Breweries "Visited"

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Beer 295: Nils Oscar Barleywine

I suppose on a beautiful fall Sunday during which I ended up working all day, it's perfectly fitting to end it with a beer that kind of sucks.

The Nils Oscar Company's Swedish barleywine style ale is brewed in Sweden. At 10.4% ABV and in a style that I generally enjoy, I had high hopes for this one. No such luck. It poured a clear, reddish brown ale with a minimal tan head. It smelled sweet like rum raisin bread.


Then it went totally south. The flavor was very smokey. The taste was overwhelmingly booze-laden. Surprisingly so. As a point of reference, I had more than a few sips of Dogfish Head's World Wide Stout on Friday night and the 18% ABV was smooth and well disguised. So it is possible to have a high ABV that isn't so assertive. Back to Nils Oscar...other notable flavors included molasses and caramel, but there was also an underlying acidity. To top it all off, as I got to the halfway point and it began to warm a bit, a weird chalkiness became more apparent.

This beer is just blech in my book. Cheers.

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