DuClaw’s Brimstone is a Beauty

Thursday, January 7, 2016.   We are constantly asked, “Which of your 38,000 beers is your favorite?”   The answer is easy and quick—“the one that’s in my hand” – and that’s usually actually true.   But we do have an all-time “favorite beer” – a 1980 vintage Thomas Hardy Ale that we cellared and celebrated our new-born daughter’s journey to our home from the hospital in which she was born.   We, probably illegally, doused her pacifier in the nectar and she relished it as much as we did.   We had the good fortune to visit the Eldridge Pope Brewery in Dorchester before its close and were privileged to visit the off-limits cellars that held the brew for the better part of a year.  Surplus tanks are a brewer’s gift from God.  After Eldridge Pope’s sad demise the brand moved to the south of England, but the heart of the poet remained in Dorset.

We still have a mixed case of a few years of Thomas Hardy we cellared in those years and they’ve richly earned the promise they made of a 25 year maturing Nirvana.  Even with the profusion of knee bucklers of the craft revolution we’ve never tasted anything in the US that matched its essence – until New Year’s Day 2016.   A nearly two-year old bottle of DuClaw’s Brimstone had the same depth of rich fruit and malt that made the Hardy so distinctive. Brimstone is a different recipe and isn’t intended to  imitate the Eldridge Pope original, but its malted rye gave it a complex edge that seemed to mimic the effect of several years of Hardy’s aging.  Notes of prunes, plums, blackberries ride over slightly smoky, but richly deep malt.  We often don’t finish big bottles of beer in multi-beer tasting sessions, but we licked the empty glass on this one.

The name Brimstone, by the way, was chosen in part as a tip of the hat to one of the pioneers of Baltimore craft brewing — Brimstone.  Those of you who attended Brickskeller tastings in the 90s will remember their showman of a brewer, Marc Tewey.

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• January 11, 2016 – Germany Crawls onto the Craft Wagon
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