Cascade Brewing’s Stumptown Bourbonic is a Huge Coffee Beer With the Berry Acidity of a Light Roast

Get it fast before it disappears—they only brewed four half-barrels of the stuff.

(courtesy of Cascade Brewing)
By Matthew Korfhage

Cascade Brewing just celebrated the seventh anniversary of the Belmont Street Barrel House that made it famous as Portland's original house of sour beer. Alongside an aptly tart beer named T'Art Larrance, after the brewery's founder, which Larrance apparently got spurted all over him at the tapping, Cascade made an anniversary version of its Bourbonic Plague mixed with cold brew from Stumptown.

To make the beer, Cascade took a blend of chocolatey imperial spiced porters aged with vanilla beans up to 22 months inside bourbon barrels, and added some cold-brew coffee. The result is a beautifully alcoholic mix of bourbon-and-vanilla sweetness with deep earthy notes of coffee, set off by a sour acidity that comes off almost like the berry notes in a light coffee roast.

It's a huge beer, well-rounded and maybe a little dirty, bursting with brightness and the low deep notes of both coffee and porter.

Recommended.

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