Dark Victory

So the Patriots lost. I'm bummed out, naturally, but I'm not nearly as despondent as I had been in 2008. The Super Bowl was, indeed, a fantastic game, and while I wish that the result had come out differently, I can honestly...

oh the hell with it. I HATE THE GIANTS SO FREAKING MUCH. My fiancée's younger sister was rooting for the Giants because, as she puts it, Eli Manning is the patron saint of younger siblings. Whatever, that was some bush league bullshit. I'm not saying the Giants didn't deserve to win. Actually, yes I am; eff the Giants. I guess what I'm getting at more is that the Patriots deserved to lose, given how many dropped passes, blown coverages, and REALLY, A SAFETY?!? they had during the game. I am a believer in the power of prayer, but Gisele shouldn't have been praying for Brady. She should have been praying for the receiving corps, the offensive line, and the defensive backfield.

So... that happened...

Today I'm in NYC today and tomorrow for an overview course on regulating Financial Instruments. And I'm staying at the apartment of an old college friend, who is originally from Kentucky. This last bit is important, because this beer I found is aged in Kentucky Bourbon barrels.

Intrigued?

I got out of class at 5:25 and ended up wandering around midtown until Ray got off work. I asked my work colleague Noe how I might kill a couple of hours until I met up with Ray for dinner. Taking Noe's advice, I took a trip to the Time Warner Center, where I discovered the magic that is the Columbus Circle Whole Foods. Now, I like Whole Foods in New York City, because they do beer right. Or at least, the one at Houston Street does - it's got a whole room devoted to hops and barley excellence. Columbus Circle, maybe not so much...

This beer isn't just intriguing, it's phenomenal.

...that is, until I found several bottles of Victory's Dark Intrigue. They have a really small beer section, but maybe it's precisely because nobody goes to Columbus Circle for beer that they still had a few bottles of Dark Intrigue. Dark Intrigue starts off as Storm King Stout, a Russian Imperial Porter with a great following. The Storm King Stout is aged in the aforementioned Kentucky Bourbon barrels for the summer before being bottled and sold on a single day at which it sold out in 3 hours. Now I'll be honest with you, despite Victory Brewing being a scant 2.25 hours from my apartment, I've never had their Imperial. I've had their Prima Pils, which is lovely, and also a few others that demand their own posts. But most of what I've tasted from Victory is light in color and IPA-ish in flavoring (think of them as an East Coast Sierra Nevada). So while I don't have any real frame of reference to how this beer differs from its younger un-oaked counterpart, I can report that this is a phenomenal beer.

Ray is from Kentucky, and we tried this beer in official julep glasses.

Ray and I chilled this down as quickly as we could at his apartment and tasted it. Fantastic. Immediately, one notices a beautifully dark pour and a very floral nose. Depending on how warm the beer was, I noticed aromas of cream, milk chocolate and vanilla. Usually when something is aged in oak barrels, you can smell varying degrees of vanilla. With the Dark Intrigue, one actually smells the oak of the barrels: it reminds one of a damp and cold New England winter, like the kind we're NOT having right now.

This was my view for a good 40 minutes:

sipping, sniffing, and savoring this very intriguing beer.

The flavor was lovely. I got hints of dark bitter chocolate, coffee and vanilla, but it was cut by a strong hop presence that is rare in a stout. The carbonation was lively and delicious, and there was nonetheless a strong alcohol component to the beer. At 9.1%, Dark Intrigue hits hard, but it's so complex it would be a sipping beer even without the alcohol content.

Actually has a bottling date: November 10, 2011.

Like I said, this beer sold out at the brewery in 3 hours. A friend of mine from DC drove through the night and was 78th in line to buy a case (amazing). But it did also ship around the country. The limited release on November 23rd also proves possibly to be their last, they say. That's very sad. As such, I will be on the lookout for more of these and buying up as many as I can. I encourage you to do the same.

Happy Birthday, West Coast!

