Innis & Gunn Oak Aged Edinburgh Ale

On a recent visit to the local convenience-store-turned-liquor-store, I noticed an entire shelf full of this individually bottled and unfamiliar brown liquid. At first I assumed it was some fancy ass whisky variant, but it turns out it's some fancy ass beer variant. The name says it all. It's a typical Scottish beer (not "Scotch Ale" or anything like that) oaked in whisky barrels. Now, the Scots, in addition to being my boys by kin ("boys" also applies to girls of course), have an advantage from the start in that their whisky barrels are used to produce something with no comparison in the states (or Canadia), and old traditions are more tightly grasped. So, here you have a good beer dumped into good whisky barrels for 30 days and aged in some fancy way for a good 77 days, as ensured by the master brewer's authentic signature on the bottle...
we got 6.6% alky - which I think is a very happy medium.
As for the beer, it honestly tastes like butter, and nothing else really. It's like butter with maybe a hint of vanilla, toffee, oak, whisky (of course), and maybe something else. It tastes like a more typical Scottish ale in the first few milliseconds, but the butter aftertaste settles in almost immediately and melts on the tongue. I really don't know how I feel about this beer/butter hybrid, but I must say I'm impressed that it is so smooth with a good mouthfeel, and it has absolutely no 'bad' notes.
I don't know what exactly they were going for in this beer, but surely someone has wanted at some point to extract the butteriness of certain Scotches, and this beer certainly does that, with the bonus of tasting temporarily and feeling like a beer. I really want pancakes now... mmm. blueberries. So, I guess the next step is to combine this guy with a 'good' blueberry ale (e.g. Sweetwater's) and see if it works for breakfast.
Cheers!

company website: http://www.innisandgunn.com/thebeer_itsallinthetaste.htm
BA: http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/10272/12719/?sort=topr&start=0