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Archive for October, 2010

Lagunitas Wilco Tango Foxtrot (WTF) Ale

Posted in Beer, tagged , , , , , , , on October 31, 2010 | 3 Comments »

See, I was going to write a review of a kickass pumpkin ale today, something like the Southern Tier Pumking or the Hoppin’ Frog Frog’s Hallow Double Pumpkin Ale. However, I managed to forget the Southern Tier last night because it was in the basement and I was rushing to throw my costume on when I got home from work, and realized at the party when three beers in (a Schlafly APA, a Rogue Dead Guy, and the upcoming review) that busting out an 8+% ABV pumpkin ale would probably not be a decision I would still be happy with in the morning. In the quest for hangover avoidance, I left it capped and will review it when I do pop it open. Maybe as dessert on Thanksgiving.

In lieu of pumpkin ale, I present to you a fabulous beer, one which is conceptually timely because of Election Day’s rapid approach.

Basic Info:
Name: Wilco Tango Foxtrot (WTF) Ale
Origin: Lagunitas Brewing Company
Style: Imperial Brown Ale / American Strong Ale
ABV: 7.83%
IBU: not listed
I drank this: poured from a bottle at a Halloween party, early-ish in the evening

The WTF Ale: “A Malty, Robust, Jobless Recovery Ale,” described to me once as being a “half-red, half-black” ale.

This beer is malty. All over super malty. I don’t know what color it is, because it was poured from the brown bottle into a red polo cup, so I never really did see the color of the beer. Therefore, I’ve decided it’s malt-colored. I can say that it has amazing head retention – the head was thick and foamy, the kind of foam that makes little peaks and valleys as it slowly collapses.

So. Malts. There were some grapefruity hops right in the background, but. This was a thick, bready beer, like black bread and caramel and molasses and biscuits and foam, did I mention there was a lot of foamy head? and nuts. It’s toasty and warming and strong. And malty. I hear people talk of beers as being hop bombs sometimes – this beer is a malt bomb.

There’s a nice, mid-level carbonation running through this that helps camouflage the alcohol. I didn’t notice any alcohol flavor at all, and that’s rare for me in beers this malty.

Aftertaste-wise, it was pretty bready. It pairs really well with oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, especially oatmeal chocolate chip cookies that are freshly baked from scratch and still have slightly melty chocolate chips.

Enjoy on a Fall day, or (apparently) on a Spring day – this beer is actually their Spring Seasonal. Imperial Brown Ale strikes me as a strange choice for a Spring Seasonal, but I never really know what to drink in the Spring, so their guess is as good as mine.

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Sierra Nevada Tumbler Autumn Brown Ale

Posted in Beer, tagged , , , , on October 29, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Seriously, people. Sierra Nevada does quality brewing. We all know this. It’s good beer and easy to find. The Pale Ale set the standard for West Coast Pale Ales and is still one of the better APAs out there. The Celebration Ale (their Winter Seasonal) is *everywhere* and tastes, as a friend of mine put it, “like poinsettias.” It’s nearly omnipresent come mid-November.

But. Sierra Nevada. Brown Ale. Autumn Seasonal. THIS TOOK ME TWO MONTHS TO FIND. EXPLAIN, UNIVERSE.

Basic Info:
Name: Tumbler Autumn Brown Ale
Origin: Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., Chico, California
Style: Brown Ale
ABV: 5.5%
IBU: 37
I drank this: on tap at Barley’s, Overland Park, KS

Two months for a brown ale. Was it worth the anticipation?

Answer: mostly. It’s a good brown ale. A very good brown ale, even. But it’s not over-the-moon, marry-the-beer-NOW* good. It honestly doesn’t need to be *that* good to be a perfectly good Autumn Seasonal it’s awesome already just by being not an Oktoberfest – it just needs to be warming and drinkable.

So the beer itself (rather than my problems finding it): it’s a dark, translucent brown with a light and foamy head that dissipates quickly. The scent is lovely nutty malts – like nice biscuity malts with a hint of almond and walnut.

Compared to some of my recent beers, this is thinner in texture. However, that’s not to say it’s a thin beer – it’s just to say that it doesn’t resemble motor oil. It’s predominantly a nice malty flavor with medium carbonation, nutty hints running throughout, and a hit of hops right in the back of the throat. The hops are slightly more noticeable than they are in Moose Drool, but nowhere near as strong as they are in the brown ale/IPA hybrids that have been popular of late.

