Sometimes We Just Stay Home and Drink: #21: Moustache Lawn Beer Cream Ale, Riverhead, Long Island, New York.
Date: June 20 , 2019 —
The Story— This is another prize from our semi-annual beer gathering excursion from Boston to Baltimore. We’re pretty sure we picked this up at Half Time Beverage in Poughkeepsie, NY. and we’re grateful for Half Time and a handful of other really good beer stores– for allowing us to try all sorts of breweries we’d never encounter any other way. Moustache (sic), for example, is located near the eastern end of Long Island; its taproom is open Thursday through Sunday but it’s well out of the way for us and we’re not likely to visit soon.
The Moustache can recalls the Utica Club Cream Ale brand of the late 1960s so evocatively that we’re pretty sure it has to be an homage to one of the great cream ales of its day. While it’s hard to recall very precisely what attracted us to the Utica Club above all others (and especially Genesee), we’re pretty sure it was a mild fruity hop and very clean and mild malt. Not much by today’s standards. This one brings back the memories but with enough balance to hold its own in the current craft beer explosion. Hats off to the Moustache guys for a fine beer in a nearly impossible style to do well.
The Beer– Hops show in the aroma and some in the flavor but only enough metallic biter to balance the tangy pale malt. Nicely reminiscent of upstate New York in the 60s. Also, props for not calling it a kolsch, which hundreds of breweries do with a hard to define gold ale. It’s a lawn beer indeed, and I could sit in a lawn chair and drink this all day long.
Value — Good to very good.
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.
Sometimes we just stay home and drink beer — hundreds of them over the course of the year as we hunt for a new favorite. The searching for the beer of the day never stops, so for a while, there will be fewer travel-oriented posts and just some to-the-point descriptions of beers we’ve enjoyed.
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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