At Pub 27 in Pompeii
Sometimes We Just Stay Home and Drink: #4 Clown Shoes at Mercury (Ipswich, Mass.) Crasher in the Rye 2017
Date: June 1, 2019 —
The Story— Clown Shoes was one of the most interesting and successful of the contract brewers of the last 15 years. Brewing mostly at Ipswich’s Mercury Brewery, they produced over 100 wildly imaginative labels and often inventive beers to go with them. Clown Shoes is now a part of the Mass Bay Brewery — brewers of Harpoon. It will be interesting to see what happens with the merger, but overall, Mass Bay produces more consistent winners than Ipswich so we expect Clown Shoes beers to benefit from the merger.
The Beer– The bottle claims a “warming spice” but no indication of anything other than malt in the recipe. Full flavored with the advertised cocoa. It’s even and chewy and smooth with lasting gentle cocoa and malt. Ellie and I disagreed on the ending — she found a bite of bitter threw the balance off and I thought it restored it. Go find it and decide for yourself.
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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