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Jan08

Two from Triton

by mynie on January 8, 2013 at 10:42 pm
Posted In: Beer Reviews

BEER BOTTLES DO NOT PHOTOGRAPH WELL IN MY HOME

triton

Triton is one of approximately 300 breweries that have opened up around Indianapolis recently.  It gets a bit of a short shrift, seeing how it’s not centrally located and they don’t seem to have the internet hype of your Sun Kings and Flat 12’s.  But they’re pretty darn good, so Imma write about em right here.

First off, I dig the bottle art.  It combines two of the five major styles of beer art: the Comic Book (style 3) and the Vaguely Soviet (style 5).  This evening’s first beer, Sin Bin Pale, has borrowed the logo of the local “Iced Hockey” team, and apparently the “sin bin” refers to the savage practice of submerging underperforming hockeymen in a tub of frozen beer.

Sin Bin has a nice, dark pour and surprisingly sweet and fruity aroma.  The taste is less tart, as the sweet fruit esters are balanced nicely against toasty malt and mild spice complexities of Belgian yeast; it stays sweet throughout but never gets cloying or synthetic-tasting.  This is a damn fine entry-level Belgian, a nice stepping stone for those aren’t quite ready to bridge the gap between Blue Moon and Orval.

Next up we got Deadeye Stout, the logo for which looks like one of those reverse power-ups in the new Mario Brothers games (which are bullshit, btw).

This is a straight-up American dry oatmeal stout.  It’s super roasty with large coffee nodes and a pleasantly rough finish of oatmeal and toffee.  Very nice, very creamy body ties everything together quite well—one of the best session stouts I’ve drank in a long while. Certainly worth the price of admission.

Pretty sure that Triton’s availability is pretty limited outside of Indy—I’ve never seen them north of Lafayette.  (CORRECTION: They are available statewide). But sixers are available and worth picking up.  And their tap room is fucking adorable and you should stop by:

http://tritonbrewing.com/

└ Tags: Indiana, Indianapolis, Review, Triton
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Jan08

Classic Review: Dark Lord Imperial Stout

by mynie on January 8, 2013 at 7:13 pm
Posted In: Class Beer Reviews

dark lord beer hole

Cut to a street corner. Early morning. Two children waiting for a school bus. This could be your street corner. These could be your children.

Little Billy wears a pair of denim shorts cut off just below the knee, a white T-shirt announcing his membership in Little League, and a ball cap. His pal, Little Andy, is a bit rough around the edges—his shirt is worn, and he has decided to wait for the bus without the benefit of a hat. Andy is a “cool cat,” as the kids say, the worst kind of ruffian—the kind that makes horseplay and delinquency seem like the “hip” thing to do.

“Hey,” says Andy. Billy knows that Andy’s about to say something real “keen.”

“What?”

“You ever felt like a real man before?”

A strange question to you or I, but Billy knows that Andy’s leading somewhere, Billy can tell that he should answer honestly.

“Once, when my dad took me fishin’.”

“Ahh, no. None of that. I mean a *real man*. You ever felt like one of those?”

“I—I guess not.”

There’s a sound, a familiar sneeipt that Billy’s heard several times before. It’s an adult sound, a sound he knows he shouldn’t ever hear, but he wants so bad to impress Andy he doesn’t seem afraid.

Andy takes a slurp of a can of Budweiser’s “Light” brand beer and, making a face, hands the can over to Billy. Billy doesn’t think. The can’s in his hand and it’s nothing but a silver and blue flash up to his mouth, the taste of stale bread and his grandfather’s breath. He coughs, but sucks some down, and then hands the can back to Andy. Yes, now he is a real “home dog,” he’s ready to start skate boarding and listening to R and B music.

But wait…Andy’s looking in the other direction, his mouth open like a hungry dog. Billy turns his head to see what Andy’s looking at and—oh no, it can’t be! But yes it is. First it’s a dot, and then it’s a blob, and then, oh god and then marching towards them big as life and sure and hell it’s none other than “Mean” Joe Green, and he is one bad dude.

Andy falls over and starts crying. Billy keeps looking at the ground. He can’t move. Mean Joe’s getting closer and closer and he can’t move, he can’t run, he can’t do anything but shake. All he wanted was to be cool, and now look at him. Mean Joe gets so close his shadow blocks out all the sunlight. Billy starts to tremble, to squeak out a plea.

“P-p-please Mean Joe. Please don’t murder me!”

Mean Joe laughs.

“Murder you? On the football field, maybe. What I want to know is, why do you childrens think that drinking Bud Light’s gonna make you real men?”

“I just did what Andy did. He’s radical.”

“Well, he don’t look radical to me.”

Billy looked down. Andy was covered in vomit, was passed out mumbling like a drowned nun.

“Gee, I guess you’re right.”

Mean Joe laughs, again, reaches inside his pants and pulls out a mysterious, wax-covered bottle.

“Here, he says, if you wanna be a *real* man, drink one of these.”

“I will, Mean Joe. I will.”

Billy didn’t go to school that day, nor did he try and wake up Andy. Instead, he went behind a shed to look at his new bottle. I found him there, and I hit him over the head with a pipe to steal his bottle of Dark Lord. Seriously, a kid isn’t gonna like this.

It’s too dark, for one. The head is little and brown which is pretty remarkable considering the massive amount of alcohol in this—but what’s really on display here is the darkness. Think about the time before you were born and that’s Dark Lord.

We’re raised to appreciate two kinds of goodness in the worlds of taste and of smell. There’s the natural and the artificial. Cherry Jolly Ranchers taste good, and so do real cherries, even if they don’t taste anything alike. This is a combination of the best natural, earthen, fruity, and grainy smells you’ve ever come across, along with the best unnatural, chemical smells.

Kids don’t know the smells of unprocessed molasses, burnt grain, or wood smoke. This would seem like a medicine chest mixed with a cookie jar mixed with a walk in a field—one whiff could scar a kid for life.

Too much complexity. On the very tip of the tongue it tastes like a dark wine, then it gets bittersweet, like fire roasted grain, browning apples, and molasses, then it gets regular sweet, like half-dark chocolate and a café mocha, and then it gets a little zippy, like Belgian alcohol and yeast. That’s—that’s like you’re falling down a hill of flavor and then you climb it back up again, from the valley of the alcohol, into the sweet, and then into the bittersweet, and then into the wine. Giving this to a child would be like giving them a bar of acid and taking them to Disneyland. Nothing would ever make them feel happy again, ever.

Serving type: bottle

└ Tags: beer review, Dark Lord Imperial Stout, Indiana, Review, Thee Floyds
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