Raise your hand if you love beer. Us too! Especially craft beer. In fact, we love it so much we decided to make our very own, one of a kind, never done before and will never be done again craft beer. It all starts with the uniqueness of our exclusive bourbon and the oak barrel it came from.
The barrel of Four Roses Bourbon that was taste tested and hand selected by a panel of experts from our resort to be exact. It was bottled and labeled to use exclusively at our craft cocktail bar, Spiked.
But after bottling was completed there was a lingering question about what to do with the physical oak barrel we had sitting around the bar. Luckily, Beverage Manager Mike Lewis had a plan.
“The first thought I had was to turn it into some kind of beer vessel,” Lewis said. And that’s exactly what he did, effectively combining his two favorite things: liquor and beer.
Mike reached out to Mother Earth Brew Co., a local brewery out of Vista, California to see if they would be interested in collaborating on something exclusively for Harrah’s Resort SoCal. After meeting with their brewers Lewis and the Mother Earth crew agreed that a barrel aged beer was the way to go. So Mother Earth built and brewed a batch of Russian Imperial Porter to fill our lonely little barrel. The beer rested in the barrel for over 9 months before it had reached true perfection.
The final product is a pretty spectacular beer with a very long name: Four Roses Bourbon Barrel Aged Russian Imperial Porter. This 10.5% abv. porter adapted new flavors from aging in the oak giving it a hefty dose of vanilla, even though no vanilla was ever added, which balances with the deep chocolate, coffee, caramel and even a hint a toffee.
If this sounds like a beer you would enjoy then we suggest you make your way to Harrah’s Resort SoCal as soon as possible because we only have 30 gallons of this one of a kind beer. And since this is a one off run, once it’s gone … it’s gone!
