Cameron’s Brewing Where The Buffalo Roam Barley Wine with Steph

Man, am I a sucker for packaging. I think it stems from being a deeply superficial person, pun intended superficially. I will 100% cop to the gold label grabbing me on this one(*) – it hit the same button as those foil-wrapped “collector’s” cards when we were kids. If they ever put a hologram on booze I’m in trouble because if you put a hologram on something there’s a pretty good chance I’m gonna buy it – sort of a comment on superficiality as well. FANCY WRAPPING ON FANCY THINGS!!

As I’ve laid out before, the logic not only fails to hold up, it’s actually 180 degrees wrong. Take two items at the same price, the one with the fancier packaging, by every dictate of economics, has to be the worse product. Packaging costs money and adds weight, and shipping costs money by weight.

(*) in this case I’m also a sucker for anything oak aged, which is more of a comment of sitting around my kitchen table doing nothing, I think. I just bought some oak smoked sea salt too, which is, like… again a metaphor.

Anyway, Cameron’s Brewing is out of Oakville, Ontario which just further builds on the b-plot about oak in this post. This is their Where The Buffalo Roam, a barley wine aged in bourbon oak barrels. The super high abv helps to draw more flavour out of the wood. Whether that’s good or not is up to you, here’s what we thought:

nose
Steph – gold colour, rye toast, syrup
Simon – toasted hops, maple, gold treacle

taste
Steph – alcohol, burnt light, decaf, coffee, flax, oat bran
Simon – loud, burnt notes, grainy

finish
Steph – aggressive, burnt stale caramel corn
Simon – bitter & coating

overall
Steph – 4/10
Simon – 4/10

Cameron’s Brewing Where The Buffalo Roam Barley Wine – 13% ml – $5.95 – Ontario

Try it? No. Buy it? No.