The Bar Towel

Here is a 2017!

Boxed serialized bottle from LC pours a deep dark orange-amber, clear with white head. Bready aromas and flavors are rounded and accompanied by a very fine citrusy and mint hop treatment. Certainly candy-orange, cherry alefruit, mineral, moderate body and well-hidden alcohol. Moderately powerful yet supple and easy. It would be interesting to age a few more.

Please feel free to add notes of others past & present.

2014

From about a week or so ago, so memory is a bit hazy:

Fullers vintage 2014-really nice beer,drank at room temperature. Smell is lots of vanilla-toffee-oak with a little bit of dried ginger and some typical English leafy hop qualities. Taste is lots of dried fruit,slick mouthfeel with a medium body. Allspice,white pepper,fudge, some slight citrus pith leading to a bit of bitterness on the finish. Quite a complex beer and really lovely, but maybe not one of the better Fullers vintages i've had.

There’s very little I seek out in the LCBO nowadays, but I always make an effort to pick up Fullers Vintage Ale. My yearly routine is to pick up a few, try the latest vintage fresh and put 3 or 4 bottles in the cellar. I also always pull out a 5 or 6 year old bottle and a couple of other vintages in-between to see how they’ve changed. I normally drink them sometime in mid-to-late December, so they’ve become a bit of Christmas tradition. The good vintages become magnificent at 5 years (the 2010 for example), but they’re not all winners. I’d say most hit their peak around 3 years or so. While I think they taste a little samey fresh, their character really spaces out with a bit of age. Looking forward to the 2017.

After reading comments on this thread, I decided to try a Fullers Vintage Ale myself (2017). I am impressed. The yeast strain has produced a lot of subtle estery complexity that I really appreciate. I've never understood the trend towards clean California ale yeasts that let the beer focus on hops. While hop complexity is definitely a good thing, I have always preferred ale yeast strains that are complex like English and Belgian yeast strains. Then again, I am a little odd-ball in that I've always firstly preferred UK hops to a close second trendy West Coast US hops. Now, I am waiting for someone to produce a double IPA with UK yeast and hops, so I can have the best of both worlds (hop and yeast complexity). Amsterdam came close, with their most recent incarnation of Life Sentence that use UK hops this time, but doesn't have the yeast by-products complexity of some of the UK strains like Fullers use.