By Greg B.  Allagash brewery has been putting out some very unique beers, bottle conditioned, corked and sitting on the shelf at one of my favorite beer stores, the Perfect Pour down in Columbia.  I’ve been trying to taste through them over the past few weeks/months and they have been good, but I think I found my all-time favorite.  The Odyssey.

I saw this bottle on the shelf and immediately was intrigued by it.  I love barrel aged beers, and love how they taste and smell and love to taste the differences between American or European oak or different toasts of the oak or even lengths of time in the barrel, how these all affect flavor.  My favorite beer of all time is aged in oak barrels, and I even spend a lot of time trying to find an oak barrel, preferably used, to make some beer in at home (I have found them new, I just cant spring for that amount of cash to experiment with beer making).  This was a welcome opportunity to try what someone else made, and think of the day when I have access to these resources for beer making.

The beer comes in a 10.3% abv and was bottled in September of 2008, one of a series of 530 cases of bottles (so says the label).  It is a very alluring label, simple and elegant with the information provided.  Pouring the beer, it has a thick creamy off-white head that leaves a really thick lacing down the side of the glass.  When I removed the cork there was very minimal ‘pop’, and the beer released it’s CO2 slowly after being poured.  However it created one of the most beautiful heads I’ve seen in a beer.  The nose at first had a kind of off-putting smell, mixed with a yeasty aroma.  But then I took another sniff, and really got the alcohol with some earthy components, and took a sip.

Talk about complexity in a bottle!  This beer was amazing, and it took several tastes just to begin to fully understand it.  There was some oak, some dark bitter roast flavors, some mild chocolate, a sweet maltiness and some darker fruits all sliding around on the tongue.  If it took a while to try to discern the different flavors, that’s only because they meshed together and played to well together in an excellently balanced beer.

I’m sorry I don’t have any pictures of this, but it really was beautiful.  A dark copper color, combined with all these intense darker flavors… man, it is totally worth the price (around $16 a bottle, for 750ml I think?).  Definitely the kind of beer you want to taste and end a week and begin a weekend with on a nice relaxing evening.  This beer gets a 4.0/5 for a score, and truly was an incredible beer.  Go seek one out and try it!  Serve it around 55F (I prefer to chill the beer briefly to around 50F, then let it warm in my glass to see how it expresses a different aroma over time) in a glass with a wide top, like an English pint glass or so, something that allows the beer a large surface area at the top to show off the creamy foamy head as well as express the beautiful aroma it has.