The hops are there I suppose. They come across as primarily fruity and floral on the nose, a bit of apricot and apple. Where they are lacking, however, is in that sharper citrus/pine scent I want in a heavily late-hopped IPA, and their laid back fruitiness leaves them vulnerable to being overpowered by the malt, which is fairly sweet and toasty. The fact that the beige head was meager and disappeared too soon kept it from really opening up I think.

The problem here is really just that in attempting to eliminate the bitterness, they’ve gone too far and there just seems to be something basic missing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an extremely drinkable IPA, decent body and all, and I could happily session a few bombers on a hot summer day, but the heart and soul of those West Coast hop monsters we all know and love seems to have been neutered when a simple trim would’ve done nicely.

Mashing of the Belgian IPA

It seems that Mother Nature has taken pity upon me for my beer failings, however, as today I bottled my first batches of home-brewed Kombucha, and they turned out better than I could have hoped for. I’ve been wanting to get into brewing Kombucha Tea (or KT, as the hippies call it) for a while and never managed to hook up a SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast!) from a friend who brews. As luck would have it, two weekends ago we were walking through Park Slope on our way to Beer Table to pick up some flip-top 33cl bottles for my homebrew from Justin, when we happened upon a table of generous yuppie-hippies giving away SCOBYs from a big jar.

Beautiful, beautiful booch...

Arriving home with my SCOBYs I immediately got to work on two batches, a regular Black Tea and Sugar Kombucha, and one I’ve been wanting to try since I first got hooked on both Kombucha and Yerba Mate, a Mint Mate Kombucha with Honey. I was wary of the Mate and Honey as I wasn’t sure they’d have enough nutrients to feed the SCOBY and ferment properly, but both batches got down to about 3.1pH after two weeks, so i sampled some of each today and they were great! The Black Tea KT I would even say was too sweet compared to the Mate, so for batch 2 I dropped the sugar down about 30%. The recipe is basically 1/4c tea and 1/4c sugar for each quart of water, but i’m working closer to 1/8c of sugar now to see how it turns out. I bottled all 3 quarts and put them back in the pantry to carbonate so I’ll post an update later on.

I will now proceed to shame myself by saying that while the above three traits all apply to this “Triple IPA,” I still love it.  The reason is that although it’s an enormous, yes even “completely massive” beer, it’s got balance.  A huge, sharp hit of hop bitterness is accompanied by a very sweet nose and a nicely heavy body on the tongue.  This anniversary beer is triple boiled, mashed, and hopped, and then aged in Bourbon barrels for 8 months.  It pours a deep amber color and over the course of the hour or so I drank it, it warmed up and became even more inviting.  A gigantic almost brandy or scotch-like experience, drinking a 12oz bottle of this beer was an exceptional treat.  At 15% ABV it shouldn’t be something you have with lunch or start your night off with, unless of course you’re “going for it.”  It’s pretty save to say with something this completely massive that you’re kind of always “going for it” when you face up to a Completely Massive brew.  Score another one for Michigan.

The first time I ever came across the Bear, he was pretty sweet to me.  We were on his home turf, and a bar I was at had extremely fresh kegs of Racer 5, their “session” IPA, on draught.  For undisclosed reasons I was afforded copious amounts of this beer for free, which went down smooth and truly gave me an appreciation for fresh, bright, amazing West Coast IPA.  Since then I’ve flirted with the Bear some more, finding some on tap here and there, drinking the bottles that I could, with Racer 5 and Hop Rod Rye far outweighing the others in terms of what I consumed.

