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Archives for February 2017

February 23, 2017 by Tupper Leave a Comment

A LIQUID POEM TO THE GLORY OF THE HOP: STONE’S RUNINATION DOUBLE IPA 2.0

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A LIQUID POEM TO THE GLORY OF THE HOP:

STONE’S RUNINATION DOUBLE IPA 2.0

five stars top 5 percent

Stone Brewing Ruination Double IPA 2.0        Abv  8.5

We applaud brewers who, in the never-ending struggle to brew a beer that’s different from the brewery across town—or increasingly across the street—get more smarter about brewing actual beer rather than dump in some new ingredient no one could have imagined.  (OK – an exception is tomorrow’s beaver butt beer, that actually worked.)  Stone has tried almost everything to maintain its reputation as an innovator, but it does its best work when it takes a great beer and improves it.

The 2.0 Ruination is a tad stronger in alcohol than the version we first tasted at the Brickskeller in 2002, but the big difference comes in the hopping.   While the new version does continue with the Magnum and Centennial, both rather innovative for their time, it adds Simcoe, Citra and Azacca to bring the profile up to date.  Perhaps more importantly, it employs “hop bursting”—the practice of adding essentially wastefully massive amounts of hops very late in the boil.  The enormous hop load achieves the IBUs that fewer hops with a longer boil could provide, but the bitterness is softer and the flavors of the hops are more evident.  stone ruination

If Stone were in New England, maybe they’d tinker around a bit more and can it and have a new cult beer, but this one seemed to us to be a bit more polished, though certainly not short on flavor.

Tasting notes:  The very rich malt and a good thing indeed and manages, barely, to more or less support the yuge deeply dank hops wave.  Some citrus peel shows but spicy and earthy notes share the spotlight in a thick, almost syrupy, oily and resiny hop profusion.

Food Pairings:  Stone’s website gives unusually detailed suggestions for its beers.  These guys have fun but take their beer very seriously.   Many of the suggestions point south of the border (mahi-mahi tacos and guacamole, are two of the many suggestions.   We’re most intrigued by the suggestion of Sag Paneer.  This massive and somewhat distant cousin of beers of the British troops in India is a far cry from the tepid Kingfisher that you expect in a Indian Restaurant; we may have to cook the dish at home to get a chance to try the pairing.  Review #0071   20170223

Tomorrow: Beaverbrau?  Castorale? Nope– it’s Olde Mother’s Tainted Love– giving a whole new meaning to “Bottoms Up.” (Strangeways Ape Armegeddon coming soon)

next week bamberg2

 

February 22, 2017 by Tupper Leave a Comment

Three Notch’d Minuteman IPA: A Gentle Nor’Easter

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Three Notch’d Minuteman IPA: A Gentle Nor’Easter

Three Notch’s Minuteman IPA        Abv 7.0       IBU  204 stars excellent

 Three Notch’d Brewery in Charlottesville, Va. entered the market at a good time, with a good business plan and an exceptionally good brewer.   Naturally they’re expanding this summer.  We’ll post a bigger feature on them later in the year when they’re comfortably into their new digs,

We first encountered them a bit over three years ago and they impressed us from the start. We’ve tasted almost 30 of their beers since and have been impressed but the number of very different kinds of beer they do well.

These days it seems that if you have a small brewery you have to at least try to top Heddy.  We’re pretty sure this style is going to slide into the fad heap before too long, but in the short run the challenge for the brewer is to produce a beer that has enough “dank and juicy” hop flavors to keep people from driving to New England, while still producing beer that looks good enough and tastes good enough for people to enjoy it.

Head Brewer Dave Warwick has produced a wide range of excellent beers in Charlottesville's Three Notch'd Brewery

Head Brewer Dave Warwick has produced a wide range of excellent beers in Charlottesville’s Three Notch’d Brewery

Brewer Dave Warwick threaded the needle well with his Three Notch’d Minuteman IPA, a creamy, softly fruity yeasty IPA that’s quite moreish.  It’s got a haze, but it looks like a proper bottle-conditioned beer rather than the bottom dregs of a fermenting tank.   It has fruity and grassy hops, but it’s not so dank you can’t drink several of them.   Trust us on this one.  If you do attempt this bit of research, however, stay off the roads – at 7% abv, it can sneak up on you.Three notchd MinuteMan-Poster[1] wbsm

Tasting notes:  It pours a slightly hazy golden brown with an exceptionally good creamy head.   The hops show in the aroma with fruit, grass and spice and stay inviting as it drinks.   A steady creamy chalkiness smooths and tempers the fruit, though a late bitter tang does sneak through at the end.

