milk stouts) rely on unfermentable lactose sugars to provide the extra sweetness. Barleywines have some amount of bitter finish, which can help reset your palate after a swig of thick, sweet caramel. Sweet stouts have very low bitterness coming mostly from the dark-roasted malts (think black coffee or dark chocolate flavors) and almost nothing from hops. A barleywine is definitely dessert-like, but in the way that a Cognac or Port wine is dessert-like. A sweet stout is, well, like having a pastry. They both satisfy different cravings and scratch different itches, just like a tiramisu or a chocolate chip cookie do. I know that I’m partial to each style when a mood strikes, and I’m very happy that they both exist.
Some information about beer styles and brewing methods has been dredged from my own half-remembered recollections, while others can be found (in more precise and correct detail) in the Beer Judge Certification Program website. Apologies for any inaccuracies!
A Beer a Day 