New Beer Sunday (week 577)

Mornin' @utopiajane,

It's good to start off with a Stout.

With lots of chores today I expect I'll be back this evening and will look to having a new stout as well, but probably not one that has a few years of aging to help it develop. (Also my review probably won't be as richly detailed as yours or even come close to making the beer sound as luscious as the one you are having/enjoying/reviewing.)

Cheers!

 

Hop Cakes Imperial India Pale Ale - NoDa Brewing - Charlotte, NC
10.2% ABV and 118 IBUs
$16 for 4 pack of 16oz cans.
Canned on 09 February 2016

Appearance: Amber-orange, two finger white head that dissipates fairly quickly but leaves some lacing.
Aroma: Sweet malts, strong tropical fruit, very well-balanced, a touch of alcohol
Taste: A bit burst of tropical fruits - pineapple, grapefruit, passionfruit, followed by a strong sweet malt presence that blends together wonderfully with the hops. Just as well-balanced as the aroma.
Mouthfeel: Slick, oily, and about medium. Still highly drinkable.
Overall: A fantastic IIPA. I understand the hype it gets. It does not overwhelm with hops but strikes an ideal balance between hops and malts with a substantial ABV. The only drawback is the price at $16 for 4 pint cans. It's not the most expensive beer ever but given the number of other excellent D/IIPAs out there for several dollars less this is a once a year purchase at best.

The picture is a stock photo and not my own. My phone camera was not cooperating today.[/IMG]

92/100

[/IMG]
[/IMG]

 

With this time change thing the morning seems to be getting away here. But seeing has I have 2 bottles of the same vintage stout in my cellar this should be a good day to enjoy one. So I'll be back a little later with my review.

 

A great, great beer!

 

5% alcohol. 49 IBU. Brewed in Mississippi.

4.1/5 rDev +7.3%
look: 4 | smell: 4 | taste: 4.25 | feel: 4 | overall: 4

Stabello Maniscalco has a thick, bone-white head, an initially clear, amber appearance, which heavily clouds, when the caked sediment is swished loose and poured in, some ascending bubbles, and moderate lacing strips left behind. The aroma is of honey, lemon, and rich yeasty, sourdough bread. Taste is similar, with noticeable, but in no way, harsh, hop bitterness. Mouthfeel is medium, and Stabello finishes semi-dry and easy going.

RJT

 

New Coffee Stout Sunday



Terrapin Single-Origin Coffee Stout - Sumatra

My third of the set. This one pours black with a thin finger of mocha-colored soap-bubble head. It has a strong light-roasted coffee aroma even before sniffing, along with condensed milk and chocolate behind. There's a nice, full, earthy coffee flavor, with a touch of smokiness, a watery finish and bitter chocolate aftertaste.

Like the rest in the series, this is thin bodied, and this one's carbonation in particular seems a little too heavy. The coffee flavor is great, but the pieces here don't come together particularly well. The earthiness and bitterness in this one need more body to balance them out. Tea drinkers might like it, but it's got this whole dirt-and-twigs thing going that isn't for me.

Haven't had the Ethiopian yet, which seems to be the crowd favorite. Of the other three, I give the Guatemalan a very slight edge over the Kona, and Sumatra a distant third.

 

Hi, hope everyone effected by daylight savings is enjoying the hour less of sleep!

New brew for me, pretty unique experience.
Brewed by:
Tired Hands Brewing Company Collaboration with Omnipollo
Pennsylvania, United States

Style | ABV
American IPA | 7.20% ABV

IPA brewed with oats and lactose sugar. Fermented atop strawberries (a high pectin fruit) and vanilla beans. Hopped intensely with Mosaic and Citra. We also added wheat flour and 50 lbs of local apples (a high pectin fruit) to the boil. Brewed in collaboration with Omnipollo.

Still awaiting 10 reviews.



My photo makes it appear a little more yellow than its true color.

My review:
16oz. can. Nice, bright, happy label, poured into snifter.

Look: Golden, cloudy, not allowing a lot of light to pass through. Pretty foamy pure white head, creamy looking, like a latte or as the name says milkshake.

Smell: Whats this? Hoppy, sweet, vanilla and the aroma of fresh strawberries lingering in the background. Bold aroma, but subtle, nothing overpowering anything else.

Taste: Starts off like a regular IPA, citrus, slightly earthy hop flavor and bitterness followed by a smooth sweetness that I assume is the result of the lactose addition. The entire time, in the background is the unmistakable flavor of fresh strawberries. It does not taste like strawberry candy, or strawberry jam, it tasted like real strawberry, just a hint, but noticeable, and a surprisingly pleasant addition. The vanilla adds a creaminess, which gives the resultant beer a flavor profile similar to a strawberry milkshake.