Needless to say I was not prepared for the intensity of the beers that The Gate had on that night.  There were TWENTY lines of Bear Republic to choose from, plus three casks which were tapped in series.  Having chased the fabled Racer X for so long after loving it’s younger brother, and having none of my friends around to discourage me from burning my mouth with hop insanity before I drank anything else, I had to go for it.  A pint of Racer X is as close as I have gotten in a long time to the completely sublime freshness of IPA on the West Coast.  There was a clean brightness about Racer X that sets it apart from the other big IPA, Apex, that I had at the Blind Tiger a few months back.  A beautiful amber color that belied the beer’s easy drinking finish, Racer X is perfectly carbonated, relatively light bodied without being thin, and finishes with an insane hop wallop dryness that is damaging but not tongue destroying.  Of course the nose on this beer is what I was after and I was not disappointed.  Didn’t have the wherewithal to try and figure out what kind of Hops went into it, but there were massive amounts of resin, citrus, and just insane fresh Hop aroma.  Wow.  I tried to drink this slowly but that didn’t go so well.

Next I was encouraged by Pat and others to try the cask, Hop Rod Rye, already mentioned as one of my favorites from the brewery.  It took me a few minutes to warm the beer up and try to recover my taste buds, but both kicked in in sufficient time and I was pleasantly surprised by how great the cask treated this beer.  Or rather, how untreated it was — it was a beautiful ruddy brown, hazed and dark.  Regardless, the natural, light carbonation and preserved freshness did wonders for the round Malt flavors, and the lack of heavy carbonation allowed the Rye to come across in a gentler, less astringent fashion.  This Rye IPA is a great example of how malt, bitterness, and spice can all come together to form a sessionable IPA without leaning to far in any one direction.  Bear Republic is masterful at balancing these properties…when they want to.

When they don’t want to be balanced, they aren’t.  After not taking it easy for my first two selections, I went for the 11% ABV Barrel Aged Old Scouter’s Barleywine next.  As shocked as I was by the first two beers, I could never have expected how perfect and wonderful this barleywine is.  I was literally walking around stunned, telling everyone who would listen that I would rather “frame this beer than drink it.”  Massive amounts of malt and barrel funk are the first thing you smell when you bring this beer up to your gullet.  The malt was so thick and heavy on the nose that I couldn’t stop smelling it, like the time I visited a sugar shack in Massachussettes and wanted to bathe in the steam of the Maple Syrup cooking down.  Touted as 120 IBUs, Scouter’s didn’t dissapoint in the bitterness department, but as unbalanced and insane as this beer intentionally is, it actually finished pretty clean.  Delicious, warming malt coats your palate first, which is then washed away by strong bitterness.  Genius moves all around.  I’m not sure how old or how common this is, but wow, wow, wow.  One of the best Barleywine’s I’ve ever had, and definitely my #1 Bear Republic beer, even though I don’t think I’d have the heart to drink another anytime soon.

Bear Republic completely mauled all of us at The Gate that night — and I learned a lot about beer in the process.  Honorable Mentions go to EZ Ryder, a 100% Rye Beer (yes, and it was…balanced, ridiculous) and Pete Brown’s (a winner as always).  For more action, check out Beertender Pat’s pictures from the event for completely superfluous heavy crew shots.

The first Stone beers that really caught my attention were its massive, insane IPAs.  Ruination is one of my all time favorites, and the regular Pale Ale and IPA are no slouches either.  Once I got hooked on their brews, though, I was able to see how many different things they were capable of, and their obsession with Belgian Yeast flavors has been evident in their Vertical Epic series.  Cali-Belgique is an attempt to marry the massive citrus and floral hop aromas of West Coast IPAs with the tropical, warm fruit nose of Belgian Yeasts, especially evident in their Golden Ales, but prevalent in various forms all around the Motherland.  Without a doubt, Cali-Belgique is a huge success, managing to skirt the line between the two styles in a way that is both uniquely Stone and unequivocally Belgian influenced.  Cali-Belgique pours a bright copper color, like a classic west coast IPA, with tight bubbles and a quickly dissipating head.  The nose is an awesome mixture of Belgian Yeast and West Coast IPA hop aromas, with almost no malt noticable at all.  Sipping this beer gives off great fruit and citrus from the hops which mixes very well with the fruit flavors from the yeast. An assertive yet transparent malt backbone which is a tiny bit thin for my tastes with a bitter beer like this, but they seem to be taking the dryness cue from the Belgians on this.  I was really glad to hear that Stone would be making this a year-round style, and this represents a very successful volley in the Belgium-influenced-us-and-then-we-influenced-them-and-now-they’re-influencing-us-again thing.  I’m glad New York City is smack in the middle between California and Belgium — we see a lot of good crossfire.

