HEDONIST BEER JIVE

WE HAVE A NEW HOME

2010-04-27T11:51:00.001-07:00

Click over to the our NEW beer blog (started in August 2011) called BEER SAMIZDAT; or our expanded blog THE HEDONIST JIVE, which casts a net well beyond craft beer and into all sorts of personal obsessions – music, film, politics, baseball, naval-gazing and extreme narcissism. Bookmark http://beersamizdat.net and http://www.hedonistjive.com/ and please visit often.

THE HEDONIST BEER JIVE 95

2010-04-26T06:00:00.000-07:00

Let’s take a moment to give thanks and praise to the beers that rejoice and sing hosannas with the angels, shall we? Expanded from the Hedonist Beer Jive 75, let me present to you the HEDONIST BEER JIVE 95 – the ninety-five finest ales (and lagers!) to have ever passed my lips. There are multiple newcomers to the list – with THE BRUERY’s “Mischief” being the single greatest new beer to hit the hallowed rankings – and jeez, if we can only drink five more world-beating beers, we’ll make it all the way up to a big 100.

As we always like to say, start your shopping here and fill your basket with these gems. HBJ says you’ll be glad ya did.

1. BRASSERIE DE ROCHEFORT – Trappistes Rochefort 8 (Belgian Strong Dark Ale)
2. BRASSERIE DE L'ABBAYE DES ROCS - Triple Imperiale (Belgian Strong Dark Ale)
3. SOUTHERN TIER – Gemini (Double IPA)
4. DESCHUTES - The Abyss (Russian Imperial Stout)

5. UNIBROUE – La Fin Du Monde (Belgian Strong Pale Ale)
6. THE BRUERY - Mischief (Belgian Strong Pale Ale)
7. MOYLAN’S – Hopsickle (Double IPA)
8. BRASSERIE DE ROCHEFORT – Trappistes Rochefort 6 (Belgian Strong Dark Ale)

9. BROOKLYN BREWING - Black Ops (Barrel-Aged Stout)
10. THREE FLOYDS - Alpha King (American Pale Ale)
11. LOST ABBEY – Gift Of The Magi (Biere De Garde)
12. SIX POINT CRAFT ALES - Bengali Tiger (IPA)
13. LOST ABBEY – 10 Commandments (Belgian Strong Dark Ale)
14. ST. BERNARDUS – Grotten Brown (Belgian Strong Dark Ale)
15. BROWERIJ VAN STEENBERGE – Monk’s Café Sour Flemish Ale (Flanders Oud Bruin)
16. LUCKY LABRADOR - Super Duper Dog (Double IPA)

17. RUSSIAN RIVER – Damnation (Belgian-Style Strong Golden Ale)
18. AVERY BREWING – The Reverend (Quadrupel)
19. MOONLIGHT – Reality Czeck (Czech Pilsner)
20. VICTORY BREWING – Wild Devil (Belgian IPA)
21. STONE BREWING – IPA (IPA)
22. HACKER-PSCHORR – Dunkel Weiss (Dunkel Weizen)
23. DE STRUISE - Pannepot Old Fisherman's Ale (Quadrupel)
24. LOST ABBEY - Devotion Ale (Belgian-Style Blonde Ale)
25. CAPTAIN LAWRENCE - Captain's Reserve Imperial IPA (Double IPA)
26. ALPINE BREWING - Nelson (IPA)
27. SURLY - Furious (Imperial Red Ale)
28. MIKKELLER/BREWDOG - Devine Rebel (English Barleywine)
29. DARK HORSE - Tres Blueberry Stout (American Stout)
30. CAPTAIN LAWRENCE - St. Vincent's Dubbel (Dubbel)
31. BROOKLYN BREWING – Extra Brune (Flanders Oud Bruin)
32. GOUDEN CAROLUS – Ambrio (Belgian Strong Pale Ale)
33. THE BRUERY – Saison Rue (Saison)
34. DENNISON’S – Weizen (Hefeweizen)
35. BELL’S – Expedition Stout (Imperial Stout)
36. BROUWERIJ WESTVLETEREN – Trappist Westvleteren 12 (Quadrupel)
37. RUSSIAN RIVER – Blind Pig (IPA)
38. SMUTTYNOSE - Gravitation (Quadrupel)
39. 5 SEASONS BREWING – Venus (Witbier)
40. MARIN BREWING - Tripel Dipsea (Tripel)
41. MOYLAN’S – IPA (IPA)
42. RUSSIAN RIVER – Rejection (Belgian Black Ale)
43. UNIBROUE – Maudite (Belgian Strong Dark Ale)
44. DE PROEF – Zoetzuur Flemish Ale (Flanders Red Ale)
44. DRAKE’S – Denogginizer (Double IPA)
45. BEAR REPUBLIC - Racer 5 (IPA)
46. LOST ABBEY – Avant Garde (Biere De Garde)
47. SOUTHERN TIER - Heavy Weizen (Imperial Hefeweizen)
48. ST. BERNARDUS - Prior 8 (Dubbel)
49. TELEGRAPH BREWING – California Ale (Saison)
50. RUSSIAN RIVER - O.V.L. Stout (American Stout)
51. LOST ABBEY – Angel’s Share 2007 (Barleywine)
52. BROOKLYN BREWING – Local 1 (Belgian-Style Golden Ale)
53. BROWERIJ DE DOLLE – Oerbier (Belgian Strong Dark Ale)
54. BOULDER BEER – Hazed & Infused (IPA)
55. DOGFISH HEAD – 90-Minute IPA (IPA)
56. BRASSERIE DUPONT - Saison Dupont (Saison)
57. GREEN FLASH – Saison (Saison)
58. LOST ABBEY – Carnivale (Saison)
59. RUSSIAN RIVER – Redemption (Belgian-Style Pale Ale)
60. SIERRA NEVADA – Celebration Ale 2007 and 2008 (IPA)
61. HANDBRYGGERIET – Norwegian Wood (Smoked/Spiced Ale)
62. SOUTHERN TIER - Hoppe (Double IPA)
63. LAGUNITAS – Imperial Red (American Strong Ale)