Feel: Full side of medium body, moderate carbonation. Remains pretty active, head is replenished, rings the glass.

Overall: I received this as a trade extra, I am happy I did. I may have a soft spot for strawberry beers that get the "real" strawberry flavor (I previously reviewed Strawberry Whalecake positively). I don't think I would want to drink a ton of these, or have it too often, but for a 1 and done, or to share with a few friends, it is a really nice brew!

 

It's 10:30 EDT and I've finished my outdoor chores for the day. It's the middle of March and it looks like spring. Last year we were still buried under snow at this time.
We've had, and are having, company last week and this week. Our youngest was home from college last week, and returned yesterday. His brother got here Friday and will be with us for the coming week. It's always good to see them and enjoy their progress into adulthood. In a couple weeks my wife and I will be flying to LA to visit our oldest daughter and the grandsons, and our younger daughter will be joining us on the visit. That's four of the six. One lives in Boston, so we see him fairly often. The other daughter lives in Phoenix. She and her husband might join us in LA, but if that doesn't work out, we'll see her in the fall. It's not easy keeping track of them all!

For today's NBS, I'm going to stick with Maria's theme and drink a stout. I am drinking Luchador En Fuego, which I picked up at Spruce Creek Provisions. Overall I enjoy what Clown Shoes makes, and this is no exception.
The bomber was bottled on 2/22/16. In a snifter it was near black in color. No head, just a few bubbles around the rim.
The aroma was chocolate, spice, and chili powder.
The taste followed the nose. Chocolate, cinnamon, with a little chili burn aftertaste. There was a smidge of vanilla, otherwise nothing in the aroma or taste to suggest barrel aging.
Surprisingly drinkable for 11% ABV.
Good beer. Will drink it again.

 

Happy NBS dear friends!
Foundation Blaze!!!
This is my most innovative beer of 2016 thus far. Farmhouse IPA!
Has pale malt, victory malt and Maine grown 2 row. Hops featured are cascade, centennial, chinook and simcoe.
6.5% ABV and 68 IBUs my friends.
What a perfect concept of pairing saison yeast with hop forward ale with just very mild malt sweetness peeking through.

Looks gorgeous, simply put. Like a late summer sunset, with short lasting finger and a half head. Streams of carbonation linger on like days and day, like a good champagne!

Aromas of apricot, some tropical fruits and ending with mild horse blankets, barnyard. God it is so inviting when some extreme farmhouse ales can be quite too much for some (I love saisons and still in the discovery phase of Brett and funky ones and so it's perfect for me)

Taste is initially dominated by the floral hops and then the fruits and gets washed by THE funk! Deeeelicious. Semi Dry finish leaves one craving for more. I can't speak for all but I feel this takes way more skill then making a "hop bomb" DIPA. It just works, friends. Aftertaste of mangos, apricots, little pineapple and then the funk to bring you back to wonderland.
Loved it and gonna go and give John Bonney a big hug. Highly recommended!!!
Cheers.

 

Do you want to know a ‘secret’? (Do ah do)

A few weeks ago I discussed an Altbier from Olde Mecklenburg Brewing: http://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/new-beer-sunday-week-574.388204/#post-4532126

Today is a happy/sad day for me: I will be drinking my last bottle of a Sticke Alt that I brewed last fall. I will be happy to drink this beer but sad to see the last bottle gone.

There are not many US commercially brewed Altbiers and frankly this is not a widely consumed beer in Germany either. The German word “alt” means old, as in the old style of beers in Germany before lagers became popular. An Alt is considered to be a hybrid beer since it is brewed with an ale yeast (albeit at cooler temperatures than most ales are fermented to restrain the production of esters (fruity flavors)). Once fermentation is complete the German brewers of Dusseldorf will lager this beer to further enhance the ‘clean & crisp’ qualities of this beer.

Now back to the ‘secret’ part. I have read that the word “sticke” is local Dusseldorf vernacular for “secret” so a Sticke Alt is a ‘secret’ Altbier.

