New Beer Sunday (Week 756)

One more tonight, Three Floyds Behemoth, thanks @bstyle!
4.39/5 rDev +3.5%
look: 4 | smell: 4.25 | taste: 4.5 | feel: 4.25 | overall: 4.5

Thank you bstyle for this
22 oz bottle, 2018, poured into a teku

A- A slightly hazy/murky reddish amber with a three finger off-white head.

S- Piney, caramel, some citrus, some stone fruits, orange peels, toasted malts.

T- Piney, toasted and caramel malts, stone fruits, raisins, some citrus/orange peels, a little herbal.

M- Smooth, medium to full body, a little creamy.

O- A really nice Barelywine, definitely has that big piney hop flavor you find in American Barelywines. Tasty and nicely balanced.

Cheers!

 

Wow is there some great-looking stuff in here today! It's how NBSers do, I know, but still ... I have some catching up to do.

I also have a new-to-me beer to help me do it:

Leffe Blonde, Belgian pale ale, 6.6% ABV

Anybody know for sure how to uncode their bottling date?


I was inspired to try this one finally after reading posts from and chatting with @Warwick7 here on BA.com ("Golden Ales" thread in particular; some good BAs have chimed in there FWIW). The short version is it's lovely, very Belgian in every aspect and highlighted by a wonderful bit of funky, yeasty, lemony earth in the nose and a mouthfeel that can't be beat for us carbonation lovers. It has a pinch too much clove flavor for my liking, but others might find that and it's earthy/yeasty flavor delightful. The flavor is definitely not too sweet despite having plenty of sweetness in the nose.

The review:
https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/470/2137/?ba=Premo88#review
4.11 (+14.2% rDev)

Games of our youths? Much like @lordofthewiens' brilliant introduction, I and my band of merry friends were all about the ball and stick, but we were never very inventive. Mostly we played baseball with our Little League aluminum bats and tennis balls (so nobody got hurt, windows included). When the band of friends wasn't around, I found every possible way to play with a ball, bat and glove you can imagine, including trying to pitch a complete game no-hitter like Nolan Ryan by somehow bouncing a tennis ball off some kind of surface, fielding/catching the ball and then, if necessary, throwing out the runner at first base. Probably this helps account for some of what imagination I have as well as my independent streak.

Hope your Sundays are wrapping up nicely!

Cheers!

 

Happy Sunday NBS players. A pretty busy Sunday but I'm hoping that better job offers this week or in the future change that back. A humid and hot summer day here on the island. Gots tomorrow off so I've been able to get a few beers in me and not have to worry about being up.

My new beer today is Blame It On My Juice, dipa w/ Idaho 7 & Amarillo, from Moustache Brewing. The brew checks in at 8.5% and no canning date. This is the latest release from the said brewery so fairly fresh.

A fairly amber color on the pour with a fast white head of bubbles. A slight nose of hops and fruit. Hoppy and tangy upfront with a smooth flow and a finish that is void of bitter. The hops and fruit come off rather muddled. Notes of lemon, orange, mango, and grapefruit. A moderate mouthfeel that drinks slightly juicy and dry.

Overall, another run of the mill take on the style. Drinkable but boring and nothing really stands out at all. 3.5 range at best,

 

Well stated and sorry about your friend

 

There are curtains? I usually hear this loud gong.

Not that it stops me. So I will continue with another Carton beer, 077XX.


Looks of a light to moderately hazed version of a classic amber DIPA (the pic has condensation muddying things a tad more than actual. The head doesn’t maintain the near two fingers of depth, but it doesn’t give up and leave, either. And I batted 1.000 on lacing today (granted one beer was nitro).

Nose is a light toasted malt with some orange marmalade, tangerine and orange pith. There’s also a mineral aspect showing up.

The mineral note comes up front with the orange/tangerine. The toasted cracker malt doesn’t put up much fight. A classic grapefruit pith bitterness grows and grows. It doesn’t completely overcome the mineral note, but it does push everything else aside, eventually.

The 80 IBU is in full effect with this beer. A fairly light heft to this at just under 8% could be dangerous if the bitterness didn’t slow you up a little bit.

A really refreshing beer for me after a couple of days of mostly dry-hopped hazy IPAs. Just a tad more malt presence and a little less of that metallic note would improve this beer.

