Ballards Alchemist

Formerly brewed at Ballards
Style: Barley Wine
Petersfield, England

Serve in Snifter

Murky nut brown with golden highlights. Aroma of plums, dates, sultanas, and molasses. Sweet and sour palate with fruity (cherry, plum) depths. Oily. Rounded flavours - you can tell it’s had a few years to come into form.

Very dark brown-amber, hazy; good yellow-brownish head. Nose of portwine, tannin & woody esters, wild mushrooms, alcohol, slightly soapy. Woody bitterness in the taste, hops too, tannines indeed. Rather raw. Dark molasses & burnt sugar. Retronasal even more bitterness: ink and chicory. Extremely well-bodied, dry-out effect. Alcohol obvious but not overwhelming. Aftertaste with very earthy flavours. Something has been tried. The expectations were high. But it quite didn't work out. It turns out quite raw. Shocking wood, nearly woodstripper. But as for the fine esters one would have hoped for...

Thick Special K flavour. Lots of alcohol, syruppy and cloying. Maybe it'd be better with some age, because at this stage, it was very unbalanced.

Oily, no head whatsoever, strange wine like bitterness. Funny that with all the odd components that I still wound up enjoying this. Not like a typical barleywine so far as I know, but got me sipping it and looking in to the unique taste. Like the off handed compliment it might deserve it is "interesting".

O my flaming tentacles! I hate beers that grab you round the throat, slap you in the face and spit in your mouth. This one had me strapped naked upside down in a freezer while a couple of wide boys splashed acid on my dangly bits. Way too much alcohol! This one needs to undergo a major evolution in the cellar before it’s ready. At the moment it hasn’t even discovered how to bang the rocks together.

UPDATED: JUL 27, 2004 Brownorange colour. Alcoholic aroma with notes of chocolate and cheap strawberry jam. Roasted bitter flavor with notes of lactic acid and big bitterness. Naah, I don´t think so.

Bottled. Hazy chestnut brown. Acidic mashed apples alongside vodka in the nose. Very sweet with thick syrupy mouthfeel and an acidic finish with no trace of hops.