Tough indeed. The wax dip on this bottle was thick but tidy—reassuring compared to New Glarus' thin, melt-prone paste and Three Floyd's flamboyant, un-trimmed hanging wax strands. It seems designed impervious to oxygen, knives, and small arms fire. I check my hands after finally removing enough to get at the cap. Amazingly I am not bleeding, though I would consider this packaging a safety hazard. I try several bottle openers before I find one which can get in between the cap and the rest of the wax, and after a couple of yanks, I remove it to reveal...
A fucking cork. The way this has been sealed, I can only assume it's designed for Sam Calagione's distant descendants to excavate, send to a lab, and attempt to re-create at some craft brewery a thousand years in the future. I don't even have a corkscrew (apparently neither does my roommate, which explains why his bottles of wine haven't been opened), but for some reason I have a 'vintage cork extractor' which is basically a couple of sharp, pointy shivs (my sensitive hands are not out of the woods yet, it seems, and I fear bloodshed) which are designed to remove a cork otherwise in danger of disintegrating by... evidently annihilating it, because it's pretty torn up once I finally get it out. By this point, I could really use a drink, of which this vessel fortunately contains several.
It's still a little hot (and fresh; I should've realized from the packaging that this one was designed to be aged for the long haul). It tastes a bit Scotchy, which it should from the barrel-aging, along with some astringent leather, soy sauce, anise, and chocolate. I wish I had cellared this one longer, but I was celebrating finishing a project, and my storage conditions aren't ideal. For the price (around $1/oz), I probably won't buy another to lay down, though it's definitely good.
