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Beer |OT|

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sefskillz

shitting in the alley outside your window
Seth C said:
Other than Jester King, I don't have a whoooole lot of faith in Texas beer thus far.
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Hops and Grain Greenhouse series is pretty good and St Arnold drops some good stuff here and there. but yea, Jester King is definitely head of the pack in Texas. JK brewery is a must visit too
 
P

PhoncipleBone

Banned
Seth C said:
They love that shit down there the way people in our area go insane over Yuengling. Some things you just can't make sense of.
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People in CT went crazy over Yuengling as well. They were making a big event about it coming back to CT, and I just don't get it.
If you want an easily available beer that is pretty cheap, then Sam Adams was what I always went for.
 
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Seth C

Member
PhoncipleBone said:
People in CT went crazy over Yuengling as well. They were making a big event about it coming back to CT, and I just don't get it.
If you want an easily available beer that is pretty cheap, then Sam Adams was what I always went for.
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Yup. If you lived in a place where cheap easily accessible beer didn't exist then I can see Yuengling being exciting, but Sam Adams is everywhere so you're covered.

Of course, I still enjoyed a Yuengling or five when I walked in to a bar in West Virginia and they had it at 75 cents a pint during happy hour. But I'm not traveling across state lines just to bring back a trunk full of it. That's just ridiculous. Might as well stock up on Red Baron pizzas, too.
 
P

PhoncipleBone

Banned
Grabbed another London Balling today, and also a bottle of Three Floyds' Dreadnaught and Stone Master of Disguise.

I am most intrigued by Master of Disguise. A golden imperial stout with coffee and cocoa nibs? It just seems like a huge contradiction.
 
D

distantmantra

Member
PhoncipleBone said:
Grabbed another London Balling today, and also a bottle of Three Floyds' Dreadnaught and Stone Master of Disguise.

I am most intrigued by Master of Disguise. A golden imperial stout with coffee and cocoa nibs? It just seems like a huge contradiction.
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Check out Cascade's Oblique Stout. I mean, you won't be able to try it since it's draft only in WA/OR, but read up on it, it's the same idea and they've been doing it for years.

http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/2391/92688/

A: Golden color with a thin white lacing. Semi-transparent. It certainly looks like a blonde ale, so it summons up different expectations.

N: Lots of coffee in the nose. Roasted malt and a rye grain. Sweet whipped cream and a healthy dose of pine from the hops. Nothing overly complex, but it works.

T: Very much like a stout. Roast with a moderate amount of bitterness and a good amount of sweetness to round things out. Straightforward.

M: Dry with a rounded mouthfeel.

O: A fascinating concept and a solid execution. I wouldn’t drink this all day and every day, but I can certainly appreciate how it was pulled off.
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Try not to go into this one with too many expectations. It looks like a light blonde ale, smells like iced coffee, and tastes like a really good coffee toddy. It's hard to communicate how little sense it makes until you try it.

The end result is an ready drinking coffee beer, that's week suited for any time of year. it'slight and fresh enough to make a good summer beer, but with the robust taste you'd want in a winter warmer.

Scoring this one was little tricky tough. On one hand, the appearance isn't great. It looks like a glass of Coors. But half the fun is that a beer that looks so mundane tastes so unexpected. So it looks like a 2, at first. But take one sip, and all you can do is stare at it and try to figure out how the hell they made it.
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Coffee IPAs also do the same kind of crazy switcheroo in your mind. Clearish yellow IPA that tastes like coffee.

I've also had a coffee saison from a local Seattle brewery. That one was weird.
 
E

elfinke

Member
MacGurcules said:
Aw man. I try to check in something distinctive for the top level badges. Now the next American beer I drink is going to cap me out. I was not anticipating this. I'll have to dig up something interesting.

Always happy to see another brewer. I brew in a smallish apartment and I'm slowly accumulating way too much gear. Right now I'm on a 5-gallon RIMS setup. Boil on the stovetop with some help from a 1500W heatstick. I use a soft-sided collapsible cooler for managing my fermentation temperatures and package in a two-keg mini-fridge setup.

Like a lot of homebrewers, I'm always wanting to try new things, but I do have a couple of recipes that I fall back on. I do a really simple pale with 92% 2-row and 8% crystal 40 at about 1.045 (or if I'm feeling extra lazy, just use plain pilsner liquid extract). Hop it to about 40 IBU with some generous late additions using whatever I've got around (Apollo and Simcoe are a nice combo).

