Pipeworks Over the Line

This is a 13.0% ABV bourbon barrel aged White Russian Imperial Milk Stout brewed with cacao nibs, coffee, and vanilla beans. It is batch 299/300 from the Pipeworks Brewing Company of Chicago, Illinois. They make a huge variety of beers, and it seems like there is pretty much no ingredient they won't put in their beer (Cinnamon Toast Crunch anyone? Grilled pineapple?). The bottle says, "Hey, careful man, there's a beverage here."  It took me a minute to get the reference.  The line, the bowling, the White Russians. It is the Dude from the Big Lebowski. The bottle also says "Tales from the Oak" on the label, perhaps the series name for their barrel aged beers? 

The beer pours a dark mahogany brown. There is a thin, short and short-lived head of light tan foam. The aroma is vanilla, bourbon, cream, light coffee, lightly boozy, really smelling like a cocktail, yes a white Russian. The taste follows the aromas directly, the taste hitting the vanilla hard, chocolate, coffee and bourbon all melding together, vapors of alcohol, warming.  This is one of those beers that is exactly its ingredients, melded together into a wonderful whole. The beer drinks medium bodied with a tingling carbonation, almost like a soda. It might benefit from a creamier, more stout-like mouthfeel, but it is pretty damn good as is.