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.

Well then.

Allow me to extend my condolences to Mr. West Coast and the rest of the citizens of San Francisco after a hard-fought loss in yesterday's NFC Championship game. We were both rooting for a 49ers victory, since it would certainly have been fun to yell at each other from coast to coast.

Love it.

I was rooting for a 49ers victory because of what happens now: the unmistakable merry-go-round that will become the ESPN, NFL Network, Boston Globe, and New York Daily News as they all try to stretch a three-year-old football game into two weeks of anticipatory coverage. David Tyree. Remember him? The guy who said he'd give up that catch and the Giants 2008 Superbowl win to keep marriage in New York between a man and a woman? He's back and he's going to be ALL OVER YOUR TV. As my buddy wrote on his blog two days ago: "You know what’s annoying? Hearing Boston and LA fans discuss the NBA Finals of 2008 and 2010. This would be even more annoying."

So as a Boston native, I was really hoping to avoid (for Winter anyway) the whole New York vs. Boston hatefest. Hating on the Yankees is fun in Boston, but what's even more fun across America is hating on both of these cities for hating on each other. Sort of a modern-day crane and clam. Anyway, I hate the Giants.

Aaah... The New Jersey Turnpike...

Here's a beer that's a little topical. We've done a few posts on Flying Fish Brewery before, each of them on their Exit Series of beers that celebrate New Jersey. Exit 16, their Wild Rice Double IPA, is named after the grains that used to cover the wet marshes of the Meadowlands, near the Giants' home stadium.

Like scum on a New Jersey waterway.

This was incredibly hoppy (duh, it's a double IPA), but I was unprepared for how dry the beer was going to be too. Usually a beer will have some malt sweetness as a base against which the hops can work. Not this one.

I will concede that this is a very nice-looking pour.

I got a really nice light yellow pour with a lot of sticky lacing that was not dissimilar from the sort of greasy foam one finds in the Hackensack river up here. The nose was the traditional citrus fruit salad (orange, lemon, grapefruit) with some brighter floral notes and intense pine resins. On the palate, bone dry, with incredible bitterness as well. I wasn't really able to taste any sweetness in the beer - the bitter hops just hit and hit hard. I also wasn't able to detect any wild rice, though one of the things I dislike about wild rice is its bitter aftertaste, so maybe it was there all along.

Maybe the only reason to brew big bottles is to have a label

big enough for your essay-long descriptions.

This is an unmistakably American double IPA - punchy, intense, and wildly unbalanced. It's not my favorite thing to drink, but if I can find another bottle of this limited release, I might bring it to a Superbowl party.

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!

Aloha! ...Oregon?

One of the nice things about my fiancée is that she likes beer. It's nice to have someone to try a bottle of beer with, or to kick back and have a beer with, or shop for beer with. It helps when you also think that person with whom all that beer is happening is really cute.

Another nice thing about my fiancée is that her dad likes beer, and they have cool things in their house including beer from bygone eras. What follows is one such beer.

A True Oregon Experience?

Behold, Star Brewing Company's Pineapple Ale. You know you're in for a treat when the interwebs note that it's been closed since 1996. Says a positively ancient article from the Portland Business Journal, "Wayne Anderson, president and chief executive officer of Star Brewing, said the company expects to close its Portland brewery by late September and move the operation to Phoenix. The company will be reborn as Phoenix Ale and Lagering Co. and consumers in the Southwest could start quaffing its brew by February 1997." However, that proved to be too optimistic: Star never made it to Phoenix, and shut down instead. A quick google search reveals that Wayne Anderson is now the chief sales manager of Oskar Blues, so at least he's landed on his feet.

I don't know why 1894 is featured on this bottle.

But back to the Pineapple beer. There's indication then that this beer is around 15 years old, since an article in Country Living from 1996 notes that the Pineapple Ale was added at that time. Here's a quote from the article: "Though Star features such high-flying comets as an Alt, I.P.A., and an Imperial Stout, it is the Raspberry Ale that puts ink on an account ledger. "It's an abomination to mankind," [Owner Scott] Wenzel overstates, "but it represents 44 percent of our sales." Star has just added a Pineapple Ale to its line." The art is screened onto the bottle directly, so it's held up nicely. As my future father-in-law opened the bottle (with significant trepidation, I might add), we were all shocked to hear the breaking of a potent seal.