Late this summer, I did land on a really excellent two-week Berliner Weisse that's gone over phenomenally well with my friends. I've brewed it three times in as many months. It just goes that fast. Super simple. Half pilsner malt, half white wheat malt at ~1.035. Sour it hot in a carboy for a few days, then boil with a touch of hops and pitch in a bunch of White Labs Brett Brux Trois. I also put in a gallon of watermelon juice the first two times, but it's good all on its own.
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Nice! Here is my very basic K.I.S.S. setup:

3DKIkpl.jpg


I enjoy playing around with ingredients and method quite a bit though. Things like reactivating the yeast from commercial beer and reusing it, using different sugars, or golden syrup or honey, throwing in frozen fruit or chocolate, or chillis and so on. Truly K.I.S.S. brewing! I don't have access to a local HBS, so that makes it a tad too difficult - and expensive, postage is a killer - to get into specialty yeast and hops, as much as I'd like to.
 
S

sharkmuncher

Member
distantmantra said:
Check out Cascade's Oblique Stout. I mean, you won't be able to try it since it's draft only in WA/OR, but read up on it, it's the same idea and they've been doing it for years.

http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/2391/92688/





Coffee IPAs also do the same kind of crazy switcheroo in your mind. Clearish yellow IPA that tastes like coffee.

I've also had a coffee saison from a local Seattle brewery. That one was weird.
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Yeah, Bean Flicker from Odd Sides is the same way.
WNbWKNy.jpg

If you gave it to me in a dark glass, there is no way you could convince me its a light colored beer. Well done chocolate blondes can do the same thing, like Boulevard's chocolate ale of a few years ago (the 2014 was terrible).
 
M

MacGurcules

Member
elfinke said:
Nice! Here is my very basic K.I.S.S. setup:

http://i.imgur.com/3DKIkpl.jpg

I enjoy playing around with ingredients and method quite a bit though. Things like reactivating the yeast from commercial beer and reusing it, using different sugars, or golden syrup or honey, throwing in frozen fruit or chocolate, or chillis and so on. Truly K.I.S.S. brewing! I don't have access to a local HBS, so that makes it a tad too difficult - and expensive, postage is a killer - to get into specialty yeast and hops, as much as I'd like to.
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If you're growing up commercial dregs, there's no reason you shouldn't be propagating your own yeast. Just grow a little extra each time you make a starter and keep the extra in the fridge. You can reuse the same yeast at least a dozen times if you keep your sanitation up. If you're doing that, it's pretty easy to gradually build up a nice little library.
 
H

HiResDes

Member
Am I the only one that started from the bottom with beer? In college I'd buy Honey Brown or a 40 of OE just because I knew that no one else would touch my shit.
 
E

elfinke

Member
MacGurcules said:
If you're growing up commercial dregs, there's no reason you shouldn't be propagating your own yeast. Just grow a little extra each time you make a starter and keep the extra in the fridge. You can reuse the same yeast at least a dozen times if you keep your sanitation up. If you're doing that, it's pretty easy to gradually build up a nice little library.
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Yeah, we bake our own bread and sour dough all the time, so it is certainly something that has crossed my mind! Just laziness on my part, more than anything. Also, given it is a couple weeks of time per brew, I wanted to have a couple in the fridge first before I got too experimental this season.

It's on the list of things to try!
 
H

HiResDes

Member
BTW guys I forgot to review Sea Hag, which Codhand sent me:

Sea Hag is a New England IPA. The fruitiness hits you instantly as soon as it hits the cup. I'm talking a sweet grapefruit sort of scent with a hint of peach and malts. It's a pale golden orange sort of colour of an opaque nature, and the carbonation is slightly higher than I wax expecting creating a nice thin yet fluffy head. Now I must say I am a main that loves his IPAs balanced so I'm a bit biased. But I found the beer to be exceptional, up there with any single IPA I've had. It's unbelievable it's not higher rated. It's oh so flavorful with a delicate finish that only lingers on bitterness, but never quite fully bites. The flavors are much like the smell, fruitiness followed by the hops at the finish. The mouthfeel isn't as carbonated as I expected, but it's still present. It's oh so satisfying and yet I can imagine if I had had a case I'd be tempted to drink them all. A-
 
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PhoncipleBone

Banned
HiResDes said:
Gandhi Bot doesn't need a review, everyone knows how good it is. I like it more than Hopslam. I've never had Heady Topper though
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I kept putting off Sea Hag to be the last thing I had in CT before moving, but it didn't work out. I know it is an all the time thing, so next trip I will get some of it.
 