Below is a nice write-up concerning a Sticke Alt from Matt Cole (headbrewer at Fat Head’s Brewery in Ohio):

“Sticke Alt is a more intense version of altbier. These “secret beers” are brewed stronger, are slightly darker, and are dry-hopped in the conditioning tank for four to six weeks. The result is a bittersweet, ultra-crisp ale with a fresh, flowery aroma. These traditional brews are available once or twice a year, usually in September and January. I was fortunate enough to taste Sticke Alt straight out of the aging tank at the Uerige brewery. It was possibly the best beer I have ever tasted.”

http://byo.com/stories/article/indices/11-beer-styles/1210-old-world-alt

I will share some of my “secrets” of how to make a tasty Sticke Alt:

· ‘Bump’ up the malt to have a higher gravity (I shoot for an OG of around 1.065); this gives the beer a bit more ‘omph’

· Ferment using German Ale yeast (Wyeast 1007) on the cool side (e.g., 60 degrees F)

· Use a combination of Pilsner & Munich Malt as base malts; I prefer 2/3rd Pilsner and 1/3rd Munich

· Use some specialty malts like Caramunich and dehusked Carfa to deepen the color a bit and add a bit more complexity to the malt backbone

· Generously late hop (including dry hopping) with Hallertau Mittelfruh hops

· Oh, and don’t forget to cold condition (lager)

I have blabbed long enough. Time to drink my last bottle of Sticke Alt!

Served in my Sly Fox Bock Fest Willi Becher glass:

Appearance:

Pours a deep copper color with a BIG fluffy off-white head.

Aroma:

A nice combination of herbal/spicy hop aroma and toasty/bready malt aroma.

Taste:

The flavor very much follows the nose. Perhaps a bit more of the malty flavors of toasty/bready but the hop flavors of herbal/spicy are there as well.

Mouthfeel:

Medium bodied with a pleasant dry finish.

Overall:

This is a very pleasantly balanced beer with both the toasty/bready malt flavors intertwined with the herbal/spicy hop flavor/aroma in a very pleasing manner. If I had to use one word to describe this beer it would be: Yum!

Cheers to the brewers of Dusseldorf for ‘inventing’ a secret beer!!!!!

@nc41 @zid @Sixpoint @rotsaruch

 

Awesome review! Hope you have a great trip west and get to try some of their awesome offerings.

 

I totally forgot about daylight savings today. That explains where the night got away from me...
Side note: DST is such an antiquated concept. This is really the only case where I feel like Arizona has things right and the rest of the country doesn't. There's absolutely no need for it anymore. We are not an agrarian society reliant on daylight to harvest crops.
Anyway, that's my old man rant/shaking my fist at the clouds moment for now.

Got called out of work at the last minute last night, so I decided to go explore and visit a pair of breweries I had not yet been to. One is a new spot that has been getting a LOT of local buzz (Cloudburst), and the two brews I had from them did nothing to disprove the positive reputation they've cultivated. The other (Outlander) is one I thought was pretty new, but I guess they've been around for a couple of years. They're in my neighbourhood, so I figured I should probably swing by and at least give them a shot. My favourite brewery 'round here is only open until 9 (actually most breweries in the city close at either 9 or 10...), and these guys stay open until midnight+, so there's already something going for them. It's an old converted house, and is definitely cozy, and I was quite pleasantly surprised by the two beers I had there as well. In particular their Tella Porter (I got the teleporter pun right away, but I'm ashamed to admit it took me a while to realize the reference to Nutella, even though it features hazelnuts, cacao nibs, and lactose...)


On to the business at hand.

I'm a little surprised this is my first time with Wisdom Seeker (though not TOO surprised: no car means no trips over to the eastside, and since I moved to the city I go to the breweries moreso than I go to the bottle shops...). Got lucky here as well. Picked it up at the grocery store and it's only ten days old!

-The pour is gorgeous. Crisp and clear body that's a deep amber colour with a decadent head of that off white foam that IPAs offer. Lacing is greater on the second pour than the initial.
-Nose starts off delicate and fragrant with a light fruitiness and nectar-esque floral quality. Malts are rich chewy caramel in this initial courtship stage. As things settle in, the sweet trappings of pretense fall away and we find a more mature, more guarded individual with a more spicy/blunt edge to the hops.
-Flavour adheres more closely to this second impression than the first. Plenty of juicy fruits still present though. Spicy/peppery hops and big bitter citrus cut through the malarky to present an unapologetically west coast DIPA (whatever that means).
-The balance and smoothe cover slide further as the finish takes it's place of prominance, sloughing off layer after layer, revealing an at-first-pithy then finally herbacious bitter heart that clings to the tongue.

Ultimately this is a solid example of the west coast style of big IPAs.



I'm musically torn. I feel like I should accompany this beverage with some classic West Coast. But the truth is, the track that's been putting itself forward for me to use in my mind-brain is got to be Spottieottiedopalicious. So that's what I'm going with. But just know that my heart is on the West Coast (I mean, technically, my whole body is on the west coast right now. So I suppose it's a good thing my heart is present as well. Couldn't move much blood with just a ribcage...)

 

Hey What's going on!

Productive weekend, things have been busy but also cooling off and just time to sit back on do nothing Sunday. Chill time indeed.