In honor of Mr. West Coast, whose birthday it is today, I'm reviewing a recent favorite. Avery Brewing, from Boulder, Colorado, has been doing pretty much everything right for just under two decades. Avery's very delicious Hog Heaven is a perfect specimen of what they do well. And I happen to know that contrary to his name, Mr. West Coast is in fact from the heartland state of Iowa, a land of pigs and porcine deliciousness. And I know Mr. West Coast is a pork fan, so here's to him, and to this marvelous beer.

Hog Heaven - one of their Holy Trinity of Ales

The first thing one notices is how fantastic the labels are. Avery puts a lot of work into its label design, and it shows. Nicely done, folks.

Nice pour. Yes, we're eating sushi behind this.

It pours a really nice and almost viscous orange, with a very weak head that faded fast. As a dry-hopped beer, Hog Heaven has a lot of aroma. I got a burst of citrus on the nose - grapefruit and orange, mainly, with some nice floral resins too. As it warmed, I also started to smell a very welcoming undertone of caramel.

The description, while correct, borders on hyperbolic ridiculousness.

Avery describes Hog Heaven as a "dangerously drinkable garnet beauty" with "intense bitterness and the dankest of dry-hopped aromas." I'm not sure I got dank aromas - they were lively and fresh, but I can attest to both its bitterness and its dangerous drinkability. That drinkability is dangerous primarily due to Hog Heaven's 9.2% ABV.

Nice color.

One thing I didn't taste in this beer was the alcohol. 9.2% ought to burn a little on its way down, as a warning - this didn't at all. I got punchy hop bitterness, a lot of the aforementioned citrus, and wonderfully full malt flavors, and the beer itself was pleasantly thick. I could drink a lot of this beer far more quickly than might be prudent. The malt really comes into its own about halfway down the glass, so although there's plenty of hoppy bite, the whole thing ends up really well balanced.

Happy Birthday, Buddy.

So there you have it - Happy Birthday, West Coast, and cheers to you!

Celebration

One of my favorite beers, year after year, is the Sierra Nevada Celebration. Unlike Abita's Christmas Ale, the recipe for Celebration doesn't actively change from year to year - Sierra Nevada finds what it likes and sticks to it. Minute changes do occur, I'm sure, and as such, I had high hopes for the 2011 version, after my West Coast partner reviewed the 2010 incarnation and found it a little lacking.

My camera doesn't really like the color red, which is a problem

in photographing a beer that's this copper-colored.

I poured this one into a tall pilsner glass. It poured a really nice ruddy copper color, with the thick head that Sierra Nevada always seems to get right. Because I can't always remember from year to year what this is supposed to smell like, it ends up being new for me each year, and I really liked what I could pick up. A lot of grapefruit and pine resin hops on the nose, for sure.

I've already remarked on the scenic quality of Sierra Nevada's labels.

Nonetheless, it bears repeating. Their graphic designer is awesome.

I've been harping on balance for a while now, as it's one of my complaints about American beer that it tends to be really hop-heavy. Sierra Nevada has been leading the movement (I've just sampled their Estate Ale and hope to write it up soon) with huge quantitities of very intense hops. Their Pale Ale, for instance, is a bitter standard in my mind. However, Sierra Nevada takes time to select the right hops, so while things are definitely bitter, everything just works. I think what I like about Celebration is that it's still got a good malty backbone that balances out some of the hops while the bitterness cuts through the rich food of the winter season and provides a spicy counterpoint to what is otherwise a very heavy couple of months.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. True to the aroma, I got a lot of grapefruit flavor, with some honey and toffee from the malt. It reminds me of wintertime citrus instead of the picturesque snow-covered cabin on its label. I really liked the mouthfeel as well - I didn't find it terribly thin, but I can see what West Coast was thinking when he called the finish "harsh." I disagree - I found it bracing and refreshing, but I could imagine that the astringency might be off-putting as well.

This was lovely, and very easily drinkable.

A bit too easily drinkable...

And one more thing: I'm really glad to find a winter ale that isn't heavily tarted up with "winter flavors." I'll have far too many examples of that particular travesty in the coming weeks. This one is one to celebrate.

Fall, Part 4

The sequential naming of all of past four posts has a point - I've been quite taken by the beauty of Autumn and its harvest bounty, and I'm much happier eating (and drinking) seasonally. As I've said before, I'm a marketer's dream, which isn't far from my first point. What is seasonal cuisine anyway, but nature saying "limited time only!"

