This beer has a crushing 4.76 Untappd score and has been lighting up the trade boards but maybe it’s all these malty antidepressants that keep me from being aroused.

Cellarmaker threw the entire dictionary of hype casking at this, triple barrel Willett -> Thomas H Handy -> 10 Year “Pappy” barrels ::ahem:: But sometimes more is less. The Cellarmaker barleywines have been crushingly good one after another but this one takes things a step too far for me.

It’s weird to ask for nuance from the absolute highest end of excess in the beer world. I need some soft poetic DMs not just full frontal out of the gates. There’s no pageantry here, it’s immediately six pics sent in vanish mode with a little bomb just letting you know the erotic undercurrent.

Yes, it is good, but it’s not as good as the heights that Cellarmaker is capable of. Most other breweries this would be a revelation, here it feels like Kobe shooting nonstop reckless FG. It presents the dead wispy crackle of baleful complexity, body laying there hauntingly staring up at you in mahogany darkness. The “it’s fine” text that ruins your night with its succinct power. But the rolos and graham crackers are stopped at the sheer crushing waves of alcohol and fusel wafts.

You look at this cologne bottle and it seems like hardly enough, but a spritz of this Tom Ford “Parfum Du Shared Custody” and the caramel is overpowering with a few pumps.

Gertrude Stein had a dialectic approach to identity, self and other, autobiography and photography. This CM beer is clearly art but is presenting itself through the lens in which a massive angry barleywine wants to be perceived. In a weird tell don’t show way the heat and burning rye meets eucalyptus literally distills the experience. You’re dating a Depop girl and she’s literally talking about thrifting. It’s so on the nose that it feels like Werther’s rhinoplasty.

Don’t get me wrong, I drank it. The entire time my chest had a Skor bar xenomorph pressing its way out. Exhaling the vapors of a New Orleans dive bar, a real sternum roaster.