New Beer Weekend #207

Heck, yeah!

Thanks for kicking us off appropriately early on this (for some of us lucky ones) four-day weekend. And thanks for crossposting from the AAL thread! I've been lurking in there awfully hard and love that BA.com is doing another one. I remember the ... what was it? 2017 AAL thread? @TongoRad and others had me so excited about that one I must've had the equivalent of three cases of beer filling me fridge to burst that time around.

I'll shutup now and return later this weekend with an appropriate NBW brew or two.

Cheers!

 

Hello beer lovers! I enjoyed this crowler yesterday and it was satisfactory. I'll for sure head back to this brewery when I'm in Duluth. Cheers!

Canal Park Brewing Herrnberger Munich Dunkel
3.83/5 rDev +16.1%
look: 3.75 | smell: 3.75 | taste: 4 | feel: 3.5 | overall: 3.75
750 ml crowler purchased at the brewery 6/15/24 into a Pokal style glass.
L: SRM 33 Pours dark tobacco brown with glowing mahogany edges, a tall beige foamy head that slowly recedes to skin & edge foam, light carbonation, light random webby lacing.
S: Toasted grains, light char, light chocolate, brown bread crust.
T: Lightly sweet malts, a metallic taste, muted dark fruits, chocolate, toasted grains. Gentle dark chocolate in the light aftertaste.
F: Fairly smooth medium-bodied light cola-like feel with a medium length lightly drying clean and easy finish. It gets soft with warming.
O: Very easy drinking and tasty German-inspired beer. No frills. Simple and clean. It is good in its style.

 

Good day BAs! For me, every weekend is long - one of the few benefits of being retired. Thanks @ChicagoJ for starting this thread. When I got back from Germany, I spent the first day napping, drinking beer, and doing laundry. Now that my body's shifted to EST, I'm ready to join the living, beer-drinking, Murica.

Today's New Breakfast Beer:



Gulpin - from Cinderlands. 16 fl oz can purchased from Franklin Beer Co, Franklin, PA, 01/07/24, $ 4.50 (Including tax), $ 0.282/fl oz. Reviewed 05/07/24 (Review 3312). Note that I use DD/MM/YY protocol.
Bottom rim of can stamped “BIG GULPS 7.1% 5/21/24”. Stored in reefer at the distributor, 34 degrees at home. Served at 44.8 degrees F in a hand washed and dried Jester King snifter. The final temperature was 56.4 degrees F.
Appearance – 4.
First pour – Straw (SRM 3), clear. (Unfiltered and unpasteurized)
Body – Deep Gold (SRM 6), opaque. Under direct light, same. When rear-lite, a very tiny precipitate is evident.
Head – Large (Maximum 4.7 cm, aggressive center pour), ivory, high density with a rocky top, leaving a 1.7 – 2.2 cm frothy crown and cap.
Lacing – As the volume drops, the frothy head remains as torn curtain lacing.
Aroma – 4.25 – Initially very piney and resinous, but that soon weakens, and spice and generic citrus come through. No yeast, no malt, no alcohol (7.1 % ABV, according to the can).
Flavor – 4.25 – Lightly bitter with citrus and resin. No yeast, no malt, no alcohol. No dimethylsulfide or diacetyl. No gastric warming.
Palate – 3 – Medium; slightly creamy; lively carbonation.

Final Impression and summation: 4 An easy drinking IPA.
Rating 4.06, rDev 0% (First review)

 

Klosterbrau Bamberger Rauchbier


Appearance: Dark brown, big head.

Smell: Smoky—Charcoal.

Taste: Mild sweetness followed by nice smoke flavor. Beechwood smoke is not harsh. Medium bodied. Smoke continues in the finish, maybe a touch of acid.

Overall: Always excited to try a new-to-me smoked beer. Picked up some in the Quad Cities. Nice and smoky, maybe a step or two below Schlenkerla in complexity. Still tasty and a good deal too!

 

The bar stools here feel good BAs!
Here's something I'm pondering:
There are Sea Salt & Lime Lagers in both AL and AAL categories. Are fruit flavouring adjuncts not always considered? Seems odd.
Cheers! to day 2

 

BTW I'll be trying a new Sea Salt Lime brew today! and am digging thru some AALs.

 

Do you like Pistachios?

Back to the question above, I enjoy eating pistachios. But will I enjoy pistachios in a beer?

Today’s beer is courtesy of my good buddy Phil who purchased it a month ago while visiting with family in North Dakota. The beer is Indeed Pistachio Cream Ale which was made in Minneapolis, MN.

Below is from the brewery’s website:

“THE STORY

Just like cracking open a pistachio shell to liberate the nut, raising the pull tab of a Pistachio Cream Ale can to puncture the top has the power to bring immense satisfaction—12 ounces of it, to be exact. This pistachio-forward beer does not disappoint with a subtly nutty and malty flavor that leaves a spritzy mouthfeel. It’s a beer to go unabashedly nuts for.

THE GOODS

Malts: Pilsner, 6 row, corn, munich

Hops: Mittelfruh, El Dorado

Yeast: A15 Independence

Special Ingredients: Pistachio essence

THE STATS

5.5% ABV | 15 IBU”

https://www.indeedbrewing.com/our-beer/pistachio-cream-ale

Served in my Tulip pint glass:

Appearance:

Golden colored with a BIG fluffy white head.

Aroma:

The dominant aroma is an interesting nutty aspect.

Taste:

The flavor pretty much follows the nose with nutty but there is also some vanilla there was well. There is a low/moderate bitterness.

Mouthfeel:

Medium bodies with an off-dry finish.