64. 5 SEASONS BREWING - Dark White (Dark witbier)
65. TELEGRAPH BREWING – Golden Wheat (Wheat Beer)
66. BRASSERIE DE ROCHEFORT – Trappistes Rochefort 10 (Quadrupel)
67. THE BRUERY - Orchard White (Witbier)
68. DE PROEF – Kerstmutske (Christmas Ale)
69. ST. BERNARDUS – ABT 12 (Quadrupel)
70. SILVER CITY BREWERY – Fat (Scotch Ale)
71. TWO BROTHERS BREWING - Hop Juice (Double IPA)
72. BRASSERIE DUPONT – Foret (Saison)
73. SIERRA NEVADA – Torpedo Extra Ale (IPA)
74. NORTH COAST – La Merle (Saison)
75. RUSSIAN RIVER – Damnation, Batch 23 (Belgian-Style Strong Golden Ale)
76. RUSSIAN RIVER – Temptation (American Wild Ale)
77. ALPINE BREWING - Duet (IPA)
78. LOST ABBEY - The Angel's Share 2009 (American Strong Ale)
79. SIERRA NEVADA/DOGFISH HEAD - Life & Limb (American Strong Ale)
80. SOUTHERN TIER - Oak-Aged Unearthly (Double IPA)
81. MASIA AGULLONS - Runa Ale (Brown Ale)
82. ELYSIAN/GREEN FLASH - The Red Queen (Saison)
83. MOONLIGHT – 2006 Toast Malt Liquor (American Amber/Red Lager)
84. AVERY BREWING – Fourteen (Belgian Strong Dark Ale)
85. IRON HORSE – Beer Shoppe Anniversary Ale (Double IPA)
86. NEW BELGIUM – Le Fleur Misseur (Belgian-Style Pale ale)
87. LAGUNITAS – Freak Out! (IPA)
88. FIRESTONE WALKER – 10 (Barleywine)
89. DOGFISH HEAD – Raison D’Extra 2005 (Belgian Strong Dark Ale)
90. DESCHUTES – 2006 Jubel Ale (Winter Warmer)
91. PORT BREWING – Hop Suey (Double IPA)
92. NORTH COAST – Old Stock 2004 (Old Ale)
93. DE PROEF & ALLAGASH – Les Deux Brasseuers (Belgian Strong Pale Ale)
94. AVERY - Fifteen (American Wild Ale)
95. SOUTHERN TIER - Iniquity (Double IPA)

I LOST BELGIAN ROULETTE - DES GEANTS "SAISON VOISIN"

2010-04-21T20:13:00.000-07:00

One of our favorite games here at the HBJ is "Belgian roulette", a game where you risk $5-$6 of your hard-earned money on a Belgian bottle you've never heard of nor have any idea what to expect. As we say in the trade, "Sometimes you win, sometime you lose". I remember the time I won - BIG - on a bottle of DE DOLLE OERBIER. What a night that was. It has ended up being one of our favorite beers of all time. We've had some mighty failures as well in this high-stakes game of Belgian roulette. This is the story of one of those failures.

