Swamp Head / Cigar City Brewing Roosevelt (Aged 2 Years)

Lee and I shared a bottle of Swamp Head / Cigar City Brewing Roosevelt a little over a year ago. That bottle had about a years worth of age on it and was a bit of a disappointment. From my original review:

The beer starts mostly just hoppy and boozy with a good bit of astringent bitterness. I am thinking some oxidation has already occurred… Not much malt sweetness has developed yet, a bit of non-complex caramel and molasses, a little raisin appears as it warms.

I decided to sit on the second bottle I had for another year as an experiment, we recently opened that and here are the results:

This has improved with age. It really smells great lots of sweet malts and carmel. The barleywine still isn’t very complex, but the taste has improved immensely. No more astringent hoppy bitterness, it is now smooth and sweet with flavors of caramel, dark fruits and much milder hops. Bumping my rating up a few nothces, much better.