Last week, the guys over at Innis and Gunn sent me this bottle of Triple Mature Oak Aged Innis and Gunn.
It’s been specially released for Fathers Day on June 19th and is on sale now in Tesco for a very reasonable £2.50 per bottle.
It comes in its own distinctive bright blue box, which if your as cack handed as me makes it easy to wrap. It comes in at 7.2% ABV and has been triple matured then aged for 99 days in Oak casks.
Unfortunately I broke my latest Innis and Gunn Glass so I had to dig out my old school gold rimmed one, which is cool but a little bit top heavy.
The beer poured a chestnut brown with a lovely deep red tinge with a very thin head.
There’s lots of sweet toffee and brown sugar on the nose with a little bit of woody oak (the press release said a whiff of hops but I didn’t get any of those.)
It’s incredibly smooth in the mouth. there’s not a huge amount of carbonation but it’s not flat either. It tastes quite sweet but not overly sweet, i got quite a lot of roast coffee which I wasn’t expecting and there’s a big vanilla kick too it and a slightly dried fruit cake taste. There’s some definite oak there and a little bit of hop bitterness comes through but not much.
In all honestly It’s a tasty beer, I still prefer the Canadian Cask version but this comes a close second in the Innis and Gunn range for me. I just wish they would get rid of the clear bottles as even though I love the box I’m not a fan of the clear glass at all.
You can follow Innis and Gunn on Twitter, check them out on Facebook here or visit their website here.
In what way is it ‘triple matured’, Andy? Just curious…
I haven’t got a clue, I emailed them to ask what it meant but not had a reply yet…
It’s a bit cheeky that – they mature it in Glenfiddich casks (1), then pitch all of the cask contents into a giant vat (2) before being bottled and stored at the bottling facility for a month (3). I guess technically it has three stages of maturation, but it’s more like two…
…or maybe I’m just bitter that as Edinburgh’s beer blog we didn’t get any free samples 😉