I bought a bottle of DES GEANTS SAISON VOISIN because I like saisons, because I like beers from Belgium, and because I'm such an adventurous beer swashbuckler that I sometimes go off the hizzle and throw caution completely to the wind. But no, it didn't work out this time. SAISON VOISIN is an unfiltered, bottle refermented, 6% ABV saison. Unlike many saisons, this one's very spicy and biting, not the traditional farmhouse refresher of yore but something a little too intense & confrontational to be drunk in pursuit of mere post-work pleasure. It's an orange-colored, highly carbonated and somewhat bitter ale. It's actually quite "crisp" in a way that dries out the mouth, and even a little lager-ish. Like, weird, man. It takes a beautiful photo, that's for sure - this shot totally goes in the HBJ iPhone pictures hall of fame - but it shant be something I'll return to again. 5/10.

A FEW MINUTES WITH A NEW GLARUS “COFFEE STOUT”

2010-04-19T16:01:00.000-07:00

Earlier in the year it seemed nigh impossible that we’d ever get to try beers from Wisconsin-only brewery NEW GLARUS BREWING, they of the lofty reputation for making incredible fruit-packed and otherwise outstanding ales. Yet here we are in mid-April, writing about a fourth ingested beer from them, with a lone New Glarus beer left to go in the beer fridge to be thrown down the hatch on “one very special evening”. Like a Wednesday or something. Last week I decided to spend a few moments with their COFFEE STOUT. If you’ll allow for it, please spend another minute or so here scanning what I had to say about it.

Now don’t go mistaking this beer for one of the oily, monstrous imperial things that taste like the grounds of Peets’ dark espresso roast run through an acid bath. NEW GLARUS COFFEE STOUT’s a restrained, sweet young thing. Nice stickiness on the tongue, and smooooth like the Kenny G Christmas Album after a glass of eggnog. The coffee is present, as is a distant chocolate maltball flavor. The beer is without question very “ebony”, yet it’s a soft-focus sort of deal. The operative word is “silky”. This is a great thing in a stout, the other end of the imperial extreme. HBJ thinks it’s a really good workingman’s stout, and believes that you will enjoy it as well. Got any friends up near Badger country? Ask ‘em to send you one. 7.5/10.

THE 5 MOST BORING TOPICS IN BEER JOURNALISM

2010-04-16T17:12:00.000-07:00

“Beer journalism”. Now there’s an oxymoron, hunh? Well, as someone embedded on the beer-soaked “front lines” of “emerging media”, I think that those of us who write about beer are certainly ripe for mockery, myself included. I force myself to slog through innumerable blogs about my favorite liquid – the best of which are lined up on the right-hand side of this page. I subscribe to print magazines BEER ADVOCATE, DRAFT and ALL ABOUT BEER. I also pick up free papers THE CELEBRATOR, ALE STREET NEWS and NORTHWEST BREWING NEWS whenever I see them.

I understand there’s yet another new beer-themed glossy magazine called BEER CONNOISSEUR hitting the stands these days, and it’s one I’ve yet to pick up. Let’s hope they don’t run these hideously boring, overflogged beer stories into the ground the way the others have. Here they are for your groaning pleasure, The 5 Most Boring Topics in all of Beer Journalism:

1. “A tribute to craft brewing’s pioneers”. This is the most trite and stale of all beer magazine perennials. Everyone, but everyone, has penned their snore-inducing salute to Fritz Maytag or Jack McAuliffe or Jim Koch or that Sierra Nevada guy or the guy who started the Horse Brass Tavern or……OUCH. That was my head hitting the table. I swear I saw three of these articles just this month.

2. “Women brew beer, too”. Oh wow, that’s amazing. And some wear pink boots instead of black ones? Wow, that’s just like a girl, isn’t it? How can women brew beer when they can’t even vote? Oh wait, they’re allowed to vote now? Wait, you’re telling me they let them into the military these days? Well, shut my mouth. Maybe some of them even brew beer, too? Let’s write a 5-page piece on this phenomenon, just like every other magazine has!

3. “Cooking with beer”. Beer Advocate wastes four or more of their thin, scant pages every issue on recipes that no one ever cooks; recipes whose only unifying theme is that someone thinks they’ll be improved by mixing in a few ounces of beer into the kettle or pan. And it’s not just any beer – no, most specify that you need “1 bottle of Victory Hop Wallop” or “6 ounces of Lost Abbey Avant-Garde” in order to make the recipe a success - which I highly doubt. Other magazines have this as a running feature as well. Can we admit that no one except for gastronome alcoholics follow these?