Got lots of tasty new beers, trying to decide for either Belgian, Hop, or Roast next...

In the meantime start of straight and simple:

Lil' Hellion - Brothers Craft Brewing


Brothers Craft Brewing - Lil' Hellion by imbibehour, on Flickr

------------------------

Poured from the bottle into a Libbey style pilsner glass.

Bright and crystal clear shimmering dark brass gold body color. Ample amounts of fine carbonation, meeting to a classic bleach white soapy head. Minimal retention but with a sudsy puck as it settles, rays and rays of fine to slow carbonation just shoot like a star through this thing. Great color and great looking brew.

Excellent pilsner malt aroma with a good touch of clean herbal hop. Light sensing bready notes, a bit of sweetness of dough though that gets slightly sugary on the nose as well. Slight herb hop and fairly light smelling. Very nice.

Palate manages to bring the goods. Excellent helles light body with plenty of flavor depth, a faint touch of dry carbonation as well on the aftertaste. Mid palate hits with just a touch of honey bread dough, but gives a quick herbal soft fleeting hop bite. Finishes dry and wet but with lots of flavor in the finish, dough bread, and some pasty mild yeast character.

A very solid helles, beautiful looking brew in particular.

look: 4.5 | smell: 4.25 | taste: 4 | feel: 4.25 | overall: 4 | BA Generated Score: 4.12

------------------------

Now off to the races...

 

A beautiful rainy weekend here in Kansas, boy do we need the rain.
Last week I reviewed Victory at Sea from Ballast Point. This week I'll take a shot at Calico. I intended to do Watermelon Dorado, but here's the deal: I'm really not good with high ABV beers. I still have 5 bottles of Victory at Sea from last week, I still have 2 bottles of Nitro Wake Up Dead from a 4-pack I bought a month ago. It goes without saying that I don't like paying $15 for a sixer that's going to sit in my fridge for 5 weeks. I prefer to drink a lot of beer on the weekend and I can't do that if I'm gonna get wrecked after one bottle

One last side note -- I'm kind of getting burnt out or maybe bored with craft beer. I realized that after 1,090 reviews, 99% of those beers fall into the 3.75-4.25 category. I either don't know how to rate beer OR every single beer is the same to me, like everything I try is basically pretty good, not bad, not fantastic. Meh.

Ballast Point Calico Amber Ale. 5.5% ABV

Look: The beer is a nice clear, deep copper/amber color. A cream colored head recedes to a light film, leaving very minimal spots of lacing.

Aroma: Subtle malt bill brings out faint caramel sweetness, hops overpower with spiciness, woody cedar.

Taste: Unfortunately I prefer caramel bombs when it comes to ambers. This is a hoppy one, as I'd figured it would be. Hardly any malt sweetness is to be found although it's there in the middle. The finish is black tea tang bitterness and leaves a bitter, yet woody aftertaste.

Mouthfeel: Medium bodied, semi-dry, very drinkable.

Overall: Like I said, I like sweeter ambers, so this wasn't quite up my alley.
Rating: 3.64

 

Hello! What time is it? Sure feels like earlier in the morning to me, oh well at least it nightfall will come a bit later today.

My first new brew is from a local place, Tyranena. They made a decision in the past year to make smaller batches of their barrel aged beers so there are multiple releases each year instead of 1 or two releases every few years. Good choice!

The Kissers' Monday Night Special Oatmeal Double Stout (they don't mind really long names) is quite good. Big bourbon smell, with oak, vanilla and some dark chocolate. The smell is fantastic. The taste is a nice vanilla and big bourbon flavor. I get oak and some bitter chocolate with roasted malt. I also notice a slight hint of toasted coconut, which is pleasant. Mouthfeel is medium, but it is very velvety. Carbonation is soft and bubbly. A delicious and tasty chocolate oatmeal stout with good amount of bourbon and vanilla.

 

Since Ballast Point claims this beer is their take on English ESBs [sic] with American hops, I approach it like an old school craft APA, and in that realm I find it tasty.

 

I am currently on my dream spring break trip. I have visited Hill Farmstead, Tree House, Trillium, Jack's Abbey, Night Shift, and Castle Island Brewing so far.

Yesterday I cracked this amazing brew.


It poured a hazy golden orange, looks like a pineapple/mango smoothie.

The nose explodes with tropical fruit, citrus, and floral. Picked up small amounts of lemon as well.

The first thing out of my mouth when I tasted it was "God damn!" The taste is completely juicy, fruity, and melony. Some pineapple here and there. Possibly even some peach. Its a fruit smoothie. The finish is very herbal and earthy.

Absolutely delicious and phenomenal.