 

Hello New Beer Sunday!!!

Only 2 more Sundays I have to work, and then I'll FINALLY have a day off each week. You all have no idea how I'm looking forward to it. I've even got a road trip planned for my first Sunday - Decorah, Iowa. I'm sure a lot of you know what's there, and it will be my first ever visit there. I'm so excited. 2 more Sundays of work.

As a kid, I grew up in a suburb of St. Paul, about 20 minutes south of it. There were 2 dead end roads right by my house growing up, and there were hills there. In the winter, they were perfect sledding hills. There were woods, where us kids built forts in the summer. There was a gravel pit behind those woods, behind my parents house. We could shoot BB guns and no one cared. Hell, my dad used his .38 to take care of the woodchucks burrowing under his shed, and just wrecking it, and no one cared. It was a lot of fun.

There were some major hills leading the park nearby the house, and it was fun to ride bikes down them, though one kid didn't do so well, because he wiped out really bad, and knocked out all his teeth doing so.

It was a pretty good childhood. Heck we even got to see a girl, who was quite bitchy, and a grade older than me go into the gravel pit and hook up with a guy in it.

Fun times back in the 70's and 80's.

My mom still lives in the house I grew up in, though my dad died 2 1/2 years ago. The dead end streets are no longer dead end, and the gravel pit is LONG gone, and there's houses there now.

But, on to the main event - BEER, and a new one at it.


In honor of Valkyrie Brewing Company's 25th anniversary I'm drinking Berserk Barley Wine Ale. It's listed at 12% ABV. The bottle I've got, Randy, the brewmaster told me was from 2017.

This is a Barleywine, and a good one at it. I'll describe it better, well, as much as I can describe it in my review. I do have 2 more bottles of it that I'll age some more, and try them down the road. Who knows, if I'm able to participate in the next NBS BIF, some lucky BA might get one of the 2 bottles.

Review:

3.97/5 rDev +5.6%
look: 4 | smell: 3.75 | taste: 4 | feel: 4.25 | overall: 4

This bottle is 2017 vintage, consumed on 8-18-19.
Pours a darker amber color. 1 finger off white head. Head retention isn't so good, but expected with a 12% ABV beer. Nice carbonation bubbles rising in the glass.
The nose has a lot of boozy smelling, but in a pleasing way. I get, I think, a cherry note to it. Some caramel.
Taste - Caramel, cherry, toffee, biscuit. All in pleasing amounts.
This is a full bodied beer. It isn't as boozy as I was expecting, it's actually quite smooth. It does have also a bit of a pop from the carbonation.
This is a very tasty barleywine. I do have 2 more bottles, and I will age them, and try them down the road.


A big Barleywine means I'm done for the night. See you all next Sunday, and throughout the week.

 

(Un?)Happy Get Back Up On the Platform for A New Beer Sunday (Week 756)!
I was away in KofP/Gulph Mills since Friday for a monthly beer share held by a friend at his house on Saturday. He had long been after me to come out, but it is a bit of a haul for me on public trans. If I come in on Friday, he will pick me up & I always stay overnight on Saturday. It's a fun time & a good arrangement with me helping to clean up before I head for home.

Our big thing, as inner-city kids, was Whiffle Ball! We would play anywhere at any time & baseball was king during the 1970s so we watched it on TV, collected baseball cards & reimagined ourselves as our favorite players.

Last week, I beCAN what I believed was my final run-through/purge of Platform BC beers, all purchased before their recent acquisition. I finished on Tuesday, only to discover a couple more while packing for this weekend! Grr.

Here they are:
https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/36487/344741/?ba=woodychandler#navigation
&
https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/36487/232839/?ba=woodychandler#review

That's gonna do it for this week. Next week, I will spend the entire day as usual.

 

Back with a legit entry...

