Score: 98
2013 vintage. Bottle 11 of 230. Served in an O'so snifter and enjoyed on 01/28/14. Thank you Jon and Mark for the bottle!
Appearance: Black body, with brown highlights at the upper edges when held to light. Pours a quarter finger of khaki head that quick settles to a ring around glass. Average lacing, good retention. Lovely browning of the sides of the glass when swirled, with good legs. 5/5
Smell: Big vanilla, coffee that is overshadowed by the vanilla but still quite present, chocolate, and a light roastiness. Molasses and bourbon aroma too. The balance of coffee and vanilla present in the nose reminds me a lot of Prairie's Pirate Bomb. Overall, this is a really lovely mix of aromatics, with a sweet leaning profile that is vanilla forward. I could smell this all evening. 4.75/5
Taste: Big vanilla backbone, overlaid with coffee (more so than in the nose), smooth bourbon, molasses, and milk chocolate. Most of the chocolate flavor is towards the finish. As it warms up, there more coffee initially comes through, giving added bitter balance to the sweetness of the vanilla. However, by room temp, more molasses comes through tipping the balance back towards sweetness again. Finishes with a mix of chocolate, light vanilla and residual coffee. The finish is perfectly bittersweet. Everything is wonderfully integrated here. 4.75/5
Mouthfeel: Full bodied, quite viscous. Spot on carbonation. Oily mouthfeel. Sweet leaning profile, but still well balanced. No real booziness. 4.75/5
Overall: A really awesome bourbon-forward bourbon barrel aged beer with a good level of sweetness and coffee flavor done right. The integration here is marvelous. This and Coffee Dark Apparition are two great beers from Jackie O's that prove they have the talent to produce elite beer, yet also epitomize why most of their other barrel aged released to date have been massively disappointing. Seek a bottle of this one out.
Cost: $20 for a 22 oz (bomber) bottle.
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