New Beer Weekend #78

NBS #2. Each January, Carton Brewing releases one of its iconic beers, Regular Coffee, a 12% Cream Ale that pays homage to the coffee served in Jersey diners. As a diner aficionado, I approve! In addition to the "regular" Regular Coffee, Carton releases several variants and there is a new one each year. 2022's new variant is Cafe Revolver, which combines diner coffee with a Revolver cocktail; it's brewed with orange bitters and finished in a bourbon barrel. I have certain favorite Regular Coffee variants and this is now one of them. What a tasty and fun beer to drink!

It pours a cloudy, orange-brown color, darker than most Carton coffee variants, with a finger of creamy, milk-white head and thick lacing. It smells of freshly-brewed coffee, vanilla, lactose, and a whiff of orange peel. It opens like Regular Coffee - fresh, acidic brewed coffee with lots of milky sweetness - but almost immediately I can taste the orange bitters, which add more fruitiness than I'd anticipated. The effect of the barrel-aging is evident but it's very delicate and doesn't distract from the coffee at all. The result is quite unique - combining Saturday night's cocktail with (early) Sunday morning's coffee. The tail of Jersey dog! The mouth feel is reminiscent of the other Coffee variants; it's thick and creamy for the style with pleasant carbonation, and per usual the 12% ABV isn't in your face.

4.4/5 rDev 0%
look: 4.25 | smell: 4.25 | taste: 4.5 | feel: 4.25 | overall: 4.5

Thank you, @augiecarton, for this gem. I bet you enjoyed coming up with the recipe!

 

KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD is right
Barrel aged wild ale brewed with rice, fermented with koji, golden oyster mushrooms and cedarwood. Freaking mad scientist brewers, I'd say. Smelled sweet, sour and lemon and champagne colored. Initially fizzy. It was different for sure and I liked it.
First pour.



Second pour. Cloudier.









Mad scientists or what?
CHEERS! Have a pleasant Martin Luther King Day !
Never Forget! Raise Hell! Drink Beer!

 

Happy NBS. I was up until 5AM again, and woke up at 330PM. I might have all of my untappd data updated in a few days. It's taking a long ass time, but thankfully I don't review 4-5 beers a day like I did before, so it is going to be a lot more manageable in the future. Then I can finally do fun charts and dive deeper into my own data soon. Julia boiled a lb of linguine and it was a good dinner. Just Ragu garlic and onion sauce. We got snow last night and it looks pretty nice out. Not sure how much ice is out there, I won't drive anywhere until it's necessary. Doesn't look too wild for someone who lived in Ohio for my life lol.


Grimm Tetraplex. 3/1/2021 canning. Awesome DIPA. Lasting rocky head retention and foamy lacing. Aromas and flavors of big red grapefruit, mandarin orange juice, peach, pineapple, mango, passion fruit, melon, blueberry, citrus peel/rind, wood, pepper, pine, wheat, white bread, light toast, and herbal/floral/grassy hop earthiness. Light-moderate pine, citrus peel/rind, herbal, floral, woody, grassy, peppery bitterness on the finish. Medium carbonation and medium-plus body; balanced creamy/bready malt, sticky hops, and some resins in the mouthfeel. Increasing resin dryness after the finish, with no lingering astringency. Not overly heavy for the ABV, minimal residual sweetness from lingering resins. Mildly increasing warmth of 10% after the finish. Great mosaic profile with added Falconers flight and Citra according to the can. Great soft feel for the style and ABV. Very juicy, vibrant, and fairly dank hops; with a nice balancing oat/malt backbone. Mosaic is one of my top favorite hops, so this nailed all flavor expectations. One of the smoothest 10% beer's I've had for sure. 4.18


Cheers

 

Figured I would review something with alcohol before this thread closes down, 3 Sheeps Down with the Thickness.
4.22/5 rDev +9.6%
look: 4.25 | smell: 4 | taste: 4.25 | feel: 4.5 | overall: 4.25

16 oz can poured into a tulip

A- Black with a two finger dark mocha head.

S- Roasted malts, slightly smoky, molasses, dark fruits, touch of dark chocolate.

T- Roasted malts, dark chocolate, molasses, dark fruits, slightly smoky, hints of caramel.

M- Smooth, full body.

O- This is a thick stout as the name implies. Taste is more balanced that nose, very big flavors.

Until next weekend stay safe and wear a mask, cheers!