First, to the question of the day. When I was a kid my town had like 800 registered voters. Everybody knew damned near everybody. There were no neighborhoods to speak of and few kids lived near us. But outside play all day when very young, usually involving dirt and toy trucks. Then outside with some type of chore as we got older. The chores usually devolved into fights of some kind, so guess who did all the chores. Throwing tomatoes or rocks if we were really into it, not uncommon. But our thing was baseball in the summer, just the two of us, with arbitrary ground rules for argument fuel. We would pick teams and emulate our favorite players batting or pitching, invisible runners galore - fantasy baseball, in a way. How we never hit a window is beyond me. Second was bicycles...we had a horseshoe driveway with straightaways about 50 feet long. With no traffic, we could race it like a full oval, "powersliding " the corners. I was much more adventurous on the bike, and that three speed sting ray with the two inch drag slick rear tire went through woods amazingly well but there were some spectacular crashes. We were both into music, I started much younger, so during school that took up free time and there weren't as many chores during school. In the woods, BB guns, pine needle forts and pine cone battles. I hated garden chores at the time, but gardening and growing became second nature to me. We have had our grandson out already planting seeds, pulling weeds, watering (mostly himself), then enjoying the fruits of his labor at 2 years old. I can't imagine a summer without being able to pick my own tomatoes, peppers, etc. While I don't want to force it, I hope he learns the same lessons from his "playing in the dirt with Papa".

Ok, beer:


From our last Maine adventure, Lake St. George Danny's Oatmeal Stout. An aggressive pour yields a nice, substantial, rocky khaki colored head that actually persisted a while over the black coffee colored liquid. The smell is light chocolate, none of the burnt acrid notes stouts can have, a bit of coffee and nice, controlled toasty character. The taste is excellent - smooth and integrated, nothing sticking out or out of place. A little chocolate, touch of coffee, and a restrained yet full roast malt flavor. The textures exceptional with that smoothness oats bring to the party, medium bodied and completely enjoyable to drink. This is a winner and a well-crafted beer, and will be north of 4.0, just a question of how far.

 

I don't know you but have seen and read your posts for a few years now, and the best $0.02 I can offer based on learning about you through your posts is you've got way too much good and way too much life in you to cave in. You'll be in the S for awhile with your boss/work situation perhaps, but from my own experience when that happens, I try to tell myself to duck my head, charge through the next day the best I can and don't worry about anything else. I know it's easy to say, but if you can belive me, I've tried real hard to walk that walk and found success when I have. Good luck, brother!

 

ISO: @kemoarps blackberry pie FT: Name it.

 

Hey, take care of yourself. All other things will fall into place, jobs, relationships, etc...But first you be good to you. Glad to hear of your resilience.

 

Hello Late Night NBS.
Love the opening @lordofthewiens .
Growing up here in Orange County, we actually still had lots of orange fields, even in the 70's. We'd run around playing various tag, shoot 'em up, dirt clod wars, hide and seek games as we could think of. This song uses dry rivers and orange fields as luminous metaphors...



We also had one neighbor who let his sons and all of the rest of us delinquents dig up their backyard. We'd dig trenches, cover them with plywood, and bury them to make cave systems for our war games. Crazy crap. Somebody took it to another level by putting dog shit in those old Legg's pantyhose eggs for stink grenades!

 

Late night NBS is my favorite NBS (I don't have to work Mondays)

OK, enough f-ing emoticons ... let's try a new beer:

Four Corners' El Chingon, American IPA, 7.3% ABV, 72 IBUs, 16.5 plato

All those numbers above AND a born-on date of 10/22/18. Dammitt! You'd think a beer drinker would learn to check born-on dates.

But we forge on and find a few redeemable things about this beer: the pour/appearance of this beer is fantastic, giving it the look of a well-constructed brew; the flavor has some piney hops that are bitter, biting and tasty; the mouthfeel is so good it's helping the way a good mouthfeel can, turning a not-super-tasty beer into a pleasant experience.

The aroma is awful, just a mushy malty mess of super sweet caramel mango, and the taste, while full of bitter hops, is also at least half full of that malt mess. But for a barleywine it's not too bad, and at 10 months old, this one more or less has turned into a barleywine.

The review:
https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/30364/98161/?ba=Premo88#review
3.36 (-9.4% rDev)

I'll try to re-review this one in the future if and when I find a fresher version.

Cheers!

