New Beer Sunday (week 622)

Hey.
Happy almost Monday.
Hah!
MY day off.



4.24/5 rDev +1.7%
look: 4.5 | smell: 4.25 | taste: 4.25 | feel: 4 | overall: 4.25

Moderate pour yields a 3/4 inch medium dark tan head with nice lacing and a very nice dark brown body. Nose of roasted malts, and slight whiskey. Taste follows with some added milk chocolate, vanilla, and very slight coffee. Feel is very nice for a lower abv than average BA stout. Overall, this is very nicely done and I will be looking for other lower abv BA stouts in the future to compare. Nice job and cheers!

 

I'd sure like to try some undiluted 5X as well!

 

They are great dogs. Mine is dangerously smart but never used any of it for evil She just turned 12 in Oct and if you asked me last summer I would have bet 15 or 16 yrs easily. She has no other problems like my last one did with joints, eyesight, etc. Makes it even harder unfortunately, but we have been lucky to have so many good days together

 

I thought of one more thing related to barrel aging beers, mildly tangential but sorta not, maybe.

I am certain from the Dogfish Head tour I did, where one of the highlights is looking at the huge Palo Santo vats (used to make Palo Santo Marron). The mention in the tour that after a batch has been made, "cleaning" the vats takes time. I quote cleaning, because I seem to recall that part of that is shaving the wood down to get the wood to impart its flavor unto the next batch. It also led to a speculation that Pal Santo might not be a staple of DFH forever (unless they can get more wood).

This doesn't change any speculation from before, any wooden barrel could be chosen to impart flavor or made to not impart flavor. With DFH, the Palo Santo wood is definitely meant to impart flavor, so there is that (ok - it's late ).

 

Now THAT'S a vat! Damn, look at that thing.

I did, indeed, bug our nice tour guide/brewer about barrels at Jester King this afternoon, and he said so far JK has used wooden barrels for two main reasons.

1. Most of their oak barrels are old, used-up wine barrels that have been cleaned out, rendering them "neutral" -- his word. Same for the sherry barrels and any others they use. They want an organic container that does not add wood-type flavors to the beer.

2. They want the organic part of the wooden barrel because wood is porous enough to allow for microorganisms to get into the beer, helping fermentation in a lot of cases (beer barrel 101, I know) and also helping add the "sense of place" to their beers. JK is forever on a quest to get the Texas hill country into their beers, and wood barrels help them do that.

Shots from the barrel room today:




and Jester King's foeders:


The young brewer (Shawn/Sean was his name I think me not remember for sure) said cleaning out the foeders SUCKS -- my word not his, but he made it sound like being on the outside of the foeder is much more fun than being on the inside.

The brewer also said Jester King may someday want to use fresh or raw oak barrels specifically to get the wood flavor into a particular beer. So far it's not happened, but my bet is when or if they can get barrels made from native Texas wood, they might give it a try.

Like I say, they want this:

... to get into this:


Can you make a beer barrel out of Texas live oak?

 

Getting settled in to my new job decently well (I don't think I'll be sticking with this one a year or anything, but it will at least pay the bills in the short term), fridge was getting a little empty beer-wise, so I figured I'd pick up something new today.



Well, new to me, anyway -- I've never ended up trying this one, despite the Kroger near me always having it in stock (fresh, too -- going by the "16340" date code this is a bit less than two months old, bottled in the first week of December. Assuming that's a bottling date and not a best-by, anyway. Julian dates are usually bottling dates, right?) Going by the label it was apparently brewed in New Hampshire rather than actually in England (where I assume Old Hampshire probably is located), but I was aware that a lot of the imports owned by the bigger brewers tended to have US or Canada brewing locations (like Red Stripe) so that's not too surprising.

Certainly looks nice, though the foam on top shrinks to a thinner cap fairly quick (leaving some nice trails behind in its wake, though.) Smell is malty first; a little doughy, sweetish. There's also a difficult-to-describe smell similar to one I get in several other English ales that I'm not really sure what it comes from -- yeast? a particular hop? the malt, even? I dunno, but it's there. The taste is similar. It's pretty mild, but not bad. There is a very nice dry bready malt flavor there, along with that same unusual thing I get from the smell coming in a little later (I'm guessing probably hops.) They blend together pretty nicely, actually! Mouthfeel is surprisingly light, but it works -- it's got a nice soft bubbliness to it that counteracts the thin feel somewhat, and the two features combined make it extremely drinkable. My first two sips were more like gulps, and now half the glass is gone.

Overall, I like it. I do have to wonder if this is the improved formula that was supposed to be coming at some point in the near future or if it's still the less-good version, since I do remember reading about how the recipe had changed over the years and the brewers were working on reformulating it to be closer to how it was before. Either way, what I have in this six-pack is a pretty tasty beer that I definitely don't regret trying. I could probably go for another one if it wasn't already past 1 am, actually.

 

Well Hello Late Night NBS.
We're having enough rainfall here in SoCal to make one think of End Times.
And some of you may know, people in SoCal are terrible drivers once a 10th of an inch a rain is merely reported.

Anyway, my brother came out from New Mexico, and brought this gem:

https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/36725/265057/

It's a black IPA from Spotted Dog in Las Cruces, NM.

Quite good. It wasn't in the database, so I had the honor of entering it. I don't usually get excited for this style, but found this one quite good.