The aftertaste – this made me giggle a little – is peanut butter. I’m not sure why it worked, but it did.

Overall, this is a really drinkable ale, the type of thing that pairs easily with hummus or chicken fingers or potato skins or nearly anything else you can dream up. It isn’t trying to mess with you or pretend to be anything it’s not. It’s a brown ale, and it’s happy being a brown ale. Hop-haters, enjoy this beer before we get hit with the Celebration and all the hops therein.

* I had never considered the “marry-me-NOW-beer” as a category before I saw this post on the Gingerneer’s beer reviewing blog (scroll down and look for the blingee’d picture of Donna and the Bourbon County Stout). I have since realized the validity of this category, and hope to meet my one twu beer luv again soon (NOSFERATU I MISS YOU <3 )

(No seriously I cut out half my complaining about finding this stuff when I edited the post- it’s been making me NUTS trying to get this beer!)

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Great Divide Claymore Scotch Ale

Posted in Beer, tagged , , , , on October 28, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Another one of the “love the name” beers. A claymore, for the non-Scottish-geekery types out there, is a bloody ginormous sword used by highlanders to inflict pain on Campbells.* When I say “bloody ginormous,” I mean that the one I saw was actually longer than I am tall (I’m tall, people) and had to weigh nearly as much. The concept of someone swinging one of those is beyond my imagination.

Basic Info:
Name: Claymore Scotch Ale
Origin: Great Divide Brewing Company, Denver, CO
Style: Scotch Ale/Wee Heavy
ABV: 7.7%
IBU: not given
I drank this: poured from a bottle at home while making cottage pie

This lovely little beer pours a really deep auburn with a nonexistent head. It pours like motor oil – it’s really, really thick, so that you can almost watch it fold in on top of itself while it’s filling the glass. It’s kinda awesome.

Flavor-wise, this is a standard Wee Heavy, if a fairly well-done one. It has a (unsurprisingly, really) thick mouthfeel – almost like drinking real maple syrup, it’s so thick. It has a light hop kick right in the back of the mouth, just enough to keep it from going into diabetes-inducing-sweet territory.

This beer is (obviously, I suppose) a malt show. The malts are all over the place, from biscuit-y to caramel-y and roasted to ever-so-slightly fruity. There’s a really slight smoke hint running through it. To my tastes, hops hide alcohol flavor better than malts do, so that I always notice the alcohol more in maltier beers. No exception here – there’s a definite alcohol burn tingling as the beer goes down.

I didn’t notice an aftertaste with this beer. Like, at all. It went down smooth and was content to stay there while I finished cooking dinner. No sourness, no funky bitterness at the end, nothing. After all the foul aftertastes of Oktoberfest season, this was welcome.

As a Scotch Ale/Wee Heavy, this is solid. It isn’t my favorite – that honor goes to the Orkney Brewery’s SkullSplitter Ale** – but it’s easier to find and it’s well done. Enjoy one if you trip over it!

* if you don’t know the reference, I’m assuming you probably did need to be told what a claymore is
** beware the name: it is truth in advertising should you make the mistake of having more than one

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Sierra Nevada Southern Hemisphere Harvest Fresh Hop Ale

Posted in Beer, tagged , , , , , , on October 27, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

From the “fun beers that I have stashed away in the basement, waiting for a good occasion” files:

Basic Info:
Name: Southern Hemisphere Harvest Fresh Hop Ale (2009 Harvest)
Origin: Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., Chico, California
Style: American IPA
ABV: 6.7%
IBU: not available for 2009 (2010 is 66)
I drank this: poured from a bottle at home. Bottle purchased at a liquor store outside of Chicago last summer

I have been holding onto this beer for something like 16 months. I was really excited to pop it open and enjoy, and was not disappointed. And to Tony, Dad and Ben: you must know how much I like you, since I let you have some. My initial tendency was to hoard this all to myownself. But I didn’t. Consider yourselves loved.