 

I stopped putting up my ratings last year on this forum and WBAYDN, but one could always find them on the beer's link that I usually provide. However, this gem requires a bit of urgency.

https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/29600/95992/

I decided to post the "after" pic of my last Russian River glass. While I was on the phone, Uncle Harry the 13 year old rescued Maine **** mix, jumped up on my desk causing me to grab the glass and tap the bottle with it. He always wants to get in on the conversation. I probably lost about one third of the beer as I had drank about a third of the glass at that point.



4.67/5 rDev +8.6%
look: 4.25 | smell: 4.75 | taste: 4.75 | feel: 4.25 | overall: 4.75

375 ml. bottle.
Brewed 7.1.2017.
Bottled 11.8.2018.
852 bottles.
9.24% abv.
Moderate to vigorous pour yields a 1/2 inch off white head over a reddish- orange body with scant lacing. Wonderfully complex nose of spruce, whole ground mustard, herbed vinegar, citrus, and a bit of funk and forest. Akin to a nice hike in spruce woods. Taste tries to mirror the ever-evolving nose, but doesn't quite make it. What it makes is absolute deliciousness. Taste is lemon tartness, pine, and spruce with supporting roles of wet leaves and wet spruce needles. Wow, I need another bottle as it would probably evolve even more. Nice feel and overall, a beer as unique and delicious as, as...well, I don't know; like nothing I've ever had before. Find this beer and savor it!
Cheers!!!

 

As for beer, I popped another nice one from our very own @Buck89 . Thanks again!

Attention Please! DIPA (Citra) by Southern Grist

Pours turbid, yellow, and pushing up an assertive clumpy head. Off white with solid retention for the first few minutes. Less lacing than expected, being scattered and light.
Smell is boldly tropical initially. Then some nice bright citrus notes come in, followed by some wet grainy notes. finally heads in a slightly herbal to jasmine direction.
Flavor is no shrinking violet. Again, bold tropical flavors leap forward but mix with citrus and herbal, almost peppery notes. Cracker malt sustains all. But the melange of lemon zest, grapefruit, overripe pineapple, slight onion, and bittering notes are eventually tamed a tad by some mango and melon. A lot going on.
Mouthfeel is pillowy (as stated on the can). Active carbonation.
Overall, I might prefer it a tad toned down on the herbal and onion if I were going to drink a few. But a solid DIPA.

4.2/5 rDev -4.3%
look: 3.75 | smell: 4.25 | taste: 4.25 | feel: 4 | overall: 4.25

 

Great pic! Sorry about the glass.

 

I CANtemplated the same thing!!!

 

Beautiful pics!

 

NBSx3, night cap edition. Welp, I decided to extend the pleasantries based on the fact that I'm not anticipating too much of a crazy day tomorrow. Stupid, as it's Monday and everyday is insane. All well.

So this here is a beer that I thought sells itself. So much so that I even handed one off to my friend @Beersnake1 before even trying it. It's from Breakside, it's a stout, and it was aged in Pappy barrels. No brainer....

Breakside
Grandpappy- Maple Barrel Salted Caramel Stout 2019 (Imperial Stout with sea salt, vanilla, raisins, and cinnamon aged in wheated bourbon and maple syrup barrels)





Well, Grandpappy sure as hell looks well whatever his age. Nearly pitch black, clean looking, with auburn and ruby red highlights, and a proper, thin and tiny tight knit bubbled espresso foam colored ring just above the surface. The retention is impressive and the spotty lacing is just right.

Aroma is all booze at first, but give the old dog some time and it begins to shine. Molasses, chocolate and wood, with tart berry like sweetness stings. Just a drop of vanilla and some spice, but cinnamon is not exactly what comes to mind.

What a treat. Everything comes together very nicely here. The cinnamon shows itself well and the sea salt pops. The collective boasts a cherry soda likeness, but not in a medicinal way. Chocolate covered raisins before an oak and booze carry on in the finish.

Feel is a bit thin yet still oily. Slick and smooth with a light but spicy tingle. Favoring sweet along with low carbonation definitely encourages small sips. The booze is warming but dialed in appropriately.

Overall, this reminds me of what I would call Rusty Nail's little brother. It's very good but lacks intensity. Wether this is more refined or less, I think that would be up to the user. For me, it's a bit thin and the flavors don't explode. Having said that, it's still effing delicious.

After my official review, I gave Grandpappy a rating of 4.09 with an rDev of -1.0%. Cheers!