Overall:

This beer is pretty good, I enjoyed drinking the one can. Nothing in this beer said “pistachio” but there was some general ‘nuttiness’ to the beer. Maybe a better analogy here could be it tastes like pistachio ice cream?

@RobH @rotsaruch @KOP_Beer_OUtlet

 

Depends on who you ask.

In the (educated) brewing industry the term adjunct means an ingredient that adds extract (i.e., fermentables) to a beer. Examples are corn, rice, syrups/sugars.

If you add lime peel to a beer that should be considered a flavoring vs. an adjunct. Some person might argue that if you add lime juice to a beer that could be an adjunct since the lime juice will contain a little bit of sugars. I personally would not advocate this explanation since the intent of adding lime juice is for flavoring purposes as opposed to adding extract to the beer.

And then there are people who misuse the term of adjunct for all sorts of flavorings like vanilla, coffee, etc.

Cheers!

 

Okay. I've come to understand that "industry definition" where it's focused on the starches, priming sugars being substituted. Like, it's more about altering the core basis of the primary ingredients. I guess some beers will slip thru the cracks here & there. Thanks buddy! Looks like my Shiner Sea Salt/Lime Lager won't make the AAL thread but it'll pop up here no matter what.

 

Thanks, I genuinely appreciate all the likes although all of those notifications had me confused for a minute . "I don't remember making all those posts yesterday " Then I noticed it was the old thread and was relieved.

 

This beer is widely available on tap in MPLS/ST PAUL and even in the burbs. Indeed has good distro here.

 

Since you are willing to drink Corona type beers, an exercise you might want to consider for a future tasting is a side-by-side tasting of Corona Familiar and Corona Extra. I have read several folks opine they are the same beer. I have read where other folks point out the small difference in the listed ABV as an indication they are not the same beer. One aspect to bear in mind is that larger breweries tend to produce beers via the High Gravity method for efficiency reasons; the beers are fermented to be higher in ABV (e.g., 8% ABV) and then subsequently diluted with de-aerated water to achieve a set ABV (e.g., 4.5% ABV and/or 4.8% ABV). Presuming that the brewery is conducting High Gravity brewing than maybe Familiar and Extra are from the same 'base' beer but diluted via differing amounts of water.

An even 'better' way to evaluate these two beers would be via a triangle taste test:



Cheers!

P.S. Using two beers of comparable age (e.g., fresh) would be best.

 

Sounds like you should have 'plopped' a lime wedge into that beer like my wife did with the last Corona Extra tasting I conducted (2017?).

Cheers!

 

Wow, what a night. And thanks to @zeile33 I had a wonderful drink. Received in NBS BIF #18.

Return of the Barleywine

Pours deep and mysterious. Profoundly dark brown with a hint of viscosity shown. Sandy head forms and sticks around for a few minutes. Light lacing, great retention for a barleywine.
Nose is definitely on the sweeter side, like English style. The usual suspects chime in: caramel, dates, figs, toffee. But the barrels whisper as well. A deep, mildly fruited brandy note starts off but then makes way for a warm, gently spicy whiskey note.
The flavor starts off with a warm embrace. Rye barrel. Slightly peppery and gently charred. Then the firm barleywine notes come in, but not as sweet as expected, tamped back by the rye barrel I'm guessing. As she warms there is this back and forth between the sweeter notes raising their voices: toffee, dates, and caramel, followed by a hefty apple brandy that is lush and comforting. Then the rye barrel asserts itself, brings things around, and finishes warm and a smooth bitterness tames a bit of the sweetness on the end.
Mouthfeel is warm and a tad chewy for style, try nice.
4.35/5 rDev 0%
look: 4.25 | smell: 4.25 | taste: 4.5 | feel: 4.25 | overall: 4.25

 

New Saison Weekend for me thanks to a helpful tip from @champ103 :

I've wanted to try this beer for years but either slept on it or never saw it on the shelves here in Texas. Then a couple weeks ago I saw my fellow Houstonian post a picture of it, so I asked him where he found it, and he kindly directed me to the getting place ... a fantastic little beer shop btw and one I haven't been to in years, so double thanks to Paul for helping me find this beer *and* for getting me reacquainted with Premium Draught. I'll be going back.

The beer itself seems a sturdy example of the style it helped define. It smells like a sweet banana/clove German hefeweizen or Belgian tripel, almost a banana milkshake level of sweetness, but the taste is immediately different with an unmistakeable wall of bitterness. Hops and yeast flavor in the bitterness with the hops tasting mostly like black pepper when they're not generically earthy. The overall effect is a lemon/orange/grapefruit peel flavor that lingers in the finish and builds as you go. The banana flavor/sweetness isn't prevalent in the flavor, but the clove remains.

All in all a fairly simple brew with nothing out of bounds nor blingey ... it's not what I would call "farmy" or funky like a lot of farmhouse ales can be, but it's also not dolled up with any adjuncts or adjunct-type flavors. A very down the middle of home plate beer IMO.

Official review:
https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/637/1717/?ba=Premo88#lists
3.92 (-6.4% rDev)

I feel like a complete ass for not loving this beer b/c it's a legend and who the hell am I to knock it? At the same time, I was hoping for a bit more farminess or at least a little more sweetness in the flavor. Neither are there, so my score reflects personal bias more than adherence to the style. Rating on style alone, I mean ... it's 5/5, right? I'm not sure you can get more saison than this.

FWIW I've got another can in the fridge, and I may let it cool its heels for awhile before opening it. In fact, I might take it out of the fridge to age it a bit more quickly just to give the malt a bit more time to add something to the party.

Cheers!