Three Floyds Behemoth Barleywine

Brewed by Three Floyds Brewing Company
Style: Barley Wine
Munster, Indiana USA

Carnivals are the pinnacle of excess. Every sense is given its share of the feast, and each one ends up dizzyingly sick by the end. The screams and shouts of vendors and customers, and the spine tingling shrieks of fearful roller coaster riders tests the durability of one’s ear drums. A thousand short thugs equipped with sticky clubs of all colors and sizes brush past your ankles, coating them in enough high fructose corn syrup to knock out a dozen pancreases. The smells of boiling sulfurous cheese and a dozen too many sick people pour out from oil barrel trash cans like cauldrons, stifling the air and pushing away all the viable oxygen. Thousands of flashing, beaming lights threaten to paralyze epileptics miles away. And most excessive of all is the food. Men and women, girls and boys all gorge on sugar and grease, sometimes greasy sugar, stuffing their maws with indescribable fried foods and sweets sugary enough to disintegrate a healthy molar in five minutes flat. The price is the cost of a ticket and about 5 year’s off one’s life span but it’s worth it. Me? There hasn’t been an old fashioned carnival town in years, but I’ve found a substitute: Three Floyds’ Behemoth. This thing just fills your cranium with explosive, oozing and rich flavor. It comes from a Japanese lacquer red drink with a hastily defused chai colored head. The thing is burgeoning with immediately recognizable smells like pear, nutmeg and cardamom. Some gin, raisins, malts, hops, pine resin and juniper berries gives it some adult flavoring, but the lot together makes it sweet as candy but razor sharp as a flask of hard booze. All those familiar smells carry over to the taste, too. The mouth feel is light yet oily, burning with fizzled hops and lovingly embraced by a lot of dry evergreen forest sweetness. That 1st degree tongue lashing is, in a strange way, masochistically pleasurable. Behemoth is almost a syrup, dripping like honey overflowing from a hive, like cotton candy wisps inching out of the vat, like a s’more with the marshmallow dripping and gobbling up the bottom half of the snack, like ice cream in a deluge of Ghiradelli fudge. It is gluttony in a glass, and the sinner gets a punch of flavor in the nose for it. Put on your helmet and safety goggles for this one because your liable to break something when your vision starts to warp from pure sensual excess you’ll be staggering in a drunken, happy state, knocking things and people over without a care in the world, ‘cause you’ve got a glass of a damn fine drink: Behemoth.

On tap at FFF. I have no idea what you folks who didn’t like are talking about, this is an intense, hammering, dank, floral and aggressive Barleywine with a tender side. On tap you can feel your tongue quake when the intense hop profile hits your tongue at the same time the caramel malt sweetness does.

Hazy amber with beige head. Aroma is sweet with raisins, brown sugar and dates. Sweet, sugary flavour with raisins and dates. I’m loving it...

05 Bottle. Color is a most beautiful dark ruby red with a off white creamy head. Aroma is typical of 3 Floyd’s. Loads of caramel, brown sugar, grapefruit, and citrusy goodness. I can’t believe how awesome this stuff tastes. At first sip it’s like drinking fermented candy coated apples balanced by grapefruity, piney hops. Oily and sticky mouthfeel. This is my ideal barleywine. Imagine, if you can, Dreadnaught on steroids. That would give you an idea as to how complex and big this beer is. Slight presence of alcohol, but it is very welcome in adding to the complexity of this brew. Good job 3 Floyd’s.

Holy cow...one of my friends saved this for me for almost a year and brought it down...this, by far, is the best bw I’ve ever had. Awesome hoppiness, just makes you want to spend a paycheck on ’em.

Bomber on the Pacific ocean beachside... I thought it was going to be too big for the heat of the tropics, yet it was hugely refreshing, yet satisfying. Wonderful aromas, complex flavors sweet yet hoppy, smooth yet rude. Sweet malts, with citrus hops... Heaven.

Draft. Probably the best barleywine I have had. The flavor was mostly of very sweet malt, that was complex with superior mouthfeel.

I gotta agree with Bartzilla on one point - Its a palate crusher. I disagree on all other points. This medium red-amber has a lovely floral nose and this belies the enormous bite that registers on all levels! There is more malt flavor with all the candy and caramel that goes with it than could possible be covered by any but the most outrageous amt of hops - and this has it in the back middle and front. And lovely alcohol. This is what FFF does thae best and this is the best. I don’t think I could dring more than two of these, but, not bad....