Feel the burn.

Another painful day at the gym yesterday; another day of nursing my poor aching joints. My goal has been to sort of get my body used to being warm, as I am headed to Hong Kong in a couple of days. It's been my experience that as my body gets used to being warm, I tend not to react so poorly to heat when I'm in it. And Hong Kong is hot and humid. Severely.

I wish I were going to Hong Kong under better circumstances, but it's for a family funeral. My grandmother died a couple of weeks ago, and I'm off to the funeral this weekend. But of course, because it's on the other side of the world *and* I cross the International Date Line, I end up leaving on Wednesday morning and touching down at 7:00 pm on Thursday night. I'll line up a few blog posts, I hope, in the next two days. If not, well, it's not like prolonged absence is new around here.

I thought it might be nice, since I'm headed back to the old country, to try a beer that's a conscious echo of a different old country. Back in January, Mayflower Brewing from Plymouth, MA (duh) released a limited edition Imperial Stout. I wish I could link to something more definitive, but it's off of their website already.

Not a bad pour. This is a big bottle of a very big beer.

Mayflower Imperial Stout is strong stuff. It's a really dark pour that my camera doesn't do justice because the iPhone camera sucks at low lighting situations. A weak wisp of bubbles is about all this one could muster.

So the "Coopers Series" is all about reusing old barrels for aging (this is etymologically unsurprising), and the pedigree on this one rivals even my own. The barrels used to hold bourbon. Then they held Sam Adams Utopias. And then, Mayflower's own Barleywine, before they made the Imperial Stout. Pretty fantastic stuff. ...on paper.

Close-up of the bottle.

I wish I'd enjoyed the beer more, I'll be honest. I found the alcohol content distractingly high (10% abv). You can smell a lot of vanilla and caramel aromas left over from the bourbon and barleywine. Each sip is infused with a lot of bourbon flavors that do complement the deeply caramelized sugars of the roasted malt. It wasn't the flavors that were the problem at all. It was the alcohol burn. It felt really hot on the tongue, and the aftertaste of each sip was really warm. What we had here was a total lack of balance - the sip itself was pretty delicious, but the alcohol really got in the way, which doesn't always have to happen. Too bad.