Real live bubbles. Who'd have thought?

Bubbles! Actual carbonation survived for 15 years in this bottle. Impressive indeed. The aroma was all sugary sweetness and while I wouldn't have been able to pick "pineapple" out of the aroma if asked directly, I suppose after a while I started to detect some hints of the ripe tropical fruit on the nose. It wasn't a bad pour either - good ruddy copper color and a fluffy head that stuck around a while.

"Surprisingly tart" is not a descriptor I would use.

Flavor was really out there. True to its aroma, this was a super sweet beer. I tasted none of the Perle & Willamette Hops that were so lovingly highlighted on the bottle. Nor do I think I got much of the 2-Row, Munich, or Carastan 30-37 malts. What I got was sugar and maybe some very sickly-sweet pink bubblegum.

A Vacation In A Bottle!

In my dream vacation, I'm drinking a different beer.

When I was a kid, my Dad used to crack open cans of Dole pineapple chunks to put on cottage cheese. I, being wholly uninterested in the cottage cheese, would spoon the pineapple juice / syrup out of the can. The flavor here was not far removed from that sensation, and it left me in much the same state: speedy sugar high followed by crash.

Sediment. Not nearly as much as a beer this old should have had.

We were totally impressed that this beer had held up for as long as it had. Between the four of us, we ended up finishing a nice tasting of this bottle, though I'm pretty sure I was given the lion's share. This beer went down quite easily, I have to say, but it sat weirdly in my stomach and I would not recommend it again in case another bottle is somehow found.

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.

Christmas on the Bayou

OK, after the snooze-fest that was last night's Allstate BCS National Championship Game at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, in New Orleans, I'm a little Louisiana'd out. This after the nail-bitingly close yet also oddly boring Sugar Bowl exactly a week ago featuring my Michigan Wolverines. But this one's for Mr. Drew Brees, who led my fantasy football team to a commanding win (176.32 - 61.30, but who's counting?) over my sophomore year roommate from college and, as a result, won me a handsome virtual trophy.

Sure looks promising, doesn't it?

I've sampled Abita before: even in Ann Arbor, I was able to get a few of their beers. I have enjoyed some of their lineup - their Amber is lovely, as is the Turbodog. But their Christmas Ale did not live up to their potential. Actually (and unfortunately), it kind of did, given the weaknesses of Abita's Purple Haze, and the truly offputting weirdness of the Satsuma.

All that head is trapping some very weird aromas.

I think there were just too many things going on in this beer, really. It poured nicely dark into the glass, settling to the color of its own bottle, and with a head that started out with very large bubbles that formed the basis for a thick creamy off-white foam. The aroma was promising - it had some floral hops and nutmeg along with an intriguing lemon-pepper thing.

Mirrored labels are hard to photograph.

But on the tongue, the lemon-pepper kind of took over and the beer finished sour. I tried to find some maltiness in here, especially with a beer colored this darkly, but it all got overwhelmed. Not Abita's finest outing. The back label reads "Every year the recipe changes. Abita Christmas Ale is a perfect gift. It's always the right color and fits nicely in your hand... we hope it's just what you wanted." The thing is, there's no talk of flavor or aroma or deliciousness. Just color and how it fits in my hand (it did, thank you). Maybe next year, we try working on flavor?

Happy New Beer!

I had a wonderful holiday. I got to go home and see my family, and I got to go out West and visit my fiancée's family too. And I had an awful lot of vacation days I needed to use up. As such, I had a lovely chance to try some delicious East and West coast beers. Over the next month, I'll try to get through the whole notebook. This may take some time - there were a lot of beers. Like I said, I had a wonderful holiday.

The holiday season may be over in terms of Advent, Chanukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year's, et al., but Winter seasonals are delicious throughout the cold and dark awfulness that typifies January through March. That is, many of them are delicious. Some of them suck. Today's beer is not one of those: this beer is good.

Fest!

Session Fest is the holiday brew from the good people at Full Sail Brewery, out in Hood River, Oregon. It's a refreshingly light beer in a season traditionally marked by dark brews, which I appreciated. I don't know much about the style (Full Sail invokes a "Czech-style strong lager . . . called polotmavé or literally 'light dark or semi-dark'") but Session Fest is themed by its colors too. They wanted a red beer with a white head and a green label. Not too subtle in terms of symbolism, but they succeeded.