 

Another new Widowmaker DIPA, this time a real DIPA (), and a collab with Vitamin Sea to boot. Between Two Ferms was canned on 12/29/21, making it two-and-a-half weeks old. This beer features BRU-1 and Mosaic hops in the boil, with the same in the dry-hop plus an addition of Pacific Sunrise. I have never been sold by BRU-1 before, so let's see how this does.

Pours a typical but good-looking NEIPA with a nice sheet of lacing. It's not exactly groundbreaking, but I have generally found WM's IPAs to look pretty nice in a glass, and this is no different. Legs are a bit less-developed than some others, and the retention isn't quite great, but the lace makes up for it all with its perfect consistency.

Nose is hefty white grape with some tropical fruit, but it seems pretty anonymous upon first sniff. I can pick out some papaya and melon elements alongside a bunch of dankness, and the Sauv Blanc-esque aspect is pretty powerful for a hoppy beer that doesn't have Nelson in it. However, it's really straddling the line between being an unfocused Mosaic-driven DIPA and something greater, just from the nose alone. This starts getting a bit catty after it opens up a bit, which makes me feel like I'm drinking a Citra bomb.

Soft and plush feel driven by multiple foams of oats (according to WM, this features "a massive amount of flaked, malted, and naked oats in the grist"). Flavors of honeydew melon, bright white grape, crisp tropical fruits (papaya and passion fruit are prominent notes), and hints of apricot. I enjoy this for what it is, but it's missing the tangy bite I really want from something with these hops. BRU-1 continues to evade my appreciation (though it has always seemed like a hop that would be better in non-IPAs to me), and overall it's good stuff, but just not spectacular at all.

 

Day 2, this beer has widely varying reviews. I’m a SN fanboy of the highest magnitude (this will be beer #125 that I’ve enjoyed from them), so I’m really looking forward to this relatively fresh hop bomb.







4.35/5 rDev +11%
look: 4.25 | smell: 4.25 | taste: 4.5 | feel: 4.25 | overall: 4.25
by ovaltine from Indiana

Pours a beautiful golden color with the slightest bit of suspended hop haze and a clingy, substantial oatmeal colored head. This is the classic old school WCIPA look that I love. Dank citrus nose, at least for me because I’m drawn to those aromas, and there’s also the stone fruit and melon mentioned in the description of this beer.

The citrus is forward on the taste, with my palate picking up tangerine and grapefruit flavors, and there’s also a substantial berry note, which is absolutely delicious, and the melon and some malt sweetness at the back of the palate for balance.

The mouthfeel is medium, fairly bright, and very dry, perfect for the WCIPA style. There’s a lot going on with this beer, but at its core, it’s a full bodied, flavorful WCIPA that I’ll keep in my beer fridge on the regular if it’s added to the SN lineup on a regular basis.

 

That is just unacceptable. I would understand if the bartender at BWW or TGIFs didn’t know when a keg was tapped, but a brewery? Come on, those folks behind the bar are the beer SMEs, subject matter experts.

That’s a real unfortunate brewery experience, sorry to hear that.
It would have been a one & done visit for me!

 

Poured into a 16 oz Snulip glass not sure when it was canned. Pours a rather dark brown with a half finger light brown head that leaves a few wisps of lace, with little retention. 3.75

Aroma chocolate, peanut butter, raspberry, and vanilla. 3.5

Taste follows cocoa, peanut butter, vanilla, and again not sure why but raspberry after each sip. 3.75

Mouthfeel is very thin for the ABV, more carbonation would be nice, not sticky or dry, and again for 9% it goes down really easy. 3.75

Overall not a beer I would get again, not terrible but I wanted it to be better. 3.5

 

I've seen this around but for whatever reason I've kinda been hesitant to give it a shot despite mostly liking PB stouts. Thank you for the review... it is as I feared, and I am once again thanking my gut feeling for being probably-right. Cheers, sir.

Last one for the night...



Following the theme of going back and forth between IPAs and stouts today, here is an 8% flavored dessert-inspired stout from Hi-Wire Brewing. I'm not very familiar with them, but they seem to be based out of North Carolina. I think 10W-40 is a fantastic name for a stout (it's a designation for an older kind of engine oil used in diesel vehicles), and this seems to be a series. This one is Blueberry Crumble inspired and features blueberries (duh), molasses, cinnamon, cacao, vanilla, and lactose.

