After close inspection, Sigman Stavecation Maple by Pontoon Brewing is labeled as a whisky barrel (Blanton's no less!) milk stout, of 13.9% alcohol content, and in almost microscopic font you will find "Vermont Maple Syrup, Madagascar Vanilla, Chili." It seems this is no Mackeson's XXX or Left Hand wannabe. With this additional data, I determined to evaluate the beer as BJCP class 33 wood-aged beer, with some sort of strong and sweet/spice-flavored stout base presumably with lactose character.

The beer is served at 52oF in a large Belgian goblet after a vigorous pour of about half the bottle (0.5L/16,9 oz.). The beer's color is dark brown-opaque and exhibits a dark brown foam that immediately fades away. 

The nose is deeply rich and sweet with aromas of strong caramel, dark fruits and nuts, a little bit of sweet vanilla and butter, and some appreciable alcohol. Beneath the sweetness lies a faint coffee tone, but I can detect no chili character. With swirling, a pronounced maple sweetness blends with the big buttery caramel tone. Overall, the aroma is sticky sweet and dessert like, but had only modest hints of roast malt character.

The flavor starts with a big blast of caramel sweetness, then a surprising hit of chili heat that fades into the long, medium-complex, maple-dominated mid-palate. It is very difficult to detect hop character of any sort; just layers of maple and caramel sweetness and a little bit of dark fruit and wood but no expressive whisky notes above toasted oak and vanilla, and no really complex Madeira/aldehyde woodiness either. The finish does have a quite nice lingering capsicum component to go with the rich sweetness, but I am still struggling to find much in the way of stoutish-roasty notes and can only really find a slightly soy sauce-like element. It’s not that the beer wasn't made with roast barley and/or malts (the color is evidence of that). Rather, I think it's that the big, sweet flavors coming from maple syrup, vanilla, lactose, (and done up in a barrel-aging) simply transform and wash over them.

The texture is very heavy, and given the pronounced sweetness and lactose creaminess, it has some flabbiness to it. In this regard, the lack of conditioning exacerbates the heaviness. However, what we are talking here is a dessert stout to the extreme: hugely sweet, very maple-y, and with an intriguing hit of red chili spiciness. I love chili peppers of all kinds, and in addition to being impressed with their use here, I wonder exactly what type were used (cayenne?), and how they were processed to get the strong but complementary expression. I fear without the chili, the beer would have been, for me anyway, over-the-top cloying. As a dessert stout or a spiced-up maple-old ale, this beer does not lack for flavor and might pair well with a simple bowl of good old vanilla ice cream. Fans of deeply sweet and flavored beers should seek this out as it is pretty out there.