C

codhand

Member
just pm me. sea hag is everywhere.

Glad you liked it des, i wanna send some different stuff next time,,.

holy shit des, honey brown was legit craft back in 2000, forgot about that beer.
 
M

Milchjon

Member
All the wet/fresh hop beers I've tried so far were annoying shit.

Although they were all German, so maybe brewers here just haven't figured it out yet.
 
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Seth C

Member
MacGurcules said:
"Wet hop" is the term that I always hear for beer hopped with undried hops direct from the harvest.

Maybe it's a regional thing.
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That's what we call it around these parts. Apparently in the PNW they insist on calling that "fresh hopped". Apparently Sierra Nevada disagrees with that terminology and they consider a fresh hopped beer to be one using dry hops, but ones that were only harvested within a few days of being used for brewing.

Wet hopped, to them, is as you describe and the terminology all the brewers in the rest of the country seem to use.

Milchjon said:
All the wet/fresh hop beers I've tried so far were annoying shit.

Although they were all German, so maybe brewers here just haven't figured it out yet.
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What style were they brewing? I know the Germans are getting better about it, but I don't think I've had many good IPAs from them, and I don't know that I would ever actually want a wet hopped pilsner. Wet hopped beers are going to be grassy, which with the right hops and in the right beer can be appealing, but might not be otherwise.
 
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Milchjon

Member
Seth C said:
What style were they brewing? I know the Germans are getting better about it, but I don't think I've had many good IPAs from them, and I don't know that I would ever actually want a wet hopped pilsner. Wet hopped beers are going to be grassy, which with the right hops and in the right beer can be appealing, but might not be otherwise.
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I've had two wet hop Pilseners (not great) and three pale ales (shit to utter shit).



German IPAs are getting better. But I mean there only are like 10 of them on the market, and we'll probably never catch up to other countries when it comes to that particular style. Our brewery just released a decent one, and I'm happy to finally have reliably good stuff at a good price.

They also made it pink for some reason and I utterly adore the label:

ratsherrn_ipa.jpg


One of our brewmasters also just made a quad that's outstanding. It's great to finally get some variety from German brewers, even if not all of it is great. But a good German IPA is still gonna be nicer than a better US IPA that took 9 months to get here and spent another month on a shelf...
 
D

distantmantra

Member
I've had good fresh hop versions of saisons, pales, IPAs, pilsners, lagers, stouts, porters, etc. They can be done.

MacGurcules said:
Hmm, guess I never really noticed the "Reserve" wording on previous bottles. It's basically a shelf turd here, for whatever reason. I picked up a 2012 bottle off the back of the shelf in like March this year.
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It's the only Deschutes reserve beer that isn't a shelf turd in the Seattle market. Black Butte Anniversary, Green Monster, Mirror Mirror, Stoic, Dissident all turd it up, but The Abyss is always gone in less than 24-48 hours.

Well, Jubel 2010 didn't last long either, but that was a special release.
 
P

PhoncipleBone

Banned
Having a Stone Master of Disguise right now. My brain is still messed up from the idea behind it. It is golden, clear, and relatively light. But my god is the coffee smell and flavor very strong in it. Really good so far, but my brain still can't get over the coffee stout taste when drinking something lighter and golden.
 
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Dr.Horrible

Member
Headed to Colorado next week to hit up some breweries. Anything a must see/drink in Boulder? We are doing Ft. Collins as well, but we've already been there so we have some ideas already.
 
T

Triz

Member
Managed to finally get my hands on 2 bottles of "Pliny the Elder" bottled on the 12th of this month. I get why it's so coveted. Truly the most balanced double ipa I've ever had. Now the quest to get it again.
 
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PhoncipleBone

Banned
Liquor Barn had Great Lakes Blackout Stout today. Giving it a try. It was $12 for a four pack, but a 64oz growler was $13. Yeah, I'll take the growler.
 
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