Pours a decent-looking brownish-black beer with a quickly-forming head of pale-brown foam that quickly sinks to a half-finger of suds, leaving behind almost no lace. The legs here are alright, but I would definitely prefer a bit more retention and lacing in this type of beer. I'm hoping the decadent adjunct ingredient list buoys the proceedings a bit.

The nose is oatmeal-forward with strong suggestions of cocoa and darker berry elements. Pie crust and slight rye-like spice enter my senses quickly, dissipating just as fast, though I do enjoy the light baking spice that I pick up here after the initial elements fade. The cinnamon is quite light, but it helps bring out some subtle dessert-esque aspects that would probably be lost otherwise. Moderately-strong ethanol sniff with a bit of earthiness for good measure.

Flavors of dark chocolate and vanilla-tinged marshmallow overtake the palate as slight suggestions of dark berry weave in and out over the course of the session. The molasses is somewhat intrusive here, I'd say, as it really brings out this sticky bitter element that I wish would just chill out and actually let the other adjuncts/recipe itself deliver some sweetness. The dessert-like component of this is a bit lost, honestly, and that is frustrating. For comparison, I appreciated how reserved-yet-still-present the strawberry donut was in the Evil Twin beer I reviewed a few hours ago, but this one just seems to be getting in its own way despite having all of these extra ingredients. A bit of grassy bitterness in the finish and a ton of roasty, spicy maltiness... eh. I wouldn't pick this up again, but it's not awful. Just not in line with what was promised.

 

Last, at least new beer of the weekend, for me. Another beer from Tonewood, this one is named after the location of their new production brewery. They built it in and old lumberyard so here we are…

Tonewood Brewing - Lumberyard Lager (5.2 % helles lager)



Pours a straw color with a nice initial head. Leaves some decent lacing as it settles, less so but still present as it’s drank down. It’s clearer than it looks in the picture but still slightly cloudy.

Aroma initial impression a subtle sweetness, a touch of gentle floral hops and some subtle grain/cereal.

Taste leans same grain and subtle sweetness; spicey hop finish which I didn’t expect but is very welcome.

Light body, has a nice zip to it when it hits the tongue, goes down very clean and finish dry. Low and quick fleeting hop bite at the end, comes and goes so fast. It adds to this beers incredible drinkability.

Another beer I could fill up my fridge with and not mind from Tonewood. It’s balanced and super easy to drink.

Can’t wait to see what the next chapter holds for this brewery as they have grown so organically. It’s been fun to watch it happen in a world of trend chasers and hype creators.

 

Hello NBWers,
Been a while and I apologize for general sloth and lassitude. However, I am the first to review this beer here on Beer Advocate, so that counts for something, right?

Cumbre VIVID WILD. A Hazy IPA. 7.5%
No other information other than a canning date of 12.28.21

4.1/5 rDev 0%
look: 4 | smell: 4 | taste: 4.25 | feel: 4 | overall: 4


L - the murk is real; but not opaque like some of the more dense NE IPA Styles. Head disippated quickly and not much lacing. I took this shot 2-3 seconds after I'd poured it and was struck by the lack of head. Ok...'nuff said.

S - Has a whiff of the melon, citric, tropical fruit, and dare I say "woody" note to it? I'm not sure of the hop bill here as there is ZERO information on the can itself (or on the brewery site, frankly). So it's hard to guess what's going on here, whether they are using some of the local New Mexican "wild" hop that is native to the state. To me, it smells a bit Sabro-ish and man... just not for me.

T - Fortunately it's a balanced hazy IPA, not boozy, not too woody and I don't get over-coconut, a good mouthful of canteloupe, citric, and some hops.

F - Good carbonation, but again, not overly so. Decent and full palate impact.

O - Like this beer, not sure I'd choose it again over Elevated or P. Dank however. A good experiment?

 

Poured into a 16 Snulip glass canned on 12/06/21. Pours an attractive mahogany with a solid finger plus dark tan head, that leaves a few thin streaks of lace with solid retention. 4.25

Aroma is maple, dates, brown sugar, and alcohol. 4

Taste follows maple stands out, dates, brown sugar, and again the alcohol creeps in. 4

Mouthfeel is above average for sure, soft carbonation, maybe a tad dry, and at 14.4% pretty easy going down. 4

Overall this is pretty hardcore, it is a tad sweet but still very nice. 4

 

Yes, I am still looking for it’s equal.