New Beer Sunday (Week 720)

Glad you enjoyed it, it is my favorite IPA from Tired Hands!

 

You and your Church I agree it’s a great beer, but TH has better brews. Eviscerated and Wish Fulfillment both score higher for me.

 

Larry basically does.

 

Good afternoon BA, a cold one out today with what looks like some snow on the way. Glad I got my errands doen early so I can settle in with some good beer and hockey/football. First up, Funky Buddha's French Toast double brown ale.

L: Pours a very dark brown with anout 2 fingers of cream colored head that fades quickly. 4.25/5
S: Maple syrup up front with hints of cinnamon, vanilla, as well as some chocolate from the malts 4.5/5
T: Huges amounts of maple syrup, some chocolate, vanilla and cinnamon. They really nail what they were going for with this one and the 8.8% is hardly noticable. 4.5/5
F: Medium bodied and low carbonation. Very enjoyable but it is a little thin compared to other beers in the same abv range. 4.25/5
O: Fantastic brown ale from funky Buddha if you like French toast and maple flavors. 4.46/5

 

I did. I grabbed "A small town in Ontario" and "Do you wanna make it pink" Brut IPA collab. Outside of Aslin, I went to Jailbreak Brewing in Laurel? MD which was close to my hotel. Took a trip up to Flying Dog in Frederick. Took a trip out onto the Maryland peninsula to RAR brewing. Visited Union Craft before a game against Towson. Normally I go on these beer/basketball trips with my wife, but she doesn't have as much time off accumulated as I do. Being by myself I didn't get to as many places as I would have liked. Only negative of the trip was the traffic. I don't know how you do it on a regular basis. I left to get to the GW game 2 and a half hours early and arrived 8 minutes into the first half. Google took me through the center of town and unbeknownst to me it was the president's Christmas tree lighting at the same time :facepalm:
It took me 45 minutes to go the last two blocks. So gridlocked an ambulance took forever to get through.

Sorry I didn't think to hit you up. I haven't been as present as I usually am on these boards the last couple of weeks. Last thing I remember is you were out in Oregon enjoying the west coast brewing scene.

 

Good afternoon fellow NBSrs! I apologize for my abscence last week. Life’s been busy to say the least.

Anywho, today’s first New Beer is from @thebeers . Arthur, thank you as this beer was really well done.



And my feeble review:



Hope you BAs are enjoying this fine Sunday! Hopefully I’ll return with some more new beers from some truly amazing BAs!

 

He’s a good, albeit very busy, dude. If I had his schedule I’d barely be able to drink!

 

Ha, depending on timing we might've been in the great northwest. Sounds like a good set of breweries to hit up all around.

And yes, any event at the Patriot Center is just craziness for traffic on Braddock/123, as its location is not truly suited for the events. That last half block you ran into was only about twice as bad as normal at rush hour

 

Nightmare Brewing - Windlass of Erasmus

It is the holiday season, and you know what that means: lots of Hallmark movies and men getting their intestines pulled out. For a NBS a few weeks ago, I featured a beer because it had a DIY sensibility that I compared to a teenage garage band. Well, I bought today’s beer for the same reason and this one takes that comparison and cranks it to eleven. Honestly, this situation is just fascinating from a cultural standpoint.

This “brewery” isn’t even listed on BA as far as I can tell. And without an address, website, etc, I don’t know if it’s even possible to do so. I couldn’t find any of this info. They contract brew at Great South Bay Brewery on Long Island, NY. Great South Bay beers used to have much more presence in the stores around here, and I never cared for their beer. It seems like they’ve become a contract brewer for the hip $6 per 16oz opaque brewers in the area. It’s funny how the same brewer can produce product that results in such different acceptance from the beer geek community.

What I could find about the brewery was:

Phantom Brewery
Death Metal.
Horror.

“Phantom brewery” indeed. This beer is a Gose with blackberries, black currant, and black sea salt. It’s clear the “black” is a prerequisite for their recipe formulation. Who needs to think in terms of flavors anyway? The brewer also claims that the beer has a blood-like color and viscosity. Sounds appetizing! But then there’s the can art. Yeah, it is what it looks like. The label has a man with his “stomach split open and his intestines wound around a windlass” (winch).

