Review: Goose Island Reserve Bourbon County Brand Stout

A sip of Knob Creek hits the tongue like a middle-of-the-road caramel (not overly sweet, rich or complex) and builds in relatively mild notes of spices like pepper, clove and nutmeg as it sits on the tongue. Swallowing leaves an assertive dose of those spices in the back of the mouth before fading back to the slightly spicy caramel – a smooth, simple, well-rounded, and predictable dram. The stout leans more toward chocolate as its base flavor with a sweetened condensed milk element that giving it an very rich, creamy flavor. That’s complemented by touches of vanilla, nutmeg, espresso, and oatmeal. A creamy, smokey, and woody vanilla takes comes to the fore after swallowing and remains the dominant flavor as the taste lingers in the mouth. The Takeaway: Stouts aren’t generally my pint of choice because they are a little too sweet for me – and Bourbon County Brand Stout is intensely so. While that rich, creamy chocolate and vanilla flavor is nice, at least at the beginning, the rich intensity of that sweetness tends to overshadow the whiskey attributes that may have been imbued by aging it in Knob Creek bourbon barrels.