Mmm...

Of course, the pinnacle of limited time only is, of course, the McDonald's McRib. Like Maine sweet shrimp or the best New Jersey tomatoes, the McRib is available for a tantalizingly brief moment, during which the truly devoted are eager to partake of nature's bounty.

Lovingly scattered onions

I mean, let's talk about this thing, right? It's a spongy slab of pork goodness shaped, with humor, as if it had ribs. It's "smothered," as the ads say, in tangy barbecue sauce, with two pickle slices and a smattering of real onions strewn across its textured meatscape. That barbecue sauce is pretty thick and heavy, and it paints a messy swath across the box, one's hands, and one's lips.

Bread is weird

This bun is hilarious - it appears at first glance to be toasted (I mean, it's got that irregular brown shading that one finds on actual bread that's been actually toasted), but the soft squishiness of the bread-like-substance shows it might as well have been painted on. But the whole of the sandwich is significantly greater than the sum of its parts, and because it's "limited time only," I'm all over this thing.

Way too thin.

Not enough depth.

Not enough complexity.

But what to drink? I tried a few seasonal varieties and found them sadly lacking - the Otter Creek Oktoberfest, the Sam Adams Octoberfest, even the basic Sam Adams Boston Lager. Nothing really had enough umph or backbone to complement the sharp onions, savory pork, or tangy bbq sauce. So I ended up looking a little outside the box to the other things that might complement slow roasted meat by-products and ended up with a true winner.

Big bottle of delicious

Samuel Smith's Yorkshire Stingo was exactly what this sandwich needed. The old oak barrels impart an amazing sweetness and lush roundness to the flavor.

What a color

The roasted malts provide a lovely caramel flavor with buttery toffee notes. On its own, this is already a lovely beer.

Hell of a pedigree for a beer

There's a bit of sharpness from the alcohol that cuts through the richness of the pork (this is a strong 9% abv), while the caramel flavors meld with the onions for a really amazing sweetness. And the aroma of apple cider in the beer was the perfect accompaniment to the fatty, squishy pork.

Part of this balanced meal.

Overall, the Yorkshire Stingo was bold enough to stand up to the smothering spice of the barbecue sauce, producing a truly heavenly pairing that elevated both elements. I'll be waiting, beer in hand, for the next time the McRib comes around.

Pretty Things

Labor day, or indeed, any holiday, is a great day to take stock of the important things in life. Things like safe labor conditions, job security, maximum hours, minimum wage: all of these are part and parcel with the importance of American labor. And I'm pretty thankful for all of those.

A portion of Spitzer's taps. I don't have a wide-angle lens.

Pretty Things is right in the middle.

This past weekend, I had a few friends in town, and we went around lower Manhattan on a bit of a walking tour. We came across a beautiful bar called Spitzer's Corner, a lovely spot on the Lower East Side with 40 taps. So really, my kind of place. My girlfriend at the time (more on this in a moment) identified a small tap as bearing the logo of the Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project from Somerville, MA, and I knew I had to try whatever it was.

Turns out, it was amazing. I've written about Pretty Things before, as I have really enjoyed their offerings. This one happened to be their Hedgerow Bitter, which Spitzer's describes as "a whole new kind of hoppy."

A welcome cold beer on a surprisingly warm and humid day.

It poured nicely, with a lovely copper color and a fluffy white head that trapped all manner of aromatic oils. The aroma was surprisingly absent, just a faint whiff of grass, but the sip was powerful indeed. Hedgerow looks consciously to the Old World - by calling itself a "bitter," it evokes the flavors of the great English bitters (Pretty Things uses all English-grown hop varietals in this beer as well). However, they put a distinctly American spin on the English tradition.

Nice lacing on a very, very nice beer.

Hedgerow jacks up the hops and creates a wonderfully crisp flavor profile, pumping up the bitter grapefruit and grassy hay qualities while downplaying the malt sweetnesses that one might expect from a nice amber ale. The finish is bracingly dry and floral, but the mix of those flavors is so delicious I couldn't help but continue.

