Nov07

Flossmoor Station Shadows in the Smoke

by mynie on November 7, 2013 at 9:15 pm
Posted In: Beer Reviews

Shadows in smoke

In music, a band’s genre status does not become calcified until ten, twenty years past the time when something comes out. This makes reviewing especially difficult, as having a set of generic reference points is crucial to explaining your opinon of a particular record—it would be downright unfair to compare, say, Ride the Lightning to Abba Gold. The two albums go for very different things, and both fail or succeed in very different terms.

But what does it mean if the genres keep shifting? Think about Weezer’s first album, the blue one. When that came out, everyone (including me) thought it was totally indie-tastic, a hard-rocking testament to the fact that real, rebellious rock and roll was never gonna die, man. But then, after an emo second album and 15 years worth of pop rock records that range from middling to soul-crushingly horrible, it’s become clear that Weezer were never really alternative, certainly never rebellious. They were guitar pop, a slightly more effective, less moody take on the same territory covered by Collective Soul or Live. Looking back at the reviews of the blue album circa 1995, then, everything seems off and stupid. Why were the reviewers reviewing it in that way, according to those standards?

Which brings me to a smoked fucking Oktoberfest. Maybe someday this will be its own thing—a smoked malty lager category that somehow formally differentiates itself from rauchbiers. But right now, this here, I am drinking a beer that claims to belong to a genre and then it does something that blots out all the distinguishing features of that genre. It’s like a death metal boyband with all the guitars turned up so you can’t hear the boys singing.

This isn’t a very good smoke beer. It’s okay, but problematically carbonated. The first, most salient flavor is a grating fizz, which is followed by smoked wood and light salami nodes. Nothing in here resembles an Oktoberfest.

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Sep25

Hill Farmstead’s Amarillo

by mynie on September 25, 2013 at 11:55 am
Posted In: Beer Reviews

amarillo

As I said before, the thing about Vermont is that Heady abounds. It’s not like in Chicago, where you got to get lucky to find Zombie Dust even at its brewery. Nor is it like SoCal, where yeah you got tons of good hoptions (get it? Get what I, an adult, just wrote right there?) but if you want Younger you got to get to brewery six hours before it opens and then say a magic password and then kiss this weird gross stuffed raccoon thing they got hanging up above the taproom bar.

In Vermont, Heady is surprisingly easy to find. And since it’s fucking Heady, you drink a lot of it. Which is grand. But the bad side is that other, less incredibly extreme beers begin to taste like Coors.

Case in point: all of the HF pales we had (aside from Citra, but we had that with fresh pallets). Even glorious Abner tasted kinda tame.

And so I’m just now getting around to this swig-top growler of Amarillo, which struck me as the least impressive during our small tasting session. What I’ll say is that HF does a damn fine job of really balancing their single hop beers. Meaning, they adjust the malt profile along with the hops, instead of just treating barley like an empty stage upon which hops frollick. That Hill dude is a malt wizard, and a yeast wizard.

And, accordingly, this Amarillo has a creamier, more ester-less base than the Citra. This accentuates the pleasant, floral nodes of the Amarillo while managing to diminish the potentially extreme nodes of cat pee and raw alpha acid that sometimes shine through. There’s some light fruitiness in there, too. But mostly flowers.

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Sep19

Trillium by Trillium

by mynie on September 19, 2013 at 12:09 am
Posted In: Beer Reviews

trillium

I was initially going to try to do some kind of comprehensive, linear review of our east coast travels, the way that mentally stable people usually write the travel narratives. But that doesn’t really fit in with my upcoming drinking schedule—which is manic and shaking, squeezed in between day-long binges of dissertation writing—and so we might just do this piecemeal, one beer at a time.

Or one brewery at a time! Or—one beer, actually, since they don’t serve pints at the brewery and my suitcase was already over the airport weight limit.

This is Trillium Titular beer from an insanely friendly, slightly buzzy brewery in Boston. When the friendly brewer heard that my traveling companion was a microbiologist, he allowed us to sample straight from the barrel some funk-aged concoction of this very beer. Accordingly, politeness dictated that I simply had to take home a growler.

The result… underwhelming, according to hyper-contemporary tastes. Meaning it’s not soaked with grapefruit, brett, and/or crushed up Shock Tarts.

Granted, my first sip was a little bit of a letdown. But that’s just because of my moronic expectations–it has nothing to do with the objective quality of the beer. Taking a few more sips, I realize this is a classic, dry saison. And that’s saying something, because American normally capital-S suck at making dry saisons. Usually the back end of an American dry saison is like you’ve just poured a bunch of silica gel into your mouth. This–this is more like the sensation you get from drinking a nice Brut champagne, only it’s better because it’s beer instead of wine.

