Other Half (2019)

Wait this is actually happening?

 

Tastes like AGE Light.

 

Any idea how big the monkish batch is?

 

iMO the mmm fruits are fine to good, but they don't really touch what EQ and HVB are putting out. Every sour IPA OH has put out has kinda sucked when the natural inclination is to compare to HVB.

Blueberry Crunchee was kind out of left field with how good it was. Hopefully Raspberry Crunchee is a real thing.

 

How early will people be lining up today? My flight lands around 11. Pumped for this weekend.

 

Would ecpho @BoardwalkBock ’s q from a few weeks ago - why do so many of their stouts have nuts in them? Is there some sort of brewing-technique thing going on? Does it contribute to like a thicccer mouthfeel or something like that? Other than OG cookie kooks and (possibly, it’s unclear) the VIP versions of the pastrytown stout, I think everything in 2019 has had nuts of some sort

 

Leaving work at 11:40.. I should be at the brewery around 1 to stake out a spot in line and try some of the visiting beers. Saturday is going to be ridiculous.

 

Damn is this going to be a crazy line situation? I get off work at 4 today so I was planning on getting there at 4:45, grabbing some cans and having a pour, but if it's going to be a madhouse like the pre-Green City release, I might pass.

 

I would imagine there's gonna be a decent-sized line come 5:00. I planned on getting there around 3:00 for the sake of trying to get back on the road quickly, but how well that's gonna work out is yet to be seen.

 

Yea I’d really like to know the purpose as I clearly haven’t been able to try any beers with nuts or dabble with nut additions in my homebrew due to my allergy.

Does it actually add a prominent flavor? I can’t see how it would impact mouthfeel unless the nuts were ground up. Do the oils/enzymes from the nuts impact the chemical reactions in the beer? I get the feeling that breweries put expensive sounding nuts into stouts to justify high prices.

 

HVB's best beers are still their barrel aged sours, people just go nuts over the cans because they are cans. I love cans too but people go from not really caring to hype overload once good beer goes from draft/bottle only to cans, just see what happened when Troon went from growlers to crowlers.

I'm just hoping that with Eric Salazar building OH's wood cellar in Rochester, we'll see some great true mixed culture beers coming from Other Half, I much prefer them to kettle sours.

 

the oats of stout. ?

 

Those ingredients go hand in hand with added hype and $$$ in their pockets:

 

Yea that’s my thinking. I’m sure you could get a prominent flavor from nuts in a lower ABV beer like a brown ale, cream ale, etc. However, I’d be hard pressed to believe you could pick out the flavors from nuts in a double digit pastry stout jammed to the gills with other more intense flavors (coffee, vanilla, cinnamon, etc.). Not to mention the sweetness of the beers...

 

I got a lot of almond in Snowbirds 2, I think nuts work well in stouts but you have to be judicious with other adjuncts because they can easily get overwhelmed.

 

I'm actually not the biggest HVB fan, but I end up drinking a lot of it because my wife loves their stuff. I make fun of her saying she enjoys drinking yankee candles. After coming around to the SIPA style, Incandenza has really grown on me since it doesn't have a ton of lactose and all the other bullshit added and they usually have sixers in the the cooler.

Finback's Heinous has hazelnuts in it and you can definitely taste it. It's actually one of the better pastry stouts I've had in recent memory, and was pretty cheap compared to what you usually see.

 

I've yet to try an EQ sour...I'd really like to. Do cans ever wind up down this way? (the shop at Threes, etc.?)

My limited sample size for sours includes one HVB (which was amazing) and a bunch of the Mmmm fruits and Pop's by Grimm. I will say the maximization of the Berliner worked a lot better on the Double Mmmm Fruit than it did on that higher ABV blackberry orange Pop I just tried.

 

In some I pick it up. Others hardly at all. And in either case a) don’t want to taste nuts in all stouts, b) don’t understand why it’s so prevalent since they preclude customers such as you from buying them