Food Pairings:  The soft yeast and hoppiness could temper something spicy, and this would be a great deal better than the thin sharp lagers we used to have to tolerate with Thai food.  Unlike the DIPA palate wreckers, though, this is gentle enough to escort a milder dish such as roast chicken or charcoal grilled fish.  Review #0070  20170222

 

Tomorrow: Strangeways Imperial Stout from Richmond, and don’t miss Friday’s entry:  Beaverbrau?  Castorale? Nope– it’s Olde Mother’s Tainted Love– giving a whole new meaning to “Bottoms Up.”

next week bamberg2

February 21, 2017 by Tupper 2 Comments

Throw a Dart, Find a Brewery: Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania

Throw a Dart, Find a Brewery: Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania

We’ve had some wonderful brewery weekends this winter often thanks to the Beer Mapping Project (beermapping.com).  The new format allows you to spot quickly and easily concentrations of breweries and beer bars that would take hours to hunt down on other sites.  The only problem is that there are so many significant concentrations that we’ve had to resign ourselves to not being able to visit them all.   Sometimes we come pretty close to throwing a metaphorical dart at the screen.

Elizabethtown was one of those darts and it gave us a first rate weekend.  We visited four breweries and could have done much more if weekends were five days and workweeks were two.  On the way to Elizabethtown we stopped at Ever Grain (more about this outstanding brewery in another post) and Tattered Flag (the Aleways RemAmber was a sessionable 5.5% and worth another glass or two) before settling in for the night in the wonderfully small town itself.  While we found some good beer at every stop and wonderful beer occasionally, the trip reminded us again that you don’t travel just to find good beer – you travel to Drink In the Culture of fun places to drink.

Elizabethtown sports two breweries to serve a population of less than 12,000.  Others are a 15 minute drive away.    The two in-town breweries offer significantly different experiences.   Moo-Duck has a tiny three barrel system that looks like a soup kitchen could make better use of it.

It's not a fancy place, but it's a really fun one.

It’s not a fancy place, but it’s a really fun one.

Brew House at Moo Duck

Brew House at Moo Duck

We’ve seen similar setups at Alesation in Winchester and Brew Gentlemens in Braddock, Pennsylvania.  What we’ve learned is that good, and even consistent beer, can come from these systems, but it’s really really hard to make that happen.

The beer, therefore, falls short of sophistication, but the hoppier beers were tasty reminders of why hops were at one time a near-universal component of beer everywhere.   The best of them, The Great 38, was listed as an IPA, but at 38 IBUs it was just hoppy enough to balance the dusty malt.   Rather than bitterness, the beer showed the breadth of flavors that Mosaic can provide when it’s not overblended with buckets of other Antipodean varieties.   If you plan a visit check on line to find out when there will be music.   We stayed almost all night listening to one of the most versatile acoustic guitar singers that we have heard since the Great Folk Scare of the 60s and 70s.   We were told that while the styles of music vary, the quality is always sensational.

The town’s other “brewery” is walking distance away in good weather.   .   Funk is the better funded, slicker, of the two, though far from the sophistication of a brewery like Troegs.   Beers are good to very good, and more polished than those of smaller operations.  While beer is a major draw, the kitchen offers enough variety to keep most drinkers happy and the quality of the food is quite good.

Funk Tap Room and Restaurant in Elizabethtown

Funk Tap Room and Restaurant in Elizabethtown

Funk also has a good reputation among locals for the quality of its music .

It is worth noting that most of the beer is not brewed on premise – it’s brought in from Emmaus which is about an hour and a half to the east.   There is a small brewery on sight that is apparently used for wild and sour beer production. We were content enough to enjoy the Emmaus beers that were conventionally easy to drink.

If you want to spend the night in town, the choice is an easy one.  Places like the Amanda Gish House leave us wondering why we ever stay at a chain hotel.   Immaculate, comfortable and filled with enough period pieces to qualify as a minor museum, this small B&B can serve as an excellent base to explore Lancaster County or just get away from an urban rat race.

Amanda Gish House in Elizabethtown Pennsylvania

Amanda Gish House in Elizabethtown Pennsylvania

 

Garden Room- The best of Amanda Gish House's 3 Bedrooms

Garden Room- The best of Amanda Gish House’s 3 Bedrooms

Hosts Ann and Dave Royer are as welcoming as old friends and but are skilled enough hoteliers to be worthy of managing the New York Hilton. They take care of such small details such as the coffee, tea, cocoa and bottled water that are always available and the soothing music during breakfast, but ensure your stay is far beyond simply comfortable.   Breakfast for us consisted of baked apples and an asparagus quiche that featured local goat cheese.   We were impressed that they were at the next table for the hours we spent at Moo-Duck.