One other way that Stone is exploring the possibilites of brewing and stretching the boundaries of commercial beer is to participate in collaborations with other breweries.  Collaborations are all the rage right now, both in the US and in Europe, where “gypsy brewers” like Mikkeller wander the continents and collaborate with brewers they admire.  In this case, Stone is collaborating with BDB favorite Jolly Pumpkin and Norweigan trailblazer Nogne 0.  The popularity of collaborations has been overwhelmingly positive, resulting in a bunch of new beers that wouldn’t have existed if certain juggernauts had not put their heads together in a creative way.  The Stone/JP/Nogne beer is a holiday ale, meant to highlight indigenous ingredients from each brewery’s environment — Chestnuts from Michigan, Juniper Berries from Norway, and Sage from California.  This beer is also brewed with 25% rye malt, which gives a lot of spicy balance to this otherwise pretty huge beer.  This ale pours a dark brown with red highlights, accompanied by a small, quickly fading white head.  The aroma is fantastic — hints of Sage and Juniper berry come through, and a hint of spiciness from Hops and Rye.  There’s a good deal of body in this beer, which makes it appropriate for the style, but there is dryness on the finish that doesn’t make it difficult to get through the 12oz bottle. Relatively high ABV makes this a sipper, but the flavors that run through this beer, especially as it warms up, are fantastic.  The juicy quality from the Juniper berries stood out most for me, and I don’t get much Chestnut at all, but I’m not sure what to be looking for there.  Overall, this is a successful beer that has a lot going on, and is about as focused as a collaboration between three brewing luminaries could really be.  Each wanted their say, and they got it — the result is a great beer, a step forward for craft brewing, and a unique flavor and aroma profile that would be very difficult to recreate.  Check each brewery’s website for accounts of the brewing process — it sounds like it worked out quite well.

Not wanting to completely allow my collection of 12% brews to end, but not wanting to end my streak of drinking amazing brews from Belgium, I reached for this Regenboog for my nightly brew.  Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect, since half the time I open a Belgian IPA it foams out the top leaving only a few sips left, or has no hop character at all.  Maybe my luck has been bad, but all that changed when the IPA+ came in to my life.

There’s something special to me about this beer, in that it’s actually very close to the style of a Belgian Ale that I have aging in a carboy in my basement right now.  The IPA+ has an amazing aroma of citrusy, American style hops mixed with an awesome Belgian Yeast nose that is spot on.  It pours a cloudy dark yellow with a gigantic head that simply doesn’t dissipate — it forms crazy looking cavernous shapes in your glass, popping bubbles of a dizzying variety of complex aromas.  The mouthfeel of this beer is a bit heavier than I prefer in either a Belgian beer or an “Imperial IPA,” which this would certainly qualify as with it’s 10% ABV.  IPA+ comes across as a Southern Tier Unearthly with a heavy handed use of Belgian Yeast, or a heavier Golden Strong with a heavier hop nose and a crisp bite of bitterness.  All around, this is an extremely thoughtful and well-balanced beer that deserves close recognition but could almost drink like a session beer, regardless of how altered drinking one 33cl bottle gets you.  Regenboog’s ‘t Smisje range of brews are highly recommended, and I think I’ll have to revisit my old friend Guido soon for a review — I think he would approve of the IPA+.