I realize that beer has become a canvas for artistic expression in the eyes of many, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that it is a foodstuff. Apologies to those who view it more as a lifestyle, but it isn’t… it’s a foodstuff. When was the last time you bought a food item with packaging that depicted a man’s intestines being pulled out? Sausages with a cartoon of a butcher holding links doesn’t count. I’ll say it again, culturally, this is just fascinating.

The beer looks like a melted “natural” raspberry ice pop in a glass. There’s quite a bit of salinity, which balances out with whatever sourness might have been more at the forefront but doesn’t really show up here. It’s (thankfully) dry and a bit earthy. The lack of sweetness is what really makes this work. I guess the color pushes one to expect more sweetness. All in all, it’s simultaneously subtle and very fruit forward… which is an oxymoron I can’t quite process.

Naturally, the brewer suggests a particular heavy metal album for a beer pairing. There was a description for this beer from somebody else that claimed that it paired well with bacon wrapped shrimp! Egads! Who can eat bacon wrapped shrimp with this!

 

Thank you for the lead-in.

 

Here is another new-to-me style. I'm narrowing down my quest to visit one in each category, although the completion of that means the beginning of another goal. This visits the "Scottish Gruit/ Ancient Herbed Ale" style listed on the site. The site definition of this style:

"A historical style brewed in the same way beer was most likely made during the Middle Ages in Continental Europe, Gruit is bittered with herbs and spices rather than hops, most often sweet gale (Myrica gale), yarrow (Achillea millefolium), and wild rosemary (Ledum palustre). Other herbs, spices, and berries might be used to create interesting and pleasant aromas and flavors of green and herbal teas. Other ancient ales were made with ingredients like heather, seaweed, pine, spruce, etc."



Brasserie Dupont sprl's Posca Rustica.

Pours a foggy copper-brown with a finger or two of khaki foam pending if it's the first or second pour from the bottle. Head retention is great. Aroma is heavy underlying Belgian ale qualities - yeast esters, clove, and toasty, nutty, earthy malts. Spices hit later in the aroma, but add a little zest and nuance to the aromatics. Flavor profile is yeast ester, clove, and spices right at the forefront. It comes on heavy and then fades away, revealing malt qualities of toasty, nutty, caramely, and earthy. Nice balance between the two, developing a zesty Belgian ale quality with a unique personality. Background noise is filled by light herbal qualities. Mouth feel is medium-thick, and expansive on the palate via an effervescent texture. Overall, a quality, nuanced Belgian ale. Herbal qualities add the uniqueness here, but still maintain a pleasant sipping experience.

Score: 4.25 | 4.25 | 4 | 4 | 4.25 | BA Score: 4.13 | rDev: +2.7%

Thank you to @MonDak_Joe1953 for helping me visit this style.

Cheers.

 

They seem there.

 

Beam me up stouty
..almost solid black
..around a medium body with very light carbonation that dissipates quickly
..aroma is intense, toasted coconut followed by some chocolate and even less roasted malt and dark fruit
..taste is heavy on the toasted coconut again followed by chocolate with some roasted malt and dark fruit. It was far from being overly sweet
..didn't expect much but this delivered a lot of flavors and felt like a dessert beer without being as sweet as a candy bar

 

I figured as much so that narrows it down to my Browser as @TongoRad suggests or maybe some other piece of software. Lots of other pics visible but.

These devices are so complex now days that the first release of a new major version of an OS is actually expected to result in errors and so they beef up customer support to meet the surge and plan the X.1 release happing fairly quickly.

I'll work on it. Thanks.

 

Eviscerated and Wish Fulfillment are great, but Church is pretty much sold year round now so there is that

Definitely a Church worth going to

 

Was it this one? If so, I was not a fan at all, as you can tell from my review (though iirc this was aged on Scotch-soaked oak chips... which is sorta not the same as Scotch barrel aging). I bet the Allagash one is a little better, but there's a reason I haven't gone all-in on a four pack of it. I'm definitely leery, especially as the brewery describes it as having some tartness in some versions of their press for the beer. Not sure I really want that. Also, the barrels were previously used for port wine (as Scotch whisky producers don't give a shit where they get their barrels from; very different from bourbon, which must be aged in charred virgin oak barrels), so... yeah. I dunno. Doesn't seem like something I really want. Say what you will about bourbon barrels, but at least they carry with them a consistent flavor profile when it comes to beers aged in them...