The house itself is a bit short of two centuries old, but includes modern updates such as the two-person Jacuzzi in the largest of the three rooms and as realistic an electric fire as we’ve ever seen.  It’s right on the edge of Elizabethtown, which even in its core is hardly a teeming metropolis, so it’s easy to get a good and very quiet night’s sleep.

If you want a sophisticated brewery experience, Tröegs is about a 20 minute drive away.  It’s not as intimate or neighborly as Tattered Flag, Moo-Duck or Funk, but the range of excellence continues to astound us.   We’ve been featuring several of their beers for the past week or two in our Beer of the Day column—you can still find them if you scroll back through “Beer Reviews.”

Post 0028 Elizabethtown New Jerseynext week bamberg2

 

February 21, 2017 by Tupper Leave a Comment

TRÖEGS MAD ELF: “I COULD SNIFF THIS ALL NIGHT”

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TRÖEGS MAD ELF: “I COULD SNIFF THIS ALL NIGHT”

TRÖEGS MAD ELF 2016  Abv 11       IBU 154 to 5 stars superior top 15 percent

WE step once more into the tanks at Tröegs brewery in Hershey, Pa.  We’re running it today because it’s such an easy stop after the trip to Elizabethtown featured in our Hopping Around post for the week.      We’ve been featuring TRÖEGS’s Scratch Series, but it’s worth remembering that their big batch seasonals cause a ruckus in the beer world several times a year.  Mad Elf is one of their stop traffic releases.  I think the batches they turned out in Harrisburg might have been a bit more distinctive, but it’s just as likely they didn’t have the competition then that they do now.  Even in this overcrowded spiced and holiday market, however, Mad Elf lifts itself above the crowd.

Troegs Mad Elf-- Whimsy in the label, but Mad Elf is serious beer. (courtesy Troeegs Independent Brewery)

Troegs Mad Elf– Whimsy in the label, but Mad Elf is serious beer. (courtesy Troeegs Independent Brewery)

 

 

Tasting notes:  Mad Elf is just ridiculously smooth for an 11% beer.  A rich malt starts it with lots of sweet cherries and some floral notes in the finish.  It is, however, really sweet, and hop heads aren’t going to swoon over the 15 IBUs.  Tough luck for them   There’s a bit of Ludens as it drinks, but it holds its depth.  I looked over as Ellie began to taste her glass.  She looked up and said “I could sniff this all night.”  She did wind up drinking it, but if I ever am told I can’t drink anymore, there may just have to be smelling sessions with this sort of rich beer.  [tasted from a bottle one day removed from the brewery]

Food Pairings:  Big rich meat dishes.  Spicy vegetarian casseroles.  Cheese, because cheese is almost always a good choice for a beer above 8% and this is way over 8%.   A soft cheese could allow the spices of the ale to show even more clearly.    [review 0067, 20170219]    Tomorrow: Three Notch’d Minuteman IPA, and don’t miss Friday’s entry:  Beaverbrau?  Castorale? Nope– it’s Olde Mother’s Tainted Love– giving a whole new meaning to “Bottoms Up.”

next week bamberg2

 

 

 

February 19, 2017 by Tupper Leave a Comment

The Alaskan Frontier:  Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em–

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The Alaskan Frontier:  Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em–

49th State Smoked Märzen        Abv 5.7        IBU 253 - 4 stars recommended

               There was a time when smoked beers were pretty common.  It’s easier to dry malt using direct heat than to create a double chamber system that will toast the malt but keep the smoke away from the grain.   As brewing became more commercial and more sophisticated, smoked beers gave way to cleaner flavors—except in isolated spots such as Bamberg, Germany.   [more on Bamberg’s Schlenkerla beer tomorrow.]

On this side of the Atlantic – more properly the Pacific—Alaska has pioneered a revival of smoked beer.   In 1988, Geoff Larson, who with his wife Marcy had opened the Alaskan Brewing Company a couple of years earlier, introduced Alaskan Smoked Porter.  The porter, sporadically available since, became a cult sensation—the Heddy Topper of its day.  A skillful use of smoke gave a complexity to the flavor and served and acted as a preservative, allowing the beer to be cellared for years.49th state smoked maerzen IMG_0563

It seems appropriate, therefore, for one of Alaska’s newer breweries, 49th State, to brew their own version of a smoked beer.   Their choice was a märzen style—the same style that Heller Brewing’s Schlenkerla has popularized around the world.