I don’t think that I’ve praised one of my favorite aspects of the Brewery, however — their labels.  We can all pretend that the packaging of a product doesn’t effect our perception upon consuming it, but then again we can also pretend a lot of other preposterous bullshit.  Regardless, Two Brothers always nails their labels, and this one is no exception.  It’s just, classy.  And the name is great.  Their website is still really rough, though, so go figure.  Anyway, the beer inside this package is phenomenal, a real and true Harvest Ale — where “wet hops” that are very freshly picked are added to a base beer to give them special fresh Hop character.  This beer smells like fresh hops added to hot wort during brewing, and it has a solid malt backbone to boot.  Creamy, a bit bready, and rich in flavor, balanced with a nice amount of bitterness, but not too over the top, this beer emphasizes the best qualities of fresh hops — the aromas and gentle flavors that are apart from the signature bitterness of the herb.

In other awesomeness, you can go to the website (eventually) and cross reference the batch number on your bottle with a list of the hops they used for each batch.  A good way to see if you can guess hops only by smell (I can’t), but also a great piece of dedication to the kind of artistic pride that oh so few brewers care to show in their beer.  This is a fantastic session beer, and a hell of a take on the harvest or “wet hopped” ale, and I love it to death.  Respect the seasons and you will be handsomely rewarded.

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.

I’m a big IPA fan and “Hophead” so I usually go for bitter beers in general, and the trend of European traditional and craft brewers alike responding to American styles and innovations obviously tingles my patriotic brew sense, so I gripped this green and yellow striped brew and took it home.  Broke it out last night an was immediately very pleased when I poured it out.  This thing stinks! The only other Euro beer that I’ve had which claims to and actually fulfills its promise of intense bitterness is Alvinne’s Gaspar.  Mikkeller’s Stateside is an awesome IPA, and at 7% ABV is very drinkable.  These guys kept it pretty restrained with the malt, and went for three kinds of American hops.  There is a really intense smell of pineapple or some other kind of tropical fruit which is bursting all over this beer.  It tastes bitter as hell too, with a nice body that is nice but not too thin.  Finally, an understated label for an over the top beer, instead of the other way around.

I shared the Hopslam with Stinky during a small tasting session we had while my wife was out of town.  He was just as excited as I was by this beer, never having tried it before, and neither of us were disappointed.  I didn’t know that the brew was made with honey, a very welcome addition to the beer which gave it a certain sense of balance which is often missing from these insanely Hoppy beers.  No, I’m not looking for a “well-balanced” beer in any traditional sense, but it’s nice to see this nod toward balancing sweetness with bitterness.  Hopslam has a really great heavy Hops aroma which manages to let some of the honey smells come through as well.  It pours a beautiful color, and really just gave us everything we were looking for.  Great carbonation, perfect amount of floral, citrus, and a bit of piney hop flavor.  Bell’s is a truly incredible brewery and I’m going to do my best to taste everything they make.  Hopslam retains a sense of restraint relative to the next beer I’m going to write about, which seems to be true for most of their beers.  They’re crafting exemplary brews for their style, which are typically very drinkable.  I could kill a few Hopslams and be stoked.  Nothing challenging there.

Hop 15 portrays fighter jets air-bombing Hop flowers into a pint glass, as a nice contrast to the Hopslam label which shows a poor schmuck getting decimated…by a giant Hop flower.  Hop 15 is an incredible West Coast DIPA on the order of the Green Flash Imperial IPA — over the top, intense, and unforgiving.  A little bit thin but still incredibly drinkable, Hop 15 stayed on my tongue for a full hour after I drank it.  This beer represents a great achievement — definitely the kind of beer that could inspire a European brewer to experiment with some of these “newfangled” American Hop Varietals.  Hop 15 is all about the Pine, and it really clobbers you.  Drink this beer first if you don’t want to taste anything else, or last if you want to pass out feeling like you were sucking on a pinecone.  This is just an incredibly drinkable beer for its ABV and hops intensity, and like the other Port beers I tried, it lived up to its expectations.  Very excited to get into more of their brews as well.