I should clarify that "girlfriend at the time" thing, I suppose. After saying goodbye to my good friends from England, said girlfriend-at-the-time and I walked from the LES to The High Line, a beautiful elevated park above Manhattan's meatpacking district. And it was there that I proposed to her, in a small turn-off above 25th Street.

Yet another pretty thing.

And so, my girlfriend-at-the-time has become my fiancée. Lucky, lucky me.

Draft

I like a good draft beer. It tastes fresh, clean, full of carbonation and life. It's delicious stuff, when it's done well. But unless you live by an amazing beer bar, there's just no way to get an amazing variety of beers the same way one can with a bottled selection.

Last night was my Fantasy Football draft, and already, I have awoken to severe buyer's remorse. It's amazing how a good solid week of planning, of making sure the numbers are solid, the rankings are there, etc. can all go straight down the toilet on the back of some very minor tweaks. Like finding out I draft 9th of 10, or discovering that because the draft order reverses itself, that there are 16 picks between my 2nd and 3rd round pick. So I did the only thing I knew to do. Crack open a beer.

The best part of the draft. Before anything has happened.

I've covered Samuel Smith brewery before on these pages, and I'm a fan. I tried their Imperial Stout, which was a delicious 7.0% abv. Their website says to serve with Espresso, Stilton and walnuts, cheesecake, steak au poivre, caviar, or coffee trifle with roasted almonds. I enjoyed mine with panic and a side of why the hell did I just draft that player?!?

It pours a fantastic opaque black with a wonderfully creamy tan head. The aroma is promising, like I'm maybe going to be OK this year instead of drafting a useless Tony Effing Gonzalez. First sip, I get wonderful molasses and coffee flavors. I settle in and wait for my draft turn. Foster, Peterson, and Vick drafted - nothing I couldn't explain or deal with, though I was disappointed. Ended up with Darren McFadden. OK, ok...

Lacing on the glass is fantastic.

More sips - this beer is really rich in the mouth. It's almost akin to drinking beef broth, it's so satisfying. But it's incredibly smooth and easy to drink, so I'm not noticing the timer ticking down or the 7% abv.

Panic. I don't like to draft a QB this early in the draft, but if Vick is already drafted, and suddenly Rodgers and Peyton are as well, maybe I should jump on the QB bandwagon? This beer is going to my head, and now I only have 2 minutes to decide on my pick...

Did I really drink half a glass in the first three rounds?

Uh oh...

Tom Brady. Wait, what? Two picks later, LeSean McCoy gets drafted. I'd long ago decided to take McFadden over McCoy, but McCoy should have been picked up 2nd. I'm an idiot. Drink more beer. A lot of dark fruits coming into the fore, like plums and raisins. I'm really liking this beer.

I need to top off my glass and empty the bottle.

I wait a while. Drink more beer. Dark bitter coffee and malt sweetness are battling it out, and I'm just loving every sip. My turn again? About now is when I realize most of the good running backs and wide receivers are gone. Panic... Reggie Wayne.

What? A guy who depends on having Peyton Manning throw to him? Peyton, who's been come off the injured list? I'm insane. I pass up known quantities for the likes of Plaxico Burress; I even pick Ahmad Bradshaw. Blurgh.

I don't love my team, but I love this beer.

First order of business: dumping some of these players for good ones. Second order of business: buying more Imperial Stout. This stuff is amazing.

Proust! Or was it Prost?

Flavor is an amazing thing. While there is certainly something to the idea that smell is the most powerful sense (I seem to recall reading somewhere that the part of the brain that negotiates smell is conveniently close to the part that holds the deepest memories), it's also clear that the sense of taste is so closely related to smell that I'm going to lump it in there as well. Involuntary memory is pretty amazing stuff, really.

After all, while the tongue can distinguish perhaps six flavors (sweet, salty, bitter, sour, umami [assuming one believes in it] and hot), the majority of flavor distinction is found when the nose is involved. Block up the nose (hello allergies!) and food just doesn't taste the same.