We had a chance to taste a smoked golden ale recently, and it provided a quick and effective lesson on why darker beers are more suitable for smoke.   The malt and the smoke quibbled and nagged at each other until an outright clash in the aftertaste.   49th State has avoided such a conflict in its märzen.  It’s quite smoky, but there is a fundamental balance and the smoke is strikingly clean.   We were able to try it at a bottle share; I hope we’ll get a chance to do it justice by drinking it all night if we ever get to Healy, Alaska.

Tasting notes:   A big smoke aroma greets from the start, but no more aggressive than most Schlenkerla beers.   Starts and stays clean and even with a remarkable sustained cleanliness for the style.  Still, it’s all about the smoke.  There a bit of milky malt and even a hint of salt as it drinks, but the clean rich smoke is what makes it so moreish.

Food Pairings:  One of the basic rules of food pairing is “complement or contrast”.   The knee jerk pairing for smoked beers is smoked fish or smoked meats, and that’s OK, though it can be a bit much for some palates.   We prefer to match it with meats that aren’t smoked—there’s almost a gustatory illusion as the actual and expected sources of the smoke are reversed. 

  •     * Skip It
  •    ** Good Craft Beer
  •   *** Well Above Average
  •  **** Exceptional
  • ***** Top 1%
Rating: ***  Value:   Review #0067; 20170219    Tomorrow:   Schlenkerla Pastenbier

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What’s New Inside

 Gold Metal Winning Tuppers’ Hop Pocket Ale Returns!

Join us at Dynasty Brewing on July 17 between 3PM and 8PM to savor the first batch of Tuppers’ Hop Pocket Ale in almost five years.  We’ll be there signing books at a huge discount and the brewery will be pouring the beer that was created to be “Hoppy enough for Bob and balanced enough for Ellie.”

It hasn’t been easy to resurrect Tuppers’ Hop Pocket Ale, winner of a gold metal at the GBBF in the ’90s when well hopped beers were rare and almost non-existent in the east.  We’ve collaborated with Dynasty’s head brewer Favio Garcia, the brewer who produced the last batch of Tuppers’ Hop Pocket at Old Dominion to reproduce an authentic version of the original.    Dynasty is in Ashburn, Virginia– almost within walking distance of the Old Dominion brewery that brewed the first batch just over 25 years ago.

NOW PLAYING: on Beer of the Day—  Some great beers in the San Francisco Bay area.  Scroll down below this entry to find the featured beer of the day.   >>>>>

Later — in July we resume some great weekend destinations for beer travelers that we’ve found researching our guide to breweries and inns of the Mid Atlantic.  Whether you’re looking for a turn of the (20th) century 100 year old quaint and slightly rickety hotel, an engaging B&B or a magnificent survivor of the great era of railroad hotels, we’ve found hem– within walking distance of a brewery.   We’ll present more previews of the book’s best here rolling up to Pennsylvania before we’re through.

 

 

 

Beer of the Day

only beer pub 27 IMG_3154

 At Pub 27 in Pompeii

Far From India: India Pale Ales in the 21st Century.

Date:  March, 2019

The Story—

The Beer—

Value —

Values:  “fair” is a good beer at an above market price, “good” is worth the money, “very good” is a bargain, and “excellent” is a steal.

In mid-March we’re taking a look at the incredible variety of IPAs.   The style is by far the biggest seller among craft beers in the US and probably in Europe as well.   Even century-old breweries in Reinheitsgebot-narrowed Germany are brewing IPAs (if the brewer calls it “ale” it doesn’t have to conform to the strict purity law).   But you have to ask these days: What is an IPA”?  We’ll take a look at almost a dozen recognized and semi-recognized styles of IPAs in the next couple of weeks.

 We’re often asked to share our tasting notes on over 33,000 beers; this blog is in answer to those requests.   Not all our notes, though.  The great beer writer Michael Jackson admirably followed the Thumper Rule, and we’ll try to do the same.  (“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nuthin’ at all.”)   All the beers we post are from the top half of our ratings and most are from the top quarter.   Of greater value, we think, are the stories behind the beers,   and we try to give you enough about the brewery, the style and the places to find great beer to help you on your own beer journeys.   At CulturAle Press we try to write books and publish posts that will help you “Drink Well and Travel Safely.”

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