Kassik’s Barleywine

Alaska is arguably the finest purveyor of barleywine in the United States, with Michigan Pennsylvania in hot contention.  As a result, you have so many silent quality wares dribbling down north of the wall and some people might overlook some of these decadent gems.  This is one such beer that warrants your attention.  Let’s get this out of the way right now: the label looks like harrowing dogshit.  This is what your stepdad used to call MICROBREWS and every single brewery was geography named.  It’s a testament to why you don’t leverage your marketing on FIVER and opt for a graphic designer to bring your aesthetic in line with the world class contents inside.  However, people in Alaska likely give zero fucks about this terrifying Buffalo grin. They still have Prodigy internet up there.

This beer is god damn tasty though.  It falls closer to the English style in execution and the body reminds me of a cask driven old ale or Adambier.  It is sweet with a body that is intensely drilled in with a great raisinette and skor bar drive, wethers original and wheater whiskey to the oak that dries slightly along the gumline.  You can kill this entire bottle without any issues and the lack of heft is a neg but also a compliment to the structure of the drinkability. A dollop of brown sugar in the center of your cream of wheat: just the way your foster parents used to make it.

This trades for nothing and drinks like a sweeter Arctic Devil, another world class offering that also trades for nothing.  Relish these days, once the pastry menace realizes that you can extract decadent depth from malt and casks alone and not through dumbshit marketing ploys and boil additions, these halcyon days of barley enjoyment will be short lived.  They will blacken the sky with their increasingly absurd ISOs, rivers running khaki with the residual sugars on their sticky carapace.