Review?

It was that single word, again from my editor. I admit – I’d been lazy. The last two or three reviews I’d started at had never gotten further than the trashcan on my desktop, and were permanently lost in the bitbucket that is my home.

At least one of them started as a recording, sitting in a crowded pub, muttering and raving into my microphone, doing my best to appear less like a violent schizoid preacher, and more like a sedated and well treated remnant of a person.
In hindsight, I doubt I succeeded much at all.

Review?

I’ll give you a review, one that has been brewing for a while. But not for a beer that you may know well – can’t have this be something bland. For the sake of my own pride, if nothing else. It has to be something at least a bit obscure, otherwise you’d be out drinking it, rather than sit here and read about it.

Now I know. Why do I know? Because I helped put one of Nils Oscar’s finest brews on the tap earlier this week. That’s how I know.

Because I helped put it on the tap two years ago as well.

Back then we were sitting in the almost cleaned up place that was to open into a pub. I’d been peripheral to the wrecking and building – it’s not really my thing – but we were celebrating. The bar was in place, the cooling worked, and the first kegs were hooked up. And one of them was this marvel of a drink. Sweet, with a colour like a deep red tea, flavourful and lovable. A quite strong barley flavour to it. Well duh – it’s a barley wine, after all.

Some history might be in order to explain the term. It’s not a wine, in the traditional sense of grapes crushed and fermented, but rather a slightly sweeter and stronger old ale, that for either marketing or taxation issues got rebranded from ale into wine.

This is in one sense a quite traditional barley wine, mild in terms of bitterness, rich and velvety in terms of spiciness and with hints of both fruit and caramel. It’s also quite sweet, both from the alcohol content – 9.5% – and from the malts chosen.

So here I sit, sipping my tea, reminiscing times past when we were sitting around a bar in a dark pub, sipping high glasses of a batch of Nils Oscars Barley Wine and generally enjoying ourselves.

This week I got to taste it again.

Once you let something brew in your memory for two years of slight longing, things end up… strange. I will not say disappointing, because it isn’t. The flavours are still there, but the nostalgia didn’t taste as well as I had hoped. I’m not sure why, but maybe because we’re lacking the elation of being done with something that it doesn’t quite contain the celebratory note anymore.

However, it does taste of quite a few other things, that I can only describe as lovely. There is a hint of fruits I did not remember. There’s a lasting sense of sweet heat that is hard to come by. There is the sense that this may have been more than a dream and the urge to slide deeper into a chair. To sit there, talking with friends into the night. And that’s what we did – over quite a few drinks – on a Monday.

What can I say?
Pour one – lean back and take it easy for a while. It’s not as if you really have a hurry. And the beer you’ll have may well take some time.

In fact, it’d better.