So one of my great disappointments living in the tristate area is that I can't get Oberon, a lovely summer beer native to Michigan. I am told that it is available in Pennsylvania, but even I'm not willing to drive that far. Seriously - somebody get on importing this stuff to New York / New Jersey. During a long layover,* I had an opportunity to go back to Ann Arbor, Michigan and knew immediately what beer I was going to have first.

The color of a Michigan summer.

Oberon is a cloudy yellow peach color. Often, when poured aggressively, it develops a nice thick head. Our waitress was being trained, and I don't think she was willing to pour my beer with the right vigor. Too bad. Anyway, Bell's is a native Michigan company, and while I'm not wild about all of their beers, Oberon is a perennial summer favorite. The color, aroma, and flavor are enough to transport me back to the good days of law school (and some of the bad ones too).

There's a lot of wonderful citrus in this beer: grapefruit and bitter orange peel come through the aroma. The flavor, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly herbal: it starts out with grass and hay before moving to a floral sourness that refreshes. The one thing I found odd was that the mouthfeel was thinner than I remembered. And toward the end of the sip, I could have sworn I tasted some bubblegum.

Taps, glorious taps. Plus a huge selection of whisky and other alcohols.

Following a delicious lunch, my friend and I invoked yet another memory with a pint at Ashley's. I spent many, many afternoons and evenings at Ashley's, which is a lovely beer bar right on State Street in the heart of Ann Arbor. The place memories are fantastic - this is where we celebrated getting jobs, finishing exams, fatherhood, and friendship. A group of three of us even went to Ashley's in our caps and gowns on the morning of our graduation.

This is a happy place.

As you might imagine, the smell was exactly the same - a faint hint of smoke from when Michigan allowed smoking indoors, and the wonderfully inviting aroma of beer.

Edmund Fitzgerald, next to its tap. Note its front row status - very well deserved.

We toasted to old friendships with an Edmund Fitzgerald, from Great Lakes Brewing Co. I will be the first to say that I hate Cleveland (I got a flat tire there in the rain while moving out of Ann Arbor), but the Edmund Fitzgerald almost makes up for it. It's a near perfect porter, with all of the characteristics I would look for. Unlike the Oberon, this one was also perfectly poured. The flavors are wonderful: mocha, dark chocolate, burnt caramel, malt. The hops are present, but they work on the margins. Each sip is creamy, yet bitter; sweet, but refreshing.

It's been a long time since I've seen the bottom of an Ashley's pint.

It's honestly one of my favorite beers, and it was exactly as I remembered it being. This one, I'll drive to Pennsylvania for. Proust can have his perfectly dipped madeline - I'll have another Edmund Fitzgerald.

*incidentally, that layover was scheduled to be 4.5 hours. It ended up as 8. Awful.

The Real McCoy (sort of)

So yesterday, I made fun of the short stubby bottles of Coedo Brewery and compared them to those of Chimay. Duh. I'm not thinking of the Chimay bottle, I'm thinking of the bottle. I'm stupid.

However, the traditionally bottled-up Duvel is now available in the US on draft. It's referred to either as "Duvel Single" or "Duvel Green," and it comes with an obnoxiously snooty website to boot. Of course I had to try it.

The elusive Duvel Green.

Duvel Green has a lower alcohol content than the classic Duvel, but it has many of the same spicy notes. It was inexpertly poured, sadly, with far too little head and much too much beer. That's right: I'm complaining that I got TOO MUCH BEER. The thing about Duvel (and many of the other high-octane Belgians) is that the high alcohol content obliterates some of the nuances in flavor, making much of their appeal is in their much more volatile aromas. A thick head in a tulip glass will help to trap those volatile compounds for your nose to vacuum up. No head and no headroom? Not a lot of aroma. Sad.

Duvel Green can get away with it though, because it's a much lower strength (6.8% abv instead of 8.5% abv) than the classic. Think it comes with a corresponding 20% reduction in price? THINK AGAIN. Of course, being at a gorgeous bar in SoHo didn't help price mitigation.

I picked up a lot of lemon peel and grass, with an undertone of fresh bread. It cut through my brunch of Croque Monsieur and fries, with Duvel's trademark spice pairing especially nicely with the creamy gruyere. No, it's not the classic Duvel, but it's a hell of a lot closer to the mark than Coedo.

oh dear...

