Billy's Booze Blog

Being a twitter obsessive sometimes pays off in the world of booze. A couple of weeks back I ended up on a ‘tour’ of the Sipsmith Distillery (where ‘tour’ means ‘evening of drinking gin and learning about cocktails in a garage in Hammersmith full of awesome looking still and enthusiastic gin magicians – it may one day be written up) thanks to a retweet that I noticed as I woke up one morning. Last week I saw a tweet from James Watt of Brewdog announcing that an experiment would be up to buy soon, so I kept an eye, jumped on the store when it appeared, did some clicky magic and snagged 3 bottles of Brewdog Prototype 27.

It is a silly beer – Hardcore IPA matured in a Caol Ila cask with raspberries. A very hoppy strong IPA matured in a whisky cask from a distillery known for its pungently peaty whisky, finished off with a slug of fruit. My 3 bottles arrived swiftly, looking lonely in a 24 bottle case, hand labeled with marker pen and garnering inquiries from my co-workers as to whose homebrew I had been sent…

On the nose there’s a chunk of raspberry, really sweet and almost cherryade-y. To taste it’s quite different, with loads of hops at the back of the mouth, a big chunk of woodiness round the sides, a hint of smoke down the middle and some sweet and sour raspberries at the front. It’s got a smoky sour finish, with a finishing flourish of wood.  So, to recap: Hardcore IPA (a much nicer Hardcore IPA than I had previously – I must try it again, it seems), raspberry fruit beer and a woody aged beer, stuck together with smoky glue and jammed in a bottle. I’m not sure that it all works together, but it’s certainly interesting, really quite tasty and definitely a prototype.

Brewdog Prototype 27
Caol Ila cask aged raspberry IPA.
9.3%, 175 bottles made. No longer available (it sold pretty much instantly).