4. “Budweiser, Miller and Coors are faceless corporations who don’t make beer that I like”. This is less an article/topic as it is an overplayed trope, one that shows up in countless articles and whinging about “Michelob Wheat” or “Budweiser Amber Bock” or anything that even remotely encroaches on craft beer’s precious territory. It just makes some people so……angry that the Bad Guys might try to mass-produce their swill in a form that might open up new markets – you know, like a profit-driven company might do. Honestly, why people pay any attention to these companies is beyond me.

5. “Beer is to be shared with friends”. This is a misty-eyed, maudlin staple of the columnists, who probably write these identical snoozer columns while drunk & alone at home. I can usually spot the retch-inducing, watery-eyed sentimentality in the column headline, but sometimes I’m fooled and my eyes travel down the page to a gagging pack of clichés about beer’s amazing ability to act as a social lubricant, how beer drinkers are the best damn group of humans on the planet, and honestly, if we’d all just grab a pint with our buddies more often, the planet would cool, war would end, and communities would be reborn. “Just as in Ireland, where the pub is actually the hub of social life in many towns”.

I recognize that I’m probably guilty of more than my share of hackneyed, clichéd writing – there’s no doubt that penning beer reviews can get a little, uh, samey after a while – yet I call upon the “beer journalists” of America and indeed the world to please retire each of these 5 topics, forthwith and immediately. Doing so will instantly elevate craft beer into Valhalla, and kill off the big evil beer corporations once and for all, upon whose grave you may dance while celebrating Fritz Maytag’s historic achievements.

LOOKIN’ FOR LOVE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES: “DALE’S PALE ALE”

2010-04-15T06:18:00.000-07:00

~~All I wanted was a Pepsi, just a Pepsi~~ – No, all I really wanted was a refreshing adult beverage, preferably a nice hoppy pale ale or IPA or witbier – something to take the sweat off my brow and help lighten my loafers. I was in New York City last week, and they were having a heat wave. Yeah, in early April. It was the talk of the town, this 88-degree stretch of weather, and here I was in my suit coat, actin’ like a veritable man-in-the-monkey-suit, just wishing I could be sitting in The Ginger Man or the Rattle & Hum or wherever, drinking a cold-ish beer to cool off from off the corporate shenanigans. So after my work hijinks were finally completed, that’s what I did. I hoofed it over to THE GINGER MAN, and I scanned the beer list for something that would take the edge off before I met some friends at the New York Mets game in an hour. I wanted a pale ale. I ordered a DALE’S PALE ALE, from OSKAR BLUES BREWERY. It was to be the worst decision of my hot, uncomfortable day.

OSKAR BLUES are probably the most famous of the craft brewers who can their beers. If they weren’t the very first, they were one of the first. I have had their imperial red ale GORDON and am absolutely smitten by it. What’s the opposite of smitten? Smoted? That’s how I felt by DALE’S PALE ALE on draft. Positively smoted. It pours a translucent orange/brown. This beer is a very grainy, and yes, a very hoppy one, but like 6-year-olds respectively into Bakugans and Barbies, the two do not play together well. The grain taste is all-enveloping, like an improper mash that’s hurriedly been covered up by gallons of hops. Chalky. Like – gasp – aspirin, or that Melatonin I have to take sometimes to calm down. Not refreshing in the least – in fact, it was a bit of a chore to get through. It pains me still to know I turned down 50 other unknown beers on tap at the bar for this one. I found better beer at the ballpark later that night (holla for Goose Island 312 Wheat Beer, y’all!), and the only things that made it all forgettable were A.), the New York team lost the game (yessss!), and B.) I knew I’d get to savage the beer here at the HBJ. 4.5/10.

CONTEMPLATING MY SOUTHERN TIER “INIQUITY”

2010-04-14T17:33:00.000-07:00

Howdy. Been a while since I rapped at ya - for me, anyway. This is the first five minutes I've had free to pontificate all week. I'm still drinkin', though.

Well what in tarnation is this? Is it a “black IPA”? An imperial “IBA”? A simple black ale? Confound it, what SOUTHERN TIER INIQUITY is is another damn great beer from one of my Top 5 favorite brewers in the USA. Again and again I am amazed by their brewing prowess, and practically everything they touch on the “imperial” side of things is spun into liquid gold. Here’s another case in point, sent to me by MCM in our somewhat recent east coast/west coast beer-trading throwdown.

