brew dog blog

July 4th is the supreme beer and meat holiday, automatically putting it in the running with my favorite holidays of all time.  Add in fireworks, copious sweets, great weather, and a bunch of friends outside of the city that oppresses us all so regularly, and you have a recipe for a hell of a time.  Of course Stinky and I purchased and lugged a large quantity of beer with us out to the house, taking the opportunity to grab a bunch of growlers at Bierkraft plus a healthy mixture of big and sessionable beers in 12oz and 22oz bottles.  Since I haven’t posted any photos here in quite a while, and Aaron was stoked to break in his new camera, I’ll post some food and fun pictures here with his permission, along with capsule reviews of a few of the beers we sampled.

The fact that Lagunitas has not gotten a lot more play on this blog is a testament to how dense the American Craft Beer scene is these days.  Lagunitas is one of the first craft breweries I got into after Sierra Nevada, and I enjoyed discovering that I indeed like to drink Pilsners, Copper Ales, and a variety of other flavors by making my way through their catalog.  Since being introduced to the brewery, I have had the opportunity to drink a lot of their seasonal offerings.  The latest release for summer, available in 12oz 6-packs, is somewhat misleadingly named “A Lil Sumpin’ Sumpin’ Ale.”  I half-expected a low ABV session beer until I remembered I was dealing with Lagunitas — so the result is a nearly 8% ABV Pale Ale/American Wheat Beer hybrid, intensely hoppy both in aroma and flavor, with a delicious smooth maltiness provided by the combination of wheat, base, and specialty malts.  With this awesome combination you get the great mouthfeel provided by the wheat, the aromatics provided by Ale Yeast and Hops, and the flavor provided by all of the above.  “A Lil Sumpin’ Sumpin’” turns out to be quite a beast of a beer if you knock a couple back — the alcohol is very well hidden, and this copper colored beer is a great choice for a warm, celebratory day.

Jolly Pumpkin is no stranger to the pages of this blog, and being that it’s essentially my favorite American Brewery, it’s always a pleasure to cover another of their brews in the ranks of the Brew Dog Blog.  Bam Noire is their “Black Saison,” a style that doesn’t really exist aside from a few examples.  The concept of Seasonal Saisons comes from the Fantome brewery in Belgium for the most part, and Jolly Pumpkin’s version, although a deep reddish black and adorned with Halloween motifs on the bottle, holds its own just fine in the heat of the summer.  Light, refreshing, dry, and perfectly fruity and tart, Bam Noir brings just about everything to the table in terms of being a fantastic A+ Summer drinker.  A lot of complexity in the nose and on the palette makes it more than a chugger, and takes it into the slow sipping realm, if you can make it last that long.

Chelsea Brewing Company disproves the notion that many people have that there are no Craft Beers produced on the sainted “Money Makin” island of Manhattan. While most of the brews they pump out are highly drinkable, delicious beers, none are particularly mindblowing, yet they exist as examples of good, fresh beers you can regularly get around bars and at the brew pub over on the west side.  Recently Bierkraft, a big seller of Chelsea beers, sourced a cask of one of Chelsea’s new offerings, the USA, which was dry hopped and being served in 64oz growlers.  Stinky brought one out to the barbecue and I was really glad he did.  It was a low ABV, not quite brilliantly clear golden Ale in the English style, and it had an enormous hop presence both in the nose and in the spicy, fruity flavors.  Low carbonation emphasizes the delicious maltiness of this beer also, altogether a hell of a summer drinker too and the growler disappeared quickly.

Hard to believe there’s still a Captain Lawrence beer that I haven’t written about, and one of their flagships, no less.  Freshchester Pale Ale is a very, very good East Coast style Pale Ale, from a dude who worked at Sierra Nevada and can brew any kind of beer well.  It has the perfect balance going on that is the SN trademark, and a delicious blend of hops (definitely some PNW hops in there) and malt (2-row and crystal) is extremely satisfying.  It starts bubbly and fresh with awesome hop aromas, and finishes nice and dry with a malty, rounded finish.  Not too bitter, not too sweet, just how I like it.