Anisocoria - The New Nectar Of The Gods?

Anisocoria – noun – 1) inequality in the size of the pupils of the eyes, may be benign or life-threatening, can often be caused by a concussion 2) an organic single-malt barley wine produced by Orlando Brewing.

 

While I’m not one of the 20% of people who naturally have different size pupils, I have had the privilege of drinking the barley wine produced by Orlando Brewing in, here’s a shocker, Orlando, FL.  The brewery makes about a dozen different beers, as well as the topic of this post.  For the uninitiated, a barley wine is different from your normal beer in that it has a much higher alcohol content then a beer, usually on par with that of a wine.  It is called a barley wine because it is made from grain instead of fruit.  Anisocoria has an alcohol content of 17%, though honestly I think that it may have gotten a little higher as it was bottled over 2 years prior to being opened by my group.

This past Thanksgiving, smuggled in my parent’s luggage, my brother, another fraternity brother of ours, and myself, shared a bottle of it after dinner in New Jersey.  Why was it smuggled?  Well, the short story is that since the brew in question is organic, it can’t get above a certain temperature or it will die.  So I had to put it someplace cold while it traveled.

To start things off, we poured the contents of the bottle into a few rocks glasses, and, to my surprise, the dark liquid had no head at all.  I was worried that it had gone flat, but I know it hadn’t as I heard the release of gases when the top was opened.  Later on I learned that the reason for this was because that it didn’t have a lot of priming sugar in it, which gives beer it’s characteristic head.  The more I thought about this it made sense though.  This was in effect a wine. Wines need to breathe.  Head on a beer limits contact with air which keeps them “fresher”, which a wine or barley wine does not need.  Thus, no head.  Genius!

Next is smell, or aroma I guess to the beer connoisseurs of the world.  The smell was something reminiscent of figs with maybe a hint of raisins and bread.  Now when I say figs, I mean it literally smelled like I had just opened a bag of Fig Newtons.  Not a bad smell mind you, just unexpected in a brew.

Texture-wise it was definitely thicker than your average beer, but it wasn’t like drinking a stout.  It coated the glass well, unlike a pilsner or a lager which has almost the consistency of water this was more like cough syrup.  I know that doesn’t sound appetizing at all but it didn’t taste like cough syrup, just was thicker, more viscous, like it.  The great thing about this, because it was thicker and stuck around more as you drank it, you could feel it warming you the whole way down.

The initial taste was something also I didn’t expect.  It was very coffee-like, not hot coffee but like cold coffee.  Not one of those cold fru-fru coffee drinks you get at the local Starbuck’s or at the gas station or wherever, like coffee that had been sitting out for 30 minutes or so and had become cold.  In addition to that it tasted like it had alcohol in it.  I know you are thinking, “Hey, UA, isn’t something with alcohol in it supposed to taste like that?”  If you are thinking that, then you aren’t getting what I’m saying.  This wasn’t a brew that was basically water with alcohol content.  This was a brew that you could taste the alcohol content in.  And it tasted like heaven.

Overall, I definitely recommend having one of these next time you get down to Orlando.  It’s a bit expensive for a brew at $20 for a 12-ounce bottle.  But I only had about 4-ounces of one and I think I got my money’s worth.  If I had the whole bottle, it would basically be like drinking 3-4 glasses of wine and would probably give me a buzz on the same level.

My brother, who has his own blog about different adult-type beverages that he drinks, will be posting up his own review of Anisocoria in the next few months (give him a break, my niece is gonna be born in March so he is a little behind) and I’m interested to see what his write up says.  I’ll post the link on here once he does.

-UA