Revisiting Ales: Innis and Gunn Triple Matured

Revisiting Ales: Innis and Gunn Triple Matured

Background:  As part of the blogging effort I get updates from various mailing lists, which helps me keep an eye out for interesting upcoming beers. One such update came from R and R Teamwork who were publicising the fact that Innis and Gunn were re-releasing the “Triple Matured” version of their beer in Tescos from the 30th of May in preparation for Fathers day.  Now I was a fan of the previous release of the beer so I gave them a quick shout to ask if this was the same as the previous release or if, like the Innis and Gunn IPA each version was distinctly different.

Their response not only gave a bit of background on how the beer was made compared to normal Innis and Gunn as follows, “ It undergoes 99 days of maturation (rather than 77 days which the original undergoes) and it has a higher abv (7.2%).  The ingredients were optic malt and chocolate malt from the Scottish borders and goldings hops from the hop fields of kent.” which is always nice information to have, but also let me know that the Triple Matured  is made the same way as the prior release.

They did however say that they felt the beer tasted slightly different and kindly offered to send me a sample for comparison.  So that’s the explanation , the quick plug and the disclaimer for possible biases on my upcoming tasting out of the way, so how did the beer differ?

Tasting revisited:

Well the first obvious difference is the Tardis blue box that it now comes in, which results in me being torn between appreciation for the bit of extra style that give it in the look department, and the nagging thought that I really shouldn’t be encouraging wasteful extra packing on anything if I can avoid it.

Since my memory is a fallible thing I am comparing more to the old tasting note than the vagaries of my recollections, and it feels like there is a lot more of the wood maturation evident in the nose, with port and fruitcake coming out heavily, this puts me very much in mind of the strength of nose of the rum cask aged, similarly it seems the malt is more evident. Though the more booming nose does seem to mean some of the subtle nosed underneath are not quite so evident.

Similarly the body seems to follow the nose, with more evident brandy, almost brandy cream styling and lots of fruit and slight fresh applies feel coming in at the end, along with still that slight sweetness being evident.

So a very similar beer, with just a slight extra intensity from the wood which both adds to the power and covers some of the more subtle notes.  I would still highly recommend the beer, in either of the incarnations you find it in

Thanks again to R and R Teamwork for the beer.