Fancy Pants Sunday: Fort George Sometimes Things Take Longer

Breweries barrel-age beer to extract compounds from the barrel’s wood fibers and its previous contents over time. These flavors and aromas infuse into the beer, adding a layer of complexity. Whether it’s a barrel-aged barleywine, bourbon barrel-aged Russian imperial stout, or a blend of barrel-aged barleywines and bourbon barrel-aged Russian imperial stout, the barrel’s lineage and heritage, along with the ingredients and the barrel-aging technique, engage beer fans and stimulate demand. Sometimes beer blends can be fancy, such as Fort George Brewery’s Sometimes Things Take Longer Bourbon Barrel Aged Stout and Barleywine blend, brewed with de Garde Brewing before aging for 36 months in Ransom Gin barrels. The bend sounds fancy. The blend is Fancy Pants Sunday: Fort George Sometimes Things Take Longer.

Barleywine Meets Stout

Barleywine and stout blends leverage blending and barrel aging techniques to create complex, nuanced flavors. Tannins from barrels and roasted malts interact with residual sugars, enhancing perceived sweetness and depth. Esters (from fermentation) in barleywine meld with oak lactones and bourbon residue, creating fruit-leather, fig, or even coconut-like notes. Brewers brew separate batches of the same base recipe with varying sweetness and dryness, then blend them to achieve a specific flavor profile. Barrel aging, particularly in bourbon casks, infuses vanilla, oak, and spice characteristics into the beer, further enhancing its complexity.

Fort George Knows Blends

Fort George knows blends. The Astoria, Oregon brewery has brewed hundreds of stouts. They’ve tasted thousands of stouts. They’ve perfected dozens of stouts. They have blended many stouts in their 18-year history.

Founded by brewers Jack Harris and Chris Nemlowill, the two combined their brewing expertise from previous Oregon coast gigs at Bill’s Tavern and Astoria Brewing Company to open Fort George Brewery in March 2007. Harris and Nemlowill drove their first 8.5-barrel brewhouse — nicknamed “Sweet Virginia” — from Virginia and through a tornado to open a small pub in the Fort George Building on Duane Street in Astoria. In 2009, they bought almost the entire city block, including the Lovell Building, where they installed a 20-barrel commercial brewhouse — “Little Miss Texas” — followed by a neighboring $12.5 million production facility down the Columbia River. They released Sometimes Things Take Longer, a double-barrel-aged imperial stout and barleywine blend collab with de Garde during Fort George The Aftermath 2025, the after party of Fort George’s 2025 Festival of the Dark Arts.

De Garde Knows Blends

de Garde Brewing is renowned for its expertise in blending beers, particularly spontaneously fermented wild ales. Blending is central to their brewing philosophy, allowing them to craft complex and nuanced flavors by combining beers of varying ages and fermentation profiles.

Tillamook, Oregon, is a sleepy, remote, and often damp coastal town 74 miles west of Portland. It smells of sea air and dairy farms. It’s also home to founder and head brewer Trevor Rogers’ de Garde Brewing, whose singular focus is spontaneously fermented, barrel-aged beers. The brewery near the Tillamook Air Museum’s massive blimp hangar barely distributes, meaning fans must either track down bottles on the Internet or visit in person. Once you’re there, the handful of wild ales, guest rarities on tap, and limited-release bottles available don’t disappoint. Berliner weisses, Belgian ales, porters, and more are left to naturally ferment in an open-air cool ship, letting wild yeast descend from the Oregon Coast air. Local fruit and various cherry, oak, and gin barrels add bold notes and tart overtones.

Sometimes Things Take Longer

The Fort George and de Garde blend imperial stout and barleywine to create Sometimes Things Take Longer. They age it 36 months in Ransom Gin barrels for a barleywine stout blend with juniper on the nose and barleywine than stout with cherry, leather, bourbon, raisin notes, and botanical gin on the finish.

You fancy, Fort George Sometimes Things Take Longer!

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