Ok, yes that line was meant to grab your attention and draw you into this post. Sue me. I can’t help the fact that BrewDog and 3 Floyd’s named a beer Bitch Please. This beer is classified as an American Barleywine and weighs in at a hefty 11.5% ABV. I rarely discuss beers in posts, but I could find no other review of this beer by an American (reviews on Beer Advocate or Rate Beer are all from Europe), so it seemed that the mantle has fallen to me.
To my knowledge, this beer is not (yet?) being distributed in the US. My astute husband found this beer on the BrewDog website and promptly ordered it, since 3 Floyds is one of my favorite breweries and BrewDog is one of his. Six bottles arrived about a week later from the UK. Because this is a barley wine style beer, we decided to open one now and allow the others to age over time. I expect aging will do nothing but improve the beer.
To ensure complete objectivity in this review, I didn’t read any of the label notes or any published information about this beer before sticking my nose in the glass. Perhaps I should have taken a big clue from the name, because this is the approximate order of events that followed: Takes Big Whiff [SMACK IN THE NOSE] REELS HEAD AWAY FROM GLASS. MIND SCREAMS: EJECT! EJECT! EJECT! Shakes head violently to clear nasal passages. *gasps* *sputters* Utters, “whoa” to on-looking husband (who is laughing hysterically).
Here is what the bottle says:
Here’s what I got out of the beer:
The nose on this beer (at least fresh out of the bottle) is a screaming tornado of peat and camphor complete with a megaton of destructive force. I found that I could not drink the beer while inhaling at all. But I admit I have a very sensitive sense of smell, so perhaps others won’t have their noses bashed in. As you can see from the picture, it pours a tawny red with a good head and lacing, but I was still recovering my wits so I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have.
The beer itself is a very complex jumble of tastes, and I wasn’t surprised by this. I typically find young barley wine style beers to be akin to the screeching mess you hear from a symphony warming up; a veritable mosh pit of disparate flavors that, given sufficient time, pull together and smooth out like sliding on air. I think Bitch Please is probably square in the middle of that statement. In the present form, the peat flavor remains strong in the initial taste and throughout, but does not dominate as it does in the nose. There is also a great deal of wood, iodine, band-aid, tar and (oddly) something approaching a masking tape flavor. It’s not that this is bad; it’s just that I was reminded of a trip to the nurse’s office when I was a kid. And some folks, like my husband, remember that experience more fondly than perhaps I do.
I searched for the whiskey notes but, not being a true whiskey person, all I could find is wood flavors from the barrels. Perhaps Jura whiskey is really peaty so that flavor is all I should expect. If not, well, the peated malts own this beer, at least for now. The label notes also mention shortbread and toffee. Though I did find a sweet taste at the outset, it was so completely and quickly crushed by the stronger and much more dominant flavors mentioned above that I could not honestly discern if it tasted like toffee or not. And – I’m sorry Nick, Barnaby, Chris, James and crew— I couldn’t find a shortbread note for all of Donald Trump’s hair. However, as mentioned, this is a very young barley wine, so I may change my mind in a year or two.
If you love iodine-y, peaty scotches – this is the beer for you. As it drinks right now, I fully believe that Bitch Please can bash skulls, wipe out smaller species of rodents and definitely put hair on your chest. Which is probably just as BrewDog and 3 Floyds wanted it. Cuz they’re badasses. For my part, I plan to wait at least a year (probably more) before I brave this beer again. But that’s just my opinion . . . my husband loved this beer and likely I will too (in 2013).