This beer is a slightly cloudy medium amber/orange color with a light, thin head – it resembles many of the pumpkin ales I’ve been drinking lately. The scent is light, bright and citrusy, all orange blossom/neroli-hoppiness with a hint of sweet running through it. I want a perfume of this beer badly. (Dear BPAL, please get on that KTHX)

Taste-wise, we’ll start with the malts. They’re actually noticeable, which is nice. They’re medium-to-light and slightly caramelly-spicy, slightly sweet. They create a nice, slightly syrupy backdrop for the hops.

The hops are the star, obviously. However, the IBUs on this beer can’t be all that high – I’d guess in the 60-70 range (which is probably about right – the 2010 version came in at 66). To translate for non-beer-geeks, this means that the hops are the dominant flavor, but they’re not going to facepunch you with bitterness the way some of the higher-IBU beers would. In the tastebuds of my mouth*, this beer doesn’t taste bitter at all – it’s clean, bright, sunny, citrus-y and tinged with something lightly floral.

To be nonsensically poetic about it, this beer is like drinking sunny springtime.

To be beyond nerdy about it: I’d love to think that this is the beer the hobbits drink in the Lord of the Rings films. Obviously it wouldn’t be so in the books: in the books, the hobbits are probably drinking an Old Ale or something comparable. I like to think of them drinking Wychwood’s Hobgoblin.

Fun note: the hops for this beer came freshly picked from New Zealand, home of my favorite Sauvignon Blancs and Flight of the Conchords. Moral of the story: good things come from the land of the Kiwis. *thumbs up*

*keep in mind that my favorite liqueur is Campari, that I will choose dark chocolate over milk at all times, etc. What I’m saying is that I like bitter things.

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Blue Moon Harvest Moon

Posted in Beer, tagged , , , , , on October 26, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Regular Blue Moon is awesome, one of those beers that is compulsively drinkable during the Summer months, nice and cold and with an orange squeezed in. I’d never tried any of the seasonal moons, so we’re dealing with a first for me.

Basic Info:
Name: Harvest Moon Pumpkin Ale
Origin: Coors Brewing (Blue Moon division)
Style: Pumpkin Ale
ABV: 5.7%
IBU: not listed
I drank this: poured from a bottle at Old Chicago, Overland Park

This beer is pretty. It’s a soft pumpkin-y orange color. I didn’t get much of a scent off of it.

“Pretty” is about where my admiration stops. This wasn’t the worst pumpkin I’ve ever had, but it’s emphatically not a favorite, especially when there are some really good ones running around. It tastes like someone dumped some pumpkin into an Oktoberfest mixed with a bit of Blue Moon.

To elaborate, here’s what happens during a sip: it starts off with some pumpkin pie spices right at the beginning of the sip, which is pleasant. Then there’s a distinct hit of raw pumpkin – it tastes like the way cutting into a pumpkin smells, rather than the way pumpkin tastes when it’s been roasted or something. This is followed by some kind of sharp, funky, off taste, like they chose a wonky malt at random and threw it in the mash.

The aftertaste is slightly sour and slightly pumpkin spicy and overall not hideous, but not something I’m clamoring to experience again any time soon.

Overall rating: meh. I find myself wishing I had had a camera with me last Friday while we were drinking it, because my brother’s look of bemused dismay sums it up. I mean, it’s a pumpkin ale. It would have been fine but for Schlafly and O’Fallon, who have made fabulous pumpkins this year. And I still have the Hoppin’ Frog Double Pumpkin to grab, and a bottle of Southern Tier Pumking in the basement waiting for Halloween.

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Great Divide Chocolate Oak Aged Yeti

Posted in Beer, tagged , , , , , , , on October 24, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Probably not the beer to have with a plate of raw oysters, but some days you just gotta go with it.*

Basic Info:
Name: Chocolate Oak Aged Yeti
Origin: Great Divide Brewery, Denver, CO
Style: American Double/Imperial Stout
ABV: 9.5%
IBU: not listed
I drank this: on tap at Angler’s, Lawrence, KS

GO TO ANGLER’S :D

Okay. So the beer. The original Yeti is Great Divide’s Imperial Stout. On its own, it’s already a fantastic example of the style. Aged in oak and with chocolate added, it’s sublime.

