brew dog blog

Since I was running late from the Upper West Side to band practice last night, I asked T-Bone to pick up the brews for practice.  He lives right near a very competent deli that in the past has supplied us with more than enough good jamming fodder — Lagunitas Hop Stoopid, Stone Ruination, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, etc.  Since we had been discussing it, and since supplies were looking dismal, Todd decided to also bring a Budweiser American Ale, the “great savior” of Budweiser’s Light Lager empire, their attempt at crossing over into the realm of people who have actual taste in beer.  Since the beer is certainly cheap enough, and I wanted to remind myself just how good the beer I drink on a regular basis actually is, I decided to start the night off with it, pouring some for myself and some for my bandmates.  Budweiser’s American Ale pours a darker almost brown color, with an overwhelming sweet smell, with no hops or yeast smells apparent at all.  When I tell you that this beer is actually worse than Budweiser’s “standard” Lager Beer, it might not surprise you.  However if I were to tell you that this is by far the worst, least successful beer I’ve tried in a very long time, perhaps ever, wait, you probably still wouldn’t be surprised.  To say that Budweiser should “stick to what they know” is a gross understatement.  They should send me a check refunding my cash, donate 1/10 of their proceeds to Sixpoint and Captain Lawrence, and just call it a day.  An apt description I came up with was that American Ale tastes like base Budweiser which has had cornflakes steeped in it and then had a few drops of weak brown food coloring added.  It’s truly better to drink almost anything, including nothing, instead of drinking this swill.  Do not come close, do not say I didn’t warn you, and don’t even pity me for trying it.  Just let it leave your mind.

My wife doesn’t drink beer.  This isn’t such a terrible thing — she still happily carts my fat ass to beer events, indulges my friends and I when we babble on about brewing minutiae, and does a bunch of other stuff for me that makes her a saint in my eyes.  The thing about it that makes it hard is that up until recently, purchasing a growler of beer was a huge committment for me.  I knew going in to any 64oz jug of beer that I purchased that I would be responsible for finishing the whole thing — which isn’t always an issue, but when  a high test brew is on tap at Bierkraft and I want a jug, I sometimes have to think twice.  Until recently, that is.  Bierkraft started filling select beers of theirs in 22oz counter-pressure filled bombers, which makes it very easy for a compulsive beer sampler like myself to get into some brews that otherwise would destroy my brain if I consumed all 64 ounces.

Two recent excellent offerings there included a new beer from local favorites Sixpoint, and a small run beer from recent New York implant The Bruery.

Sixpoint’s Express is a Quadruple – another example of a Belgian “Trappist” style that is difficult to nail down but should contain a few benchmark traits in order to be considered part of the style.  Typically very high in alcohol (check, this clocks in at 11% + ABV), dark reddish brown in color (this is a bit paler) and exhibiting the darker dried fruit range of flavors and aromas, some examples of the Quad style are so difficult to track down that it’s hardly fair to discuss all of them here.  But of course Sixpoint shrugs off most of these things and makes a beer that is all their own.  A deep, deep brew, this exhibits a good amount of dryness which is key to making such a heady beer easy to digest, and with a very small amount of residual sweetness, it does a great job.  I’ve heard other people talking about how well hidden the booze is in this beer and I’d have to agree — it’s hard to know, aside from how your vision is blurring and doubing, that this beer contains as much alcohol as a glass of wine, and I’m sure happy that I didn’t spring for 64oz of this — it would cause  me quite a lot of trouble.  Pouring a beautiful but paler color than most quads, Express has a deep nose of chocolate, caramel, and raisins, with a hint of something lighter — a decent amount of hop aroma, a great amount of balance, and a nice full body that finishes dry.  Balance, balance, balance.  Sixpoint does it again.  I love you guys!

The Bruery recently landed with quite a loud impact in the NYC area — every beer nerd I know has had the brewery’s name on their lips, and with good reason.  Humulus Blonde is one of their latest brews to hit this coast, and it is a hell of a beer.  Pouring a golden color, clear and bubbly, Humulus Blonde has so much god damned citrus hops on the nose that you can actually trick yourself into thinking you’re about to take a big swing of a Grapefruit Spritzer.  A good amount of bitterness is countered with a nice malty backbone and a great amount of hop flavor.  There’s a good amount of Belgian Yeast on the nose too — pretty much everything you could hope for from a “Belgian IPA” and more of a standout to me than the other West Coast renderings of the same style.  Just beautiful all around, Patrick seems incapable of failing.  I need to get out there immediately to check out the brewery and it’s tasting room which is famous for hosting great events and supporting the local homebrewing communities.

So thank you, Bierkraft, for giving a guy a break — keep those bombers flowing!

Tracing the unique paths of influence back and forth between Europe and the USA in terms of brewing styles and techniques has been a particular focus of this blog since it’s inception about a year ago.  Here we have an interesting if not more old school example of the same kind of cross-pollination, not between the old world and the new, but between the old world and…the old.

While Belgium gets the credit for being the most exciting and enduring destination for American beer nerds, a smaller, quieter subset are insistent on their obsession with Germany’s beers, particularly their Lagers.  Having experienced a decent amount of these harder-to-find and less-hyped beers over the course of the last year, I can definitely say that the next beer trip I make to Europe will not exclude some of the more interesting regions in Germany’s panoply of amazing beer.

Beersel Lager is an interesting study in cross-pollination – Drie Fonteinen’s Armand Debelder admires the Lagers of Germany, claims the label, so he decided to have one contract brewed for him at the world-class De Proef facility, where many excellent brands from Belgium are brewed.  The results are revelatory, combining the refreshing drinkability of a German Lager with the depth of flavor of a Belgian Lambic.  Beersel Lager pours a touch more amber than the typical “yellow Lager” color, with a big fluffy-white Belgian head and tons of carbonation.  The nose has touches of breadiness you would expect from a Lager and a nice hit of tart, “wild” aromas from the Belgian yeast.  Sipping this beer breeds similar interesting combinations of flavor — a bit of lactic sourness, a nice bitter bite of hops, and a smooth, bready body in the middle.  An excellent sipping beer that unfortunately could only be stocked by someone much flusher with cash than I for a regular session beer, it comes closest to Jolly Pumpkin’s beers in pushing boundaries of beer geekdom into the realm of the Lawnmower beer.  Excellent product as usual and a lesson in how taking old ideas and combining them can produce astounding and surprising results.  Killer.