As it warms a bit, fruit nodes become more pronounced. Light prunes, light lemon zest, but mostly fresh bread, a nice brush of yeast spiciness and then a dry, yeasty finish. Very good.

Also, side note, why don’t more breweries have titular beers? Repetition is cool as hell. One time I seen the video for the Black Sabbath song “Black Sabbath,” which is from the album _Black Sabbath_. The title at the end of the video read

Black Sabbath
Black Sabbath
Black Sabbath

And that was cool as hell. Trillium, by Trillium, is the beer world’s version of that

Here are some more pics from “the Trill”

t1

t2

t3

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Sep07

Lawson’s Double Sunshine

by mynie on September 7, 2013 at 1:08 am
Posted In: Beer Reviews

photo-2

This is the exact opposite of Heady. Do not drink this directly from the container. Good god, if you never listen to another word I say please pay attention now: do not drink this direct from the bottle. You will deprive yourself of the most heavenly IPA aroma any American brewer has ever before created.

Good. We got that out of the way. Now on to the regular, Beer Hole-y stuff, in which we talk about stuff that has nothing to do with beer, stuff that in normal circumstances would be taken for severe signs of psychical distress.

Dustine and I went up to Vermont last week, on a trip that was about 80% dedicated to the purchase and consumption of beer. You’d think this would result in a bevy of beer posts, but no—not at all. We were far too drunk and cancer-ridden to produce any incoherent nihilist treaties or beard-based Pynchon parodies. All we did was wonder around the most glorious countryside I have ever seen and imbibe beer after beer after beer.

Vermonters are good goddamn people. The best, I think. At least the best I’ve ever spent time around. And this goes far beyond lax dress codes and gay marriage; it was, aside from maybe the north of Iowa and the south of Minnesota, the least pretentious place I’d ever been. No one seemed even a little bit image-conscious. Everyone just existed, all tolerant and placid and peaceable. It was like how I used to think the Beats existed, back when I was in high school and I wasn’t yet aware of how rampant misogyny was back then, or how opiate abuse turns users into horrible shitty monsters.

So basically it was like the good parts of Iowa, only with gorgeous scenery, better beer, and Bernie Sanders in place of Steve King. Call me a hayseed if you will, but that’s the closet description of heaven I can muster:

Lawsons

Even there, Lawson’s was hard to come by. Even in Warren, they only got in ten cases of bombers that week (according to the only man who has ever complimented my Iowa ID). Then at the Montpellier co-op, where the only woman to ever compliment my Iowa ID worked, they only got in one case of Lawson’s per week. It was opened at 10 on Friday morning and we grabbed the last of it at 10:25.

Heady abounds. Heady abounds to the extent that all other hoppy beers begin tasting like grass and plastic and you begin aching for a good, piercing sour so as to slash and burn your pallet. We found none, however. Just hops after hops after hops, and by Boston the assault was so glorious and profound that I decided to switch to mixed, rather than insult my decaying stomach with a beer hop profile that was anything short of perfect.

Anyhow, yeah, this beer is very near perfect, one of the 20 or so best I’ve ever had an the undisputed king of its style.

We’ll describe more places in the next few days. Look out for it.

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Aug22

Some Mikkeller shit wrapped in paper (Nelson Sauvin Brut)

by mynie on August 22, 2013 at 1:03 am
Posted In: Beer Reviews

mikk

How many times will I end up paying a dollar an ounce for stale, middling Denmarkian beer before I “get the picture” and start spending my money on something useful, like that Kickstarter that’s trying to raise enough money to get Mike O’Malley to shoot a reboot pilot for Get the Picture? This time I had an excuse, though. This time, Mr. Mikkeller was wearing a fancy new paper scarf, and he looked as handsome as man from the talkies, he did, all done up with black paper and a face and a moustache. Looked like a regular Adolf Valantino… I—I couldn’t’ say no. Not to that paper.

Uhh… fuck. Sours tend to hold up. And this one was somehow, for some reason, not priced as exorbitantly as the rest of them (is it poisoned? A gimmick beer brewed with ground-up human teeth?). And—heeeeey, lookie here, there’s some words coming out of the sketch of the man on the bottle: “Nelson Sauvin Brut.” I’ve heard of that. It’s a beer de Chamaple, one of those things that, like the hybrid dog-turkeys of old, refuse to be pigeonholed and demand to act as emissary from two terrifyingly incongruous kingdoms.

Only unlike the grotesquely delicious and uncannily loyal dog-turkey, this is champ-ale’s good parts don’t offset one another like some kind of abomination of god. They instead accentuate one another, and the result is like one of the most intense and refreshing saisons you’ve ever drank.

A real masher. A+.

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