INIQUITY is a dark black India Pale Ale, or so I reckon. That’s what they’re calling it. It’s really not all that hopped out – I believe it’s actually a lot more sweet & creamy than you’d find in any typical IPA. And oh yeah, it’s totally friggin' black and stuff, and tops out with a very small head of foam. This thing really coats the tongue and the top of the mouth with roasted malts, creamy fruits, 9% worth of alcohol, and a little bit of citrus hops. If you were blindfolded, the chances that you’d peg it as anything in the IPA realm are quite small, and even now I think there’s a bit of marketing trickery afoot. Yet there’s no mistaking how fantastic this beer is, and at the risk of sounding redundant, “it’s yet another superb ale from the magicians who conjure beer alchemy all day at Southern Tier Brewing”. 8.5/10.

A TASTE OF TROEGS’ “NUGGET NECTAR”

2010-04-09T06:00:00.000-07:00

Here we have one of the legendary ones, a beer currently ranked #43 on the people-powered “Beer Advocate Top 100 beers on planet earth”, and one that I had to trade for to get. Interestingly, the last ten reviews all savaged it, something you don’t see too often on the groupthink of Beer Advocate. TROEGS NUGGET NECTAR features an aggressive drawing of a hop cone that looks like a hand grenade – watch out, sissies, this is going to be a bitter ride.

Do any of you guys pant for “lacing on the glass”? Well then do I have a beer for you. This thing lets its foam crawl up and down the sides of your chalice for the duration of your time with it – not exactly noteworthy to me, but it sure is purty. NUGGET NECTAR is one zesty, hoppy ale. I can taste the amber malts, and the three different types of hops that went into it. It’s not a raw blast of bitterness, and only once it has sufficiently warmed does it really start tasting like an aggressively-hopped beer. There is a fruit backbone to it, perhaps apricot, that mixes in well with the pineyness and the 93 IBU hops. I’d only had two TROEGS beers to date, and one was the DREAMWEAVER WHEAT that I rated an 8/10 – this one comes close, and we’ll clock it as a very respectable 7.5/10.

I SURVIVED HARPOON NIGHT

2010-04-07T06:21:00.000-07:00

I’m reporting to you live this morning from New York City, where I arrived last night for business after doing similar work in Kansas City. Upon arrival yesterday evening, I couldn’t shake that New York feelin’ – also famously known as the “New York State of Mind” – and decided to head out of my hotel for a nightcap just to welcome myself and send me off to a good slumber. And yet, who would have known that the nearby RATTLE & HUM bar – which we “famously” wrote up a few months ago in this post – would be holding HARPOON BREWING NIGHT the very same night I sauntered in? Holy mackerel and bless my soul. Shades of the lost mid-week night spend in Oakland during GRAND TETON BREWING night last month.

RATTLE & HUM has a superlative beer selection, and I could have ignored the Harpoon hullabaloo and gone with all sorts of weirdo offerings from Bear Republic, Green Flash, Nebraska Brewing (!) and others. But HARPOON, they’re a brewer I don’t know that much about. Their web site features really fit, healthy-looking long-distance bike racers, because all the people I see sucking down pints of craft beer in bars look exactly like that. They’re big among New Englanders, likely because they’re based in Boston. When I’ve traveled out east, I’ve seen their beers in just about every store, and some of their “Leviathan Series” big bombers have caught my eye. They pulled out all the kegs on Harpoon Night and said “GO” – there were a good 12 or more different Harpoons on tap, including just about all of these 9%-and-up Leviathan beers. I didn’t squander my time with any 5% pantywaisters and headed right for the rare and the odd, like these:

HARPOON LEVIATHAN IMPERIAL RED – Could there be a style more suited to my personal palate than the imperial red, that rich collection of caramel malts paired with tongue-bruising bitter hops? I would answer in the negative. This is a spicy one, a rich red ale with sharp hops. It’s made from 7 different malts and 4 different hops, and there is indeed a lot going on here. I get a very dry hop taste, along with caramel and darker fruits. Fairly intense stuff, at 9.2% ABV, and with a long, lingering aftertaste. Very solid. 7/10.