Well, clearly, something went wrong... It would seem to the world that I enjoy drinking beer much more than I like writing about it, and that's not entirely true. It's just that hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now.

This same thinking, incidentally, might be why I kind of let all of July go in terms of going to the gym. There's a little counter on the gym login computer that shows the number of times I've logged in for the last 60 days. The highest I got was 30 - that was during Lent. Yesterday and today, the counter read 5, which means that the last time I was there regularly was about two months ago. Ouch.

What have I been doing instead? My colleague and I have been enjoying some good times at a Newark establishment called Port 44. We became regulars - the bartender would ask whichever of us showed up first where the other one was. One of my favorites: Siren's Wheat.

That's a good looking glass of beer.

Here's a beer that's drinkable on a hot day (of which, Newark has more than its fair share). It's a pretty low alcohol content (4.2% perhaps?) so it's great for a session, and because it's not too dark, it's pretty dry. I've found the darker the beer, the sweeter the beer (thanks to the Maillard Reaction). Siren's is good and dry - refreshing. And I don't need a lemon slice, thank you. It also goes to a good cause. Port 44 is owned by former cops, and 25¢ from each glass goes to fund a scholarship for the children of Police Officers, Firefighters, and EMTs. Not bad.

I say that Port 44 is owned by former cops, but that may not be for much longer. One of the few bright spots in Newark has been this pub, and now, it's for sale. Anybody want to sink $2.1 million into downtown Newark? Anybody?

Damn...

Anyway, for the next couple of days, I'm going to try to clear the notebook. It's a big notebook, and it's gotten pretty thick, so I hope you'll bear with me. As for Mr. West Coast? Maybe he's just out having too much fun.

Beeramisu and other delights

I don't cook with beer enough. Generally speaking, I'll happily crack open a beer while I'm cooking, but it's rare that the beer goes into the pan or pot, instead of into the chef. Chili is one dish that I put beer in. A few weeks ago, I made one with one of the Revolutionary Rye Ales I reviewed previously. My girlfriend thinks my chili looks too much like stew. She is wrong.

Mmm... Chili...

So when I discovered a way to use beer in a dessert, I was psyched to try it out. In launching forward to St. Patrick's Day, Serious Eats published a recipe for beeramisu.

Beeramisu, pre-devouring.

Take a regular tiramisu, swap out coffee for stout, swap out madeira for Bailey's, and you've got yourself a deliciously booze-tinged dessert. Instead of Guinness, which I find a little watery (I mean, hello, it floats on the top of a black and tan), I used Black Hawk Stout. On its own, Black Hawk is creamy, rich, and bitter, with very little carbonation. It's ink-black, with deep caramel and burnt sugar flavors, so I thought it might substitute in well for the coffee. Indeed it did.

It wasn't exactly easy to slice, but the flavors were nice.

The recipe I used from Serious Eats could use some tweaking: I'd cut back on the Bailey's being sprinkled over each layer, and go with more of the stout, as the final product needed a little more bitterness than a six-count dunk provided. This dessert got devoured, and rightly so: it's fantastic.

On a completely different, but just as delicious, note, I happened across three bottles of Coedo beer and was struck by how much these really looked like a Japanese knock-off of Chimay.

Japanese attempt at Chimay?

I drank the Beniaka this past week and was rather stunned by how nice it was. It's not the typical Japanese lager that makes one think fondly of Coors. Instead, it was a nice deep red, and had wonderful layers of caramel malt sweetness.

Apparently, brewed with sweet potato.

According to its website, which I will not send readers to because it is loaded with nonsense music and flash crap (google it if you must), "this premium lager features an aromatic sweetness in its amber tones [and is] a rare combination of high quality malts and 'Beniaka,' the roasted Kintoki sweet potatoes of the Kawagoe region." I'm not sure I tasted sweet potato, but I definitely tasted sweetness, and a depth of flavor I wasn't really expecting. I'm looking forward to trying the other two sometime soon.

Capital!

