Frozen Beard Winter Ale

I figured that on a day in which we hit -1 for a high in Minneapolis, it was a good time to review Frozen Beard Winter Ale. As I had posted before, this beer is a remake of an experiment gone wrong. The short version is that I added too spruce extract which gave the beer a terrible medicinal quality. This time around, I avoided the extract and opted to use Perle hops and their "minty" quality to create a sprucey-spicy bite to it. Here's the review:
Frozen Beard pours a mahogany color with some redish hues and a foamy khaki head. Aromas of caramel, toffee, brown sugar and minty-piney spices. A very smooth, soft mouthfeel (possibly due to my inexperience with a co2 tank). It has a lot of caramel and candy sweetness right away with some rasin and minty, resiny, spiciness. Malty and smooth with very little hop presence or bitterness. There's some alcohol burn faintly in the finish. This could dissipate with age, it's fairly young. Overall, I'm really happy with the turn out of Frozen Beard. It has some nice sweetness and spiciness to it. If anything it might be a bit too sweet. But it's nice and warming and at 8% it makes for a good capper to a freezing cold walk.
Here's the recipe:
1.5 lbs Org 2-Row
.50 lbs org Crystal 60
.25 lbs Org Carafa III
.50 lbs org Vienna
.50 lbs org Caramunich
2 lbs Wheat DME
4 lbs Org Light DME
2 oz Org. Perle @ 60
.5 oz Org Hallertau @15
.5 org Perle @ 10
.5 org Perle @ 5
.5 org Hallertau @ 2
Yeast: Starter of Wyeast 1056

I'm excited to see how this ages.
Coming up, I've got quite a bit of reviews I need to get to. I plan to review some commercial beers, as well as some homebrews from Muckney Brewing.
Salud!
Bearded Brewer