Getting out of the city for the weekend is an essential aspect of staying sane in New York City. Stinky, myself, and our better halves made the short trip up to Taconic State Park to hang out, drink brews, cook over a fire for a few days, and swim and bask in the oddly named but beautiful Bash Bish falls, just over the border in Massachusettes. Of course we trucked some great brews along with us, and made a short trek a bit out of our way to hit Half Time Beverage in Poughkeepsie, New York, about an hour from the campsite.
Half Time is a well known and renowned Home Distributor who carries a great selection of Domestic and Foreign beers, specializing in a lot of great stuff from Belgium and right here in the states. A typical kind of home distribution center with a great selection and a depressing amount of floor space devoted to selling shitty yellow beer, Half Time nonetheless came through with some awesome selections including a couple bottles of Fantome Chocolat, some cellared Saisons from the Late 90s, and a couple other domestic treats which made it well worth the trip. If you’re headed upstate from the City, you should definitely check it out — great prices, friendly people, and pretty easy to find. Hard to beat.
After settling in and drinking our requisite quota of Flower Power, recently reintroduced to a city way parched after missing out on a few summer months with our favorite “local” session IPA, we decided to go for something pretty heavy — the Dark Horse Double Crooked Tree Imperial IPA. Topped with green wax, and adorned with unreadable languages, scary trees, and other forboding imagery, this beer promised to be heavy at 13.6% ABV and it certainly was. Consumed as it was without the clearest head, this took a while to hit us, but when it hit, man did it hit! This is an absolutely gigantic beer, which pours with a very small head and a dark copper color. Enormous and complex smells follow – a variety of hop odors that I’m not qualified to pick out individually. A truly heavy malt backbone takes time to melt away into a very satisfying amount of malt flavor. This beer is pretty syrupy and enormously heavy, but at 13.6% ABV, what would you expect? Nicely packaged, and insanely bitter as it warms up, this is one that is really worth tracking down. An incredible beer by an excellent brewery.
About a week before we hit the woods, I sampled Dark Horse’s “normal” IPA, the Crooked Tree. According to Dark Horse’s website, they took the Crooked Tree recipe and “doubled everything except the water” to produce the Double Crooked Tree, and I can beleive it. A toned down, lighter copper version of the Double with a slightly thicker head, slightly less bready malts, and a lot more aromatic and bittering hops available up front, this is more of a standard Session IPA at 6% ABV. There’s definitely some harsh bitterness here that makes it less pleasant than even a higher ABV IPA like Flower Power, but an interesting and pretty well-balanced brew is there if you let it come through. More hops love from Michigan — there’s definitely something in the water in Kalamazoo.
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