If you’re not already a stout drinker – if you’re the type that won’t touch a Guinness because you’re worried it’ll be too thick – this is NOT YOUR BEER. This beer pours roughly the consistency of motor oil. It’s incredibly thick and black as pitch with a lovely light chocolate-colored head. In my world, this is all good. Beautiful, really. And if you’re the type of person who thinks a Guinness is thick, this is most likely because you’ve never tried one. Guinness goes down like water.

Chocolate Oak Aged Yeti goes down like the world’s most gourmet chocolate malt.

The beer begins with the scent of warm, black, almost burnt malts underlying a gloriously rich chocolate haze of good things to come. It has a gloriously silky-creamy mouthfeel. It’s like a combination of milk and dark chocolates, warm toasty notes, a sweet hit of alcohol, and a sort of backing piney/herbal hoppiness that rounds it all out. Writing that makes it sound not great, when I think about it, because all the notes in the beginning and then throwing in ‘piney hops’ sounds terrible. Somehow, however, it works beautifully. According to Great Divide’s website, there’s a dash of cayenne in this, which may help it all work. Who knows. It doesn’t taste spicy, just amazing.

The aftertaste is all warm malty chocolate, cozy and happy. Or as my tasting notes put it, “toastywarmcreamyawesomechocolate just. AWESOME.,” which was somewhere along the lines of halfway through the glass. At 9.5% alcohol, you can bet my writing wasn’t exactly coherent by that point. And it was SO WORTH IT.

In my world, I would say skip the food and enjoy this lovely monster on its own as dessert. If you’d like to have food with it, you need to do it with either a gamey, barbecued meat (something savory/smoky/sweet that would stand up to all the flavors here), or with a slice of cheesecake.

*Interestingly, the Great Divide website lists raw oysters as exactly the thing you *should* be drinking with this beer. I think they’re out of their minds. This is why I think food/beer (or food/wine) pairing is something that needs to be determined on an individual basis – what works for person A may not float person B’s boat.

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Angler's – Lawrence, KS

Posted in Watering Holes, tagged , , , on October 24, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

GO DRINK HERE: Angler’s Seafood House, 1004 Massachusetts St, Lawrence, KS

The mere fact that I managed to find and enjoy Great Divide Chocolate Oak Aged Yeti Imperial Stout on tap says that I found an AWESOME place to drink. That place is Angler’s, in Lawrence. It is awesome. To give a hint of its awesomeness, I’ll just give you the website address: www.fishandbeer.com. Fish and beer. No name, no nonsense, just fish and beer. From what I’ve tried (mostly raw oysters that the bartenders shucks right behind the bar <3)(the crab dip is excellent as well), the fish is excellent. It’s also sustainable, a first in the area – thumbs up there. Their taps are the best and most fun that I’ve seen since having to leave Porter’s Pub behind in Easton, PA. Add in that service has been entertaining and friendly, and I’m really, really happy there, as in “willing to move in part time.” And there ends my unpaid advertising for a kickass restaurant. Just go and eat and drink their fabulous beer and support a place which looked around and said (apparently, anyway – I don’t know for sure that this was the exact train of thought): ”you know what? We don’t need to waste six of our taps on Boulevard, because everyone else is carrying it. Let’s do something different.”

A+++++

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Dear Old Chicago-Overland Park,

Posted in Watering Holes on October 24, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Please give Melissa a raise. She’s awesome and puts up with a lot and gets brownie points for the Mayonnaise Incident.

Sincerely,
A frequent customer (er, me)

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Mamma Mia! Pizza Beer

Posted in Beer, tagged , , , , , on October 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Yes. This exists.

I was given some courtesy of my gingerneer friend at Gingerneer Beer, who has provided her own review here. I haven’t yet figured out how to pay her back.

Basic Info:
Name: Mamma Mia! Pizza Beer
Origin: Tom and Athena Seefurth, Campton Township, IL
Style: pizza herb/vegetable beer
ABV: 4.6%
IBU: not listed
I drank this: poured from a  bottle

Pizza beer is the result of a homebrewing experiment by some beer-loving types who were most likely drinking at the time of the idea’s conception. I mean, PIZZA BEER. They *had* to be drinking, right?