HARPOON LEVIATHAN SAISON ROYALE – Even better was the SAISON ROYALE, an amped-up farmhouse beer that I found to be exceptionally fruity. It is pictured above. I got a strong whiff of stone fruits (yeah, I’m the dork sniffin’ his beer in the corner when you’re not looking), and then a big blast of peach, honey and apricot flavor. Not in a cloying, “fruit beer” sort of way, but with that rustic earthiness that characterizes the saison. This is not a dry beer, however. The 9% alcohol packs a little heat, and though this supposedly was leavened with white pepper and rosemary, I’m thinking they gave me the peach-n-honey version instead. Loved it, and I can now successfully make something of a case for these guys as a strong & successful brewer of interesting ales. 8/10.

LAGUNITAS' "BROWN SHUGGA"

2010-04-06T04:56:00.000-07:00

This is a theoretically "big" beer from a Petaluma, CA brewer who probably deserve a bit more respect than they typically get - they've earned mine in spades on the basis of beers like IMPERIAL RED, MAXIMUS, their PILS, etc.. I'm not convinced respect is necessarily earned on this one, however. LAGUNITAS BROWN SHUGGA is nearly 10% in alcohol, and fits into no true discernable style. "Strong ale" is what these boys are going for, and in terms of approachability and drinkability, they've done very well for themselves.

BROWN SHUGGA's made with brown cane sugar (hence the name, you know), and I can taste that along with molasses and something vaguely smokey, One has to strain to pluck these tastes out of the mix - it's just not that flavorful of a beer, you know? It's still and silent, with very little head to speak of after the initial pour. Not a heavy beer, but likely a dangerous one. I've had better offerings from the gang at Lagunitas, and just picked up a bomber of their "Roger Wilco Foxtrot" or whatever it's called and will share the results of said beer in the near future. Meanwhile, Brown Shugga = 6/10.

CHERRIES JUBILEE: NEW GLARUS’ “WISCONSIN BELGIAN RED”

2010-04-02T10:43:00.000-07:00

NEW GLARUS BREWING from New Glarus, WI have made their reputation both in and outside of their home state with these fruit-infused, Belgian-style ales that I’d been dying to try. I’ve been to 41 of the 50 states in the Union in my lifetime, but Wisconsin isn’t one of them, and it’s the only one in which you can buy New Glarus beer. Unless, of course, you know good people who are willing to ship you some, as I now do. WISCONSIN BELGIAN RED is an odd but pleasurable one. Seriously, if you presented this to me as “cherry soda”, I would have believed you, and probably told you “it tastes a little like beer, though”. Because it has instead been presented to me as a cherry-infused beer, I’m comfortable pronouncing it as more than a little reminiscent of cherry soda.

NEW GLARUS WISCONSIN BELGIAN RED is highly, highly carbonated, and quite sweet to boot. The “Belgian” in the name led me to believe that this might have an acidic or sour taste to it, but I reckon they’ve saved that flavor profile for their RASPBERRY TART ale, a bottle of which I also have at home for TBD consumption. I’m detecting a little bit of hops in this beer, and a faint hint of woodiness that slightly takes the sweetness down a notch – which is good. Another great thing about this one is that you just know you’re drinking real cherries, not the crap that would come in a cherry soda. And yet I’m not sure I dig it as much as others do – nor even quite as much as I did the NEW GLARUS CHERRY STOUT I reviewed a couple of weeks ago. I’m the guy who’s usually defending fruit beers from the skeptical hoards, and this is supposed to be one of the great ones, but the best I can muster up for it is a 6.5/10.

NIGHT OF THE ORGANICS

2010-04-01T06:53:00.000-07:00

My wife’s part of a category of vegetarians that are very few in number: “fowletarians”; i.e. people who are pretty much vegetarian most of the time, except when they’re eating chicken or turkey. Since her consumption of fowl is actually quite limited, and is usually undertaken at Thai or Vietnamese restaurants or on Thanksgiving, we eat at a lot of vegetarian places when we go out so she can actually enjoy herself. Me, I’m very cool with vegetarian food as long as it doesn’t get to be my lifestyle, you know what I mean? We went to a fantastic, semi-legendary San Francisco vegetarian restaurant this past weekend called GREENS, and the food is so good and so rich you wouldn’t even know there wasn’t animal flesh being served. Oh, and they serve a rich variety of small-brewer beers, most of them organic, which is what I’d like to discuss today.

I looked through my older reviews and found a little bit of hostility in the past toward organic beer – not simply because they were organic, but because they were mostly mediocre-to-awful. There was one huge exception – MAD RIVER BREWING’s SCOTCH PORTER, and since GREENS had that on the menu, that’s what I went for right away. Here’s what I had to say about it last time, