What a month November's been! I'm sprinting to the finish line of NaNoWriMo (50k words is calling my name) and just about ready to deck the halls around the blog to ring in the Christmas season. But before we start the Old Saint Nick welcoming procedures, we have one Maple Month offering to make.

We're finishing Maple Month proper as we started it: With a barleywine from Jackie O's. But, it's more than just a barleywine, it's a barleywine cuvée. It's Cellar Cuvée 15.

Look, I just wrote about Jackie O's earlier this month, so I'll link you to that post instead of getting into the whole thing here. But I will say that there's a reason Jackie O's is so well-regarded. Athens, OH's original brewery is still out there making a wide array of beers, "Something For Everyone."

I'm not sure if Cellar Cuvée 15 is for everyone, but it certainly seems like it's for me. The limited release' official spot over on Jackie O's' website gives the mixture of the 14.7% ABV barleywine: 58% honey stout and 42% maple barleywine. After aging in bourbon barrels, the ultimate result has notes of maple syrup, peanut brittle, chocolate cake, and marshmallows. Yeah, this reads just like a beer for John.

The nose of the cuvée is giving me maple syrup, chewy chocolate cake, and marshmallow. If I think about it, I find the peanut brittle, but that doesn't strike me as an aroma that I'd count as being "present." I'm also finding black dark coffee, oak, boozy burn, and a little something that'd I'd say is nearly cream cheese, but not quite. Overall, yeah, this is a killer bouquet. Purrl gave my bottle eight whiffs, meaning it has her stamp of approval.

Cellar Cuvée 15's palate is plenty damn complex. I find good, roasty malt first, giving me dark chocolate and black coffee (what I want in a stout, a style two-fifths of this beer's base). This becomes brownies, then vanilla. Honey and maple come through next, their sticky sweetness lingering as the boozy burn of that enormous ABV barrels through. As the finish develops, a fudgy chocolate cake returns. I, uh, am flabbergasted by what Jackie O's has been able to pull off within a single bottle of beer.

Mouthfeel? Perfect. No notes. It's big, full, robust, viscous. Akin to maple syrup, honey, and melted chocolate. It's exactly what I want from a beer this big and flavorful.

One thing I do in the fall is play The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim pretty consistently. Something about the chill of the season makes me want to explore Tamriel's northernmost country. I won't detail you the exploits of Balder Yorson, Yor Hodson, Háma the Strong, Borak Mead-drinker, or Curtis Witchwood here, but I will say that today's barleywine reminds me of my first steps in Skyrim, when I really got hooked. It's late nights, warm coffee, and dark beer.

This November has been great for me. I had a couple of ciders (one was astounding) and two incredible barleywines. That's right, I said two. Jackie O's' Cellar Cuvée 15 is another 10/10 beer from Athens' favorite brewery. The maple, the honey, the chocolate, the bourbon barrels, and the sky-high ABV come together perfectly. This is everything I'll always want a barleywine to be. This is the new standard to which I hold everything else in the style.