So despite my initial two posts, east coast means all of the east coast: not just New England. This correspondent just got back from DC, where he celebrated the nuptials of two lovely friends of his.

DC is a funny place. It's got a huge number of out-of-state license plates on its roads, for all who come to the capital to serve the nation and its many constituencies. And it doesn't really have a lot going for it, culinarily speaking either, except maybe for Ben's Chili Bowl. Damn, that's some good eating…

So I walk into a store, and there's Dogfish Head from Maryland, Sam Adams from Boston, even Bell's from Michigan and Kona, from Hawaii. The most local stuff - National Bohemian, isn't even from DC. So unless you know a dude who's basement brewing or are willing to chance it on some local brewpub, you're out of luck on this whole "locavores" thing.

Which isn't to say you can't find good beer: you're just not going to be drinking locally. I went out with friends to the Brickskeller, which is listed in Guinness as "the bar with the largest selection of commercially available beers." Now, that may be, but our night, at least 5 beers we ordered were unavailable. Also, if you're a wuss, they also serve Bud Light and Bud Light Lime. FYI, this was kind of a mob-review: I tried every one of these, but didn't finish all of them.

In honor of a class I took on Icelandic Saga, I tried the Viking Premium Gold, which is a very generic lager. While deeper flavored and having much more citrus than anything that's so golden really ought to have, Viking is still pretty thin. Side note: dear Vílfilfell, and all other breweries who are using plastic decals instead of easy-to-remove paper labels: cut it the hell out. I collect beer labels, and plastic decals are freaking hard to remove well. PS. dear Vílfilfell: make better beer.

Tried the Ace Cider from Sonoma, CA (sorry, Steve) but it was sour, thin, and pretty wretched overall. At least it wasn't as sweet as other hard apple ciders can get. Refreshing, but I'm just not a cider kind of guy.

Founder's Java Porter is delicious and creamy, with a lovely hint of vanilla. Hailing from Grand Rapids, Michigan, I didn't get a lot of coffee in this one. Nonetheless, a fantastic, jet black beer with real depth and smoothness.

Also up from Founders was the Cerise cherry fermented ale. This was nice, with a lovely cherry flavor that didn't taste artificial. The cherries (for which Michigan is famous) were refreshing and tart, and the fruit flavor faded out of the way into a delicious ale. If I didn't think I'd be laughed at, I'd probably order this more often.

While we're on the fruit thing, one friend ordered the Sea Dog Apricot Wheat Beer from Maine. Sadly, it smelled a lot nicer than it tasted: unbalanced and yeasty, this one didn't have much else to recommend it. Stale, nasty, thin, gross. No thank you. Actually, screw the "thank you." NO.

In the meantime, I also had a Fix 1864 Spezial. Beer Advocate says that this is a retired beer - I don't think it is, but that doesn't mean I don't think it should be. Supposedly, the "National Beer of Greece," this was about as unpleasant as one might think Greek beer would be. Thin, watery, and redolent of stale white bread. Also, it's brewed in America, so it's not like our hands are totally clean on this one either.

My girlfriend ordered a Williamsburg AleWerks [sic.] Washington's Porter, from Virginia. It's really dark, with a pretty intense head and nice lacing. However, it over-promised and under-delivered: it was thin, with a fruity raisin-ish flavor and an astringency that evoked stale burnt coffee. Disappointing.

Also tried a "Sweaty Betty" Blonde from Boulder, CO. Our waiter warned me off, but the name sounded too good to be true. And in truth, it was a lot less objectionable than the waiter had led me to believe. It's rather easy to drink, with good grapefruit and orange aromas, and very little hop on the tongue. Instead, it's pique comes from its rather heavy carbonation. Not great, but definitely not as bad as the waiter had said.

Finally, a real revelation of the night: Oskar Blues Old Chub Scottish Style Ale. $4.00. Canned. Everything that says "stay away from me and order something Belgian." Wow, was I wrong. This stuff is pretty fabulous. It's dark brown with no head to speak of and very few bubbles, and its beautifully smooth finish leaves almost no trace of its 8% abv. Great roasted flavors, malt sweetness, and wonderful balance. These suckers are dangerous.