10 Barrel Pray For Snow

Review Date 2/3/2017 By John Staradumsky

  Style: Winter Warmer   Brewery: 10 Barrel   Country: USA   State: Oregon   $ Per OZ: $.16 (B), $.38 (D)   ABV: 7.5%

New Brewery alert! For January of 2017, Taco Mac is featuring two west coast breweries as the Beer of the Month sections: Seattle’s Elysian and Portland’s 10 Barrel. Now, I’ve had beers from Elysian in Seattle before, but 10 Barrel is entirely new to me. So, I hopped on over to their website to see what they’re all about:

10 Barrel started back in 2006 with three guys in Bend, Oregon who shared one simple mindset; brew beer, drink beer and have fun doing it. Since then our brewery has grown but we will always stay the same… Rough morning? Grab a beer. Big powder day? The “Gone Skiing” sign goes up. Too hot to work? Mandatory company float. You get the picture… Here’s to living it up with a beer in hand. CHEERS!

So, there you go, 10 Barrel has been around for 10 years yet I’ve never seen their beer until now. There’s just one problem for the beer geek crowd: 10 Barrel was bought by Anheuser-Busch Inbev in 2014. Elysian was purchased by AB around that time too, so both breweries this month are in the AB Inbev empire. Gloom and doom predictions that the quality of the beer would suffer have not come to pass, at least not if 10 Barrel Pray for Snow Winter Ale, their winter release, is any indication.

I ordered up a glass of Pray for Snow on January 5^th, and apparently the name works, because it snowed the following day, a rare occurrence here in North Georgia.

10 Barrel Pray for Snow has an alcohol content of 7.5% by volume according to the brewery website with 75 IBUs. They use English East Coast Goldings  for “Flavor Profile” and “Specialty malts” for “Strong spicy-herbal hop complexity”. I paid $6 for a 20-ounce mug and that came with a free glass; it runs $11.49 a six pack at Total Wine, which is about $1 high I think. I would style this as a winter warmer. The lacing on this beer was just incredible, too.

My mug of 10 Barrel Pray for Snow Winter Ale arrived a dark brownish color with a medium sized head of creamy tan foam and a light toasty malts in the nose. Taking a sip, I got deep seated roasty toasty malts in the palate, toffee, nutty malts, chocolate chip cookies, and dry spicy grassy hops and warming alcohol in the finish.

I just loved this one, the beautiful malty notes are a perfect pairing with the spicy English hops. 10 Barrel Pray for Snow is sure to make your winter warmer-even while it seems to bring snow with it wherever it goes.