Anyway, Pizza Beer is “Ale Brewed with Oregano, Basil, Tomato & Garlic.” If you’re a regular drinker of beer (or at the very least a regular reader of this blog), then you know that none of the listed ingredients are among common (or even uncommon) beer flavors. They’re not common alcohol flavors in anything except a Bloody Mary (or a Red Eye, in the case of tomatoes). A quick round of google taught me that basil is becoming a popular ingredient in some foofy-sounding martinis, that oregano and alcohol seem not to combine ever. Garlic supposedly helps cure hangovers and is otherwise only involved in alcohol when a garlic-stuffed olive gets shoved into a good vodka martini.

What I’m saying here is that they get 100 points for creativity and a few extra for being out of their ever-loving minds.

So how is it?

It’s… interesting. I’d even go all the way up to “it doesn’t completely suck.” It’s emphatically not the worst beer I’ve ever had (that honor still goes to the Roy Pitz Lovitz (Watermelon) Lager)(I’m not counting the Michelob Ultra experiments as beer). Basically, it’s like someone dumped oregano oil into a very light ale or a lighter (but not LITE) lager. It’s overwhelmingly oregano, up there with dropping straight oregano oil onto your tongue. It’s also bubbly, slightly reddish in hue, and has a slight tomato addition to the OREGANO *jazzhands* aftertaste (which lasts FOREVER)(but might be okay if you were eating fresh mozzarella – it would provide a hugely oregano flavor to go along with the light flavor of that cheese),

I want a case of this stuff. There are a couple of reasons for this. It’s my favorite beer ever to spring on unsuspecting beer snobs because it’s pretty much guaranteed that they’ll never have had anything like it. In oddity factor, it rates up there with the homebrew recipe I saw that involved sticking a chicken carcass in during the boil (I kind of want to do this, but only if I can find 15 other people to help me drink the stuff once it’s done). The other thing is that they’ve got a bunch of recipes on their website that make use of the Pizza Beer (I love to cook) - while I can’t see wanting to drink a whole bottle, I could see where it could make for interesting eats.

So there you have it. Pizza beer.

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He'Brew Messiah Bold

Posted in Beer, tagged , , , , , on October 20, 2010 | 2 Comments »

I love He’Brew beers. They’re good beers and given some of the most gloriously groan-worthy names out there: their doppelbock is the Rejewvenator, the anniversary ale is the Jewbilation, and so on. Their names have made me snortlaugh in the aisles of liquor stores because I am a pun-loving dork.

Basic Info:
Name: Messiah Bold
Origin: Shmaltz Brewing Company, New York, New York and San Francisco, California
Style: Brown Ale
ABV: 5.6%
IBU: not listed
I drank this: from a bottle at Old Chicago, Olathe

This came in bottle form, which in this case I approve of because it gave me a moment to giggle at the label. Labels on He’Brew beers are as worth reading as are labels on Stone beers – completely entertaining, the type of label that makes me wonder what I have to do to write ad copy for them.

Anyway, when poured into a glass (I always pour into glasses when I’ve got a bottled beer, unless I’m outside at a BBQ or something and glasses aren’t available), this beer is a nicely dark brown – dark, but not porter-dark either. It smells of dark malts and something kind of nutty (generic “nut smell” – I don’t have almonds or walnuts or pecans listed specifically). It’s pleasant and warming.

The Messiah Bold has a fairly high level of carbonation. Even pouring carefully, when I poured it into the glass it did the Coke thing, wherein it fizzed up with a bubbly head which almost immediately dissipated into nonexistence. It’s not quite as dark as a Coke, but there’s a pretty strong resemblance.

This beer is a glassful of really lovely warm, dark, toasty malts, with hints of nut running throughout. It’s a sharp ale for a brown, with enough hops that it feels slightly sharp on the tongue. Note: as with most darker ales, this doesn’t mean that this beer is hoppy at all. It’s not. It’s just that the hops keep the beer from going sweet, add something to the mouthfeel, and work to highlight how awesome the malts are. The aftertaste is buttered toast. Buttered dark wheat toast, to be specific. The aftertaste never goes sour or overly salty or anything else, so bonus points there. This is just all-around good brown ale.

Fun fact of the day: Shmaltz Brewing Co., the brewers who create the He’Brew line, also brew the Coney Island line of beers (the Freaktober, etc).

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