New Beer Sunday (week 620)

The more I kept reading that label, the more it looked like it said "warehouse sale".

 

So, my first NBS post of the new year turns out to be a real winner (finally, for me) from Hermit Thrush.




4.34/5 rDev -0.7%
look: 4 | smell: 4.25 | taste: 4.5 | feel: 4.25 | overall: 4.25

Moderate to vigorous pour yields a 1/2 inch head that dissipates down to a ring in a few minutes with a mahogany body. Nose of grapefruit, candied lemon, and oak. Taste follows very, very nicely with a nice mouthfeel. Overall, their finest moment!

 

Well Cheers All. And Happy New Beer!!!

Great start, and thanks for DH'ing Jack!
I poked my head in a tad late last week, but was unable to participate. I was driving all day Jan. 1st to see my brother ( a surprise) in Las Cruces. Very fun to knockk on his door, with our Pop in tow, and say, "Hey, we were just driving by, and thought we'd say, "hi." Had some great SW brews, particularly from Bosque and Spotted Dog.
kind of ironic that the very same NBS I"m AWOL due to traveling to the Land of Enchantment happened to be the same NBS where my friend @ONovoMexicano popped back on the radar. And I was near his old stomping grounds!
Cheers Brother. Be good to yourself.

As for this week, I imbibed a bit too much (I know it's all relative) but Bruery beers are BIG. Mash French Toast was a highlight. And now today, I have no more than a whisper rising from my throat, so only a glorious Bosque IPA was enjoyed.

Cheers to you all. And as many of you mentioned last week, I'm wishing you all, our great nation, and our world a better 2017. Let's try to put more "good" out there.

 

Amber ale from Ohio. Pretty nice, this is advertised as having English yeast. Aromas and flavors of lemon, orange peel, peach, pear, apple, and light peppery/piney hops; with some caramel/toasted bread malt balance; herbal/floral/grassy hop and yeast earthiness. Light-moderate pine/grassy/spicy bitterness on the finish. Medium-high carbonation and fairly crisp; with balanced bready malt creaminess and hop stickiness in the mouthfeel. Moderately dry. The English yeast was an interesting addition to the style, but I ended up really enjoying this. Really well balanced between hops, malt, and yeast esters. Crisp and quite refreshing. 3.68


Great Blonde ale! Nelson hopped. Aromas and flavors of big lemon, peach, mango, melon, tangerine, passion fruit, white grape, berry, and light peppery hops; with balanced cracker, biscuit, light honey malts; with some herbal, floral, grassy hop earthiness. Light herbal/spicy balancing bitterness on the finish. Medium bodied; nice bready/grainy creaminess and light hop stickiness in the mouthfeel. Minimal dryness. Very refreshing and flavorful! The Nelson Sauvin hopping is extremely well represented, despite the low bitterness of this beer. This is a spot on blonde ale across the board. Looks like I will be buying a lot of this, like I already do with the Coffee version of this beer already(Walter Gets Buzzed). Love it. 4


Really nice sweet stout! This is a blend of Hazelnut Nectar and Chocolate Stout. Nice head retention and spotty lacing down the glass. Aromas and flavors of big milk chocolate, cocoa, caramel, brown sugar, toffee, hazelnut, vanilla, creamed coffee, fudge, and toasted brown bread; with some light herbal/spicy hops. Light herbal/spicy hop and roast bitterness on the finish. Medium bodied; nice bready creamy/silky notes; with some light chalky roast and hop stickiness. Lightly increasing bitter roast/hop dryness. Nicely rich and dessert-like without being too sweet. I am actually surprised the bottle says this has 75 IBU. Wouldn't have guessed that at all. Very smooth and easy drinking, no warming alcohol. Really impressive new beer(even if it is a blend of 2 of their other beers). The price was pretty good for the bomber too. Might pick another up. 3.9


Cheers, have a good night NBS.

 

I thought that name is great. Sort of brazenly understated. With all of the conversation about style and provenance, "warehouse ale" slices through just like a real thing.

 

Howdy, New Beer Sunday!

