BEER

Happy anniversary, y'all! I'd toast but it's not even 10am. So I'll toast with my orange juice! 

As evidenced elsewhere, I drank beer this weekend. LOTS of beer. Let us begin:

Real Ale Scots Gone Wild
This is my favorite beer on Earth. It's also a single-batch brew released over 2 years ago and only available on draft. Honestly, I thought I would never taste it again. Imagine my surprise and immense delight seeing it on the draft list of a Dallas burger joint. I didn't even believe it at first. Surely there was some mistake, or my eyes were deceiving me. And even if I'm reading it right, surely by now it's tapped out. That I would ask for it and the server would give me that slow, "Well, actually..."

Nope! I ordered it, and it came, and it was glorious.

Scots Gone Wild from Texas' Real Ale Brewing Company is a scotch ale soured with wild yeast and aged for several months in oak barrels. Gorgeous ruby/gold color, bracing tartness and an otherworldly complexity that meanders through fruits, balsamic, vanilla and caramel. Not having tasted it in 18 months or so, I worried it wouldn't live up to my memories. It did so and more. Love, love, love this beer. It is the reigning pinnacle of Real Ale's Mysterium Verum series of single-batch, draft-only beers.

Real Ale The Kraken
If that wasn't enough, the same burger joint also had this one. The Kraken hails from the same line of specialty beers as Scots Gone Wild. A faintly hoppy barleywine aged in oak and fermented with wild yeast, The Kraken packs a punch at around 13%. Pronounced bitterness from the hops and a determined woodsiness rule the day here. Unfortunately the wild yeast don't deliver near the sour here that they did above. It's good. I'd order it again. But my heart remains with the Scots.

Lakewood Brewing Co. Bokkenrijders
The latest in the Garland, TX brewery's Legendary Series. Bokkenrijders is a dopplesticke altbier with all the crispness of the style, but with a vocal hop bitterness I didn't expect. It resembles a red ale more than a traditional altbier. Tasty, but there are other Lakewood offerings I would recommend first.

You can read the history of the name here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckriders

Dogfish Head Burton Baton
Finally something with some distribution outside Texas so I'm not just talking to myself. One of my favorites from Dogfish's seeming endless line of IPAs. Burton Baton is a combination of an imperial IPA and an English old ale. Relatively tame on the hops considering the brewery, with the vanilla oak thing you might associate with white wine. I've had it a few times now and would consider it one of DH's best.

Spaten Optimator
You probably know this one. You probably like this one.

I also had some Shiner Bock and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, because that's what the theater had.

I have some Pizza Port Swami's IPA waiting for me at home. I love this beer. That is all.

Lately I've been drinking a fair amount of Chatoe Rogue's First Growth Dirtoir Black Lager.

I don't even know how to describe this stuff - it's totally jet black and opaque, and tastes a bit of coffee and chocolate mixed with a really sweet wine... if that makes sense.

I could definitely see it not being to everyone's taste, but I am quite enjoying it.

Last week I was at a bar for a gig and they were selling this:



So I bought one and regretted that decision about 30 seconds later when some of it got in my mouth. Fuuuuck me that's a bad beer. I can't remember the flavour of it, only the bad memories.

Went to a beer class once that had a quick, interesting digression about how one region or country's "fancy" beer is another country's trash beer. One example the instructor gave was Stella Artois, which is marketed as an upscale, refined alternative to major labels here in the U.S., but it is in fact the Pabst Blue Ribbon of Belgium. That's how he put it anyway.

Dear god, i love beer. I get the IPA backlash to a certain extent, but it's long been my favorite style, with stout/porter being a very close second. Mainly, I just love well-made beer, regardless of the style. A sampling of my favorites, w a concentration on the great lakes region, esp chicago:

IPA: Ballast Point Sculpin, Haymarket Mathias (only available on-tap and in growlers at the pub, quietly the best Imperial IPA produced in the Midwest), Three Floyds Dreadnaught, Stone IPA, Revolution Anti-Hero, Bell's Two Hearted, Sierra Nevada Celebration, Pipeworks Ninja vs Unicorn

Stout/Porter: Goose Island Bourbon County (the OG of bourbon barrel-aged beers, way better than anything Alltech puts out), Revolution Eugene, Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald, Founders Breakfast Stout, Bell's Expedition Stout, Sierra Nevada Narwhal

Others: Firestone Walker DBA (excellent English-style pale/bitter), Three Floyds Zombie Dust, Half Acre Daisy Cutter, Founders Backwoods Bastard (a scotch ale/wee heavy aged in bourbon barrels), Goose Island Sofie (Belgian-style saison)

As a Utahn I'm jealous that you could even say that.

(At least I don't live in Pennsylvania) 

Pretty amazing selection. I think there's less than a handful available near me (even in the places with great selections).

Normally I dislike IPAs, but out of curiosity I might try that StormBreaker Cloud Ripper IPA, mainly because I think the name is funny. Of course the last time I got a beer just based on the can/bottle/name being funny I got 668 The Neighbor of the Beast, a pale ale I did not care for at all.

Nasty beers of my misspent and wayward youth, the kind of beers one would find in great quantities at underage punk rock shows and house parties:

Mickey's Big Mouth
National Bohemian
Liebotschaner Cream Ale
Genesee
Old Milwaukee
Labatt
Miller High Life
Miller Genuine Draft (if we felt fancy)

Is it any wonder that I thought I didn't like beer? Oh but I sure did drink it anyway. I don't think I had a good beer until I was 21.

Most of them are cheap, adjunct-heavy pale lagers. Corn and rice beers. I did a search for "worst beers in the world" and found nearly all of them.
Interestingly, Beer Advocate ranks Mickey's (a malt liquor) just out of the bottom 50 - 59th to be exact. Seems overly generous, but maybe my memory fails me. We bought it because a) CHEAP b) it came in a cool bottle

and c) there were rebus puzzles under the cap. But it was terrible. Here's a Beer Advocate review that seems about right:


APPEARANCE: brassy golden body that matches the translucence of water; snow-white sudsy head fizzles to a sickly residual; vibrant bubbles at the pour evaporate immediately... AROMA: pitchy, astringent malts; its appeal is purely in the twist cap nostalgia.. PALATE: fizzy, rather oily and soft; gassy, beefy aftertaste; thin and drinkable....TASTE: puckerishly sweet, with a water hose copper coupling overbearing flavor;; some champagne (!) notes; simply not flavorful ... OVERALL: Mickey's will always have a place in my heart--and on our college pong table--but this is a rough one to sip with any sustained interest...

for some reason my only experience with Mickey's was on one of many many trips to NOLA, but the rebus-cap beer i remember most was Pearl, which must have been favored by my friend down there (and it turns out the time frame of my visits was the swan song of Pearl in NOLA)

I gotta brag somewhere. There's a small brewery down in the SW suburbs of Chicago, and the head brewer is married to a VP at the university where Wilford works. He and the VP are friendly and they talk beer sometimes. She was telling him that they're releasing a very limited barrel-aged stout with vanilla the day after Christmas and we should come by and grab a bottle.

Well, we're going to be heading to Indiana by then, so she offered to snag us a bottle. Since this is right up my beer-loving-heart's alley, I'm pretty psyched to taste it.