Every class coming through the St. Andrew's Cafe has a designated day for a Beer lecture and tasting as part of their curriculum. Now while that is pretty cool in its own right, every once in a while an exceptional class with exceptional connoisseurship in beer happen. The current class had just the person to make this happen, a Justin Burchill; who with a good bit of knowledge about the better beers in life helped create a special tasting. While there were too many beers to mention all of them, two of them really stood out for me.
The first of the two was Brooklyn Breweries Black OPS. Black OPs is a unique Russian Imperial Stout which is aged for four months in old bourbon barrels, bottled flat, then re-carbonated with champagne yeast.
As you can see from the picture of it below in the glass, its as dark as the devils soul, and just as sinful. What an amazing beer! When you first sip it, you are instantly transported to drinking a shot of good quality bourbon, but then it transforms into creamy coffee-like chocolate stout of a beer. Damn good stuff. Expensive too, at about $30 a bottle. Oh, and they only made 1,000 cases of the stuff, so if you have a chance to try it then I strongly suggest you do.
The second beer that really amazed me was Innis & Gunn, another oak aged beer. Unlike the Black OPS, the Innis & Gunn was surprisingly mellow, with flavors of vanilla, spice, orange, and lemon zest. A really well rounded beer, probably one of the best I had ever tasted. What was nice was that the beer had so many flavor profiles of what reminded me of a Belgian beer, but without the strong hops flavors. I think I might just have to go buy a few of these just to do some more "research".
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