A good amber is tough to photograph

in crappy apartment lighting.

As discussed prior, I'm not sure Session, as a label, fits within the classic definition of a session beer. A session beer should be lower alcohol, under 5% ABV, but needn't be a flavorless affair. At 6.2% ABV, Session Fest isn't really a session - they do get away with it, I suppose, by packaging their beer in an 11 oz bottle? Maybe?

Speaking of packaging, their bottle caps are adorable. Session seems to have replaced the "rock" in their rock-paper-scissors scheme with "fruitcake." I bought Session Fest as a single, so I don't have any other reference points, but I wouldn't mind another purchase to check under more caps. The naughty - nice markings are a nice touch too.

The beer itself pours a nice reddish-amber, and they got their white head in order as well. I got a lot of grassiness and toasty bread on the nose. It's got a surprisingly spicy flavor - the well-toasted malt serves as a nice background to an undeniably peppery finish. It's so different from the other two Session beers that I'm happy to have the trio to choose from. I do wish that they had the balls to make an actual session-style, but a low-alcohol brew is a summer conceit, and I can't really complain from the depths of January. Nice work.

New Year's Resolution

Blog more and also less sporadically. Starting tomorrow.

...at least I didn't miss December entirely. But this is only true because I'm on the West Coast and I got an extra 3 hours to post.

In that vein, here's something I'll be posting soon.

What a cute stubby bottle.

Also, remember how Session has twist-off caps with rock-paper-scissors underneath? This is what ended up under the Fest, along side two of its non-holiday brethren.

Fruitcake beats scissors. Duh.

Happy New Year, kids.

Fall, Part 5 - Weather is Weird

So this past month, we've had 30 degrees and snow and we've had sunny high 60s, so I thought I'd channel that unpredictability with this post.

First, the ridiculous snow we had. Dear winter - go the hell away. Seriously - roads got sloppy, tree branches snapped under the weight of heavy snow, and I lost internet access for a whole two days. Horrible, I tell you, horrible!

Goose Island Mild Winter - another winner.

So we pray for a Mild Winter (see what I did there?). Goose Island's Mild Winter is a delicious malty treat of a beer. It's a nice deep brown with a great sweet aroma wafting up from a nice fluffy head. The first sip was beautifully smooth, with just a touch of bitterness on the back end to balance everything out. I couldn't really smell anything, but that might just have been a stuffed nose on my part. I had a hard time tasting any of the "spicy rye flavors" that Goose Island was touting, but I really enjoyed the beer's overall richness and dark fruit flavors. And Goose Island's got some slight balance issues (their IPA is aggressively hopped and their Bourbon County Stout could kill) but this one settled down nicely.

Sledding is very wintery.

Hockey Skates - also wintery.

I enjoyed the label as well - nice view of the Chicago Hancock tower on one side, and the Willis (née Sears) Tower on the other. I've become a pretty big fan of the city of Chicago over the last decade, and both it and the beer are worth a return visit.

Serving suggestion.

Ps. What's a Willi Glass?

And then there was that two week period of gorgeous late summer days and mild evenings, not even a week after the snow. In celebration, I grabbed a really nice Sierra Nevada Summerfest.

Sierra Nevada has the most scenic labels.

I'm usually pretty enamored of Sierra Nevada. Their Pale Ale is distinctive and delicious with just the right amount of bite for a good all-around beer. I wish I liked the Summerfest as much, I'll be honest.

Not a bad looking pour.

Color was off on the camera though.

I think a lot of the problem was just that I'm not as in love with lager these days. There was some great grassiness hay on the nose, and the pour was the pure bright gold of summer. It had, as it promised, "a crisp, refreshing finish," but I guess I didn't taste any of the "delicate spicy and floral hop flavor" that I was promised.

Overpromise + Underdeliver.

I think Summerfest's greatest strength is in how mild it is - I could put a lot of these back without overwhelming my taste buds, because there wasn't a lot of flavor there.

It did not take me long to finish this beer.

Maybe in the depths of August that's really necessary, but on an Indian Summer day in November, it was nothing more than my pathetic attempt to hold on to the fleeting sunshine.

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.