I have a new beer for me, but it's not new to many of you: Lagunitas IPA

Growler filled at Whole Foods in Houston ... the Waugh Street Whole Foods, and I'll reiterate what I've said before about this place in case you're ever in Houston and needing a good beer fix: go. The prices are cheap, the selection is good (at worst) to excellent (at best), and the freshness is as reliable as the sun setting each day.

Which leads me to this Lagunitas IPA ... the hop flavor is amazing. So much grapefruit, so much orange, a pinch of cilantro and super bitter to start off with. In fact, that first sip punched me square between the eyes. I've been drinking so many stouts, eisbocks and darker malt brews, and these hops cut straight through the month of that no problem. It takes a couple of sips for the palate to adjust, then the malt sweet washes over everything, affecting the flavor and mouthfeel, laying down a skin of sweetness that mixes with the hops and turns the grapefruit flavor into a candied orange/mango flavor. It slickens the mouthfeel even more but also seems to add a bit of weight.

The carbonation level pushes up a fluffy thick head of foam, but it isn't enough to fill out the mouthfeel. It does tickle the tongue at the end of each sip.

The nose, by the way, takes on just a hint of onion at times, though it generally follows the flavor closely.

This is as good an American IPA as I've tried in some time. In fact, I feel like something's wrong here, like Whole Foods mislabeled the Yellow Rose tap with "Lagunitas IPA" ... maybe it's the freshness, maybe it's the fact that I haven't had a good hoppy brew in some time, but the juicy grapefruit hop flavor is super yummy. The malt doesn't have that biscuity thick smacking sweetness that Yellow Rose has (which thickens the mouthfeel more than this), but otherwise it's not a bad comparison.

The review:
https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/220/916/
4.08 (+5.7% rDev)

A friend of mine and I attended a very cool play today at Main Street Theatre in Houston, the Prague Shakespeare Company's Much Ado About Nothing. The conceit of the play is an Allied Forces radio company is putting on a live radio version of the play in London during WWII, so there's tons of old wartime posters everywhere, and some of them are outright hilarious:

... so watch that "loose talk", sailor!

Cheers, NBSers!

 

Just when you thought every pun beer name was used, in walks Walter Blondale.

 

So much beer, so little time! I'm going to squeeze in one last entry after a day of football, beer, food and a Blackhawks win to cap it off. I risked life and limb taking a trip around the lake on Friday for this Greenbush release as I got caught in some wicked lake effect snow squalls. Never a dull moment living near the shore! Let's pop the crown on this 12oz. bottle of Sheep In Tall Grass barrel aged Scotch Ale dated 11.14.16 and pour it in the Greenbush snifter to see if it was worth the effort.

It pours a murky brown leaving a half inch of light tan foam that quickly settles to a thin ring. Some thin lacing is left behind. The smell is toffee, caramel, vanilla and bourbon. Taste is sweet toffee, caramel and bourbon forward along with some vanilla, oak and leather. The feel is slick and slightly effervescent.



As barrel aged Scotch ales go this one can run with the best in my opinion. While a little on the sweet side, it's a palate pleasing mix of toffee, bourbon and vanilla. It's pricier than its counterparts at $24 a four pack, but I have no regrets buying two as I feel it will cellar well. Another solid barrel aged beer from Greenbush that has eluded me until now. My score is 4.27 / rDev +2.9%.

One last photo in keeping with the spirit of the thread and beer history. This sign hangs on the wall at the bottom of the stairwell entering the mancave. Strohs had some great advertising pieces as well back in the day.



Cheers friends, have a great week! Here's the official scorecard......

https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/25937/165970/?ba=Prager62#review

 

Appalachain brewing in Harrisburg, PA, had this style on a rotating basis but I see the most recent review was in 2011 so maybe it's now extinct.

 

Death wish much?

 

Wow! Neat stuff!

 

Can't help you there, I'm afraid. I got that as an extra in a trade quite a while ago.

 

I'm seeing that IPA around a lot more lately than in the past. In fact, it's becoming the "token craft beer" at a number of restaurants/hotels/etc. for whatever reason, so I'm also drinking it a lot more than I used to. And I gotta say, I don't mind it one bit and am never really left wanting for something else. Definitely still a solid brew.

 

Big thanks to madman TongoRad for making this happen. I don't know if anyone can tell, but the guy genuinely likes beer.

I think he'll be a little amused by my impression of this beer (purchased alongside his).

While I got the flavors that I found objectionable in my previous beers, they weren't nearly as intense with this one. In this case, I could actually get a sense of the beer rather than having it totally drowned out by what I perceived to be off flavors.

This could very well be a case of batch variation... with TongoRad's and my original beers being at extreme ends of the spectrum, and this beer being somewhere between those. Either that or I'm just being more tolerant today.

TongoRad, with this beer in mind, I bet you're very glad you didn't get one that was as extreme as my earlier ones.

 

Thank you! I've had a lifelong love affair with collecting things people don't want anymore. My house is sort of a shelter for said items.

 

Wow- seriously? Jeez, and I thought that I actually had the bad one today . This actually went the opposite way that I hoped it would (obviously ), but I'm still glad we did it. It also makes you appreciate the breweries who can pull off 'consistency' these days. Thanks for humoring me . Cheers!

 

Last new-to-me beer from the Sam Adams variety pack tonight. I have a job again for the first time since the start of December, so I figured I'd celebrate with a beer -- three days of orientation stuff starting tomorrow afternoon.


Tonight's beer is the Chocolate Bock. As far as the Samuel Adams variety-pack beers go I don't see a lot of comments (positive or negative) on this one, mostly a lot of praise for Old Fezziwig and a lot of hate for whatever spiced wheat beer happens to be in the pack this time around. It definitely looks nice, though, and "chocolate + dark beer" is a combination that seems to work pretty well, so expectations are up.

The smell of this one is definitely leaning more toward "bock" than "chocolate" -- lots of dark malty smells mixing around in there, maybe just a hint of chocolateyness mixed in toward the end. So this won't be super chocolatey like Shiner's Birthday Beer or Samuel Smith's Chocolate Stout, but that's okay -- dark malts are something I almost always appreciate too, having a little chocolate in there on top is just a bonus. Flavors are similar to the smell at first, but then a lot of nice rich cocoa comes in toward the end, blending together pretty nicely aside from a brief moment of metallic flavor in the middle there (thankfully, the more I drink the less this stands out -- it was pretty noticeable on the first sip, but barely there at all on the second.) The aftertaste leans toward the chocolatey direction, with a bit of the malts showing through alongside the chocolate. Surprisingly dry too, considering the sweeter nature of the flavors -- which works to distinguish it from other chocolate beers which definitely tend toward being sweeter.

My expectations for this one were pretty high, and... well, it pretty much met them! This would've been a decent malty dark beer even without the chocolate, but the chocolate presence really adds to it since the flavors all blend together so well. A different style of chocolate beer (I think this must be the first "chocolate lager" I've had -- they're usually stouts/porters it seems) that works pretty nicely.

Have to say I'm pretty pleased with how this variety pack turned out -- Hopflake, this one, and Old Fezziwig were all great, Boston Lager is always good, and the Winter Lager actually surprised me with how enjoyable it was this time around (I wasn't overly impressed when I picked up a six-pack last year; it wasn't bad, just... not as good as I'd expected.) The ginger beer was the only "ehh" one and even that one wasn't terrible, just not nearly as good as the other beers in the pack (or as good as it could've been.)

 

I thought this exercise was great! I don't think the results were that odd either.

These were worse than the one you had before but (in my mind) better than the ones I had before. Is that possible? When I had this beer I felt like I was getting some of what I had before, but with a better sense of the beer you appreciated.

To give you a sense of the degrees of my reactions - if I only ever had the beer you gave me, it certainly wouldn't be something I'd buy again... the ones I had before actually made me mad.

 

Let me ask you this - Did you finish the beer? Cause I couldn't finish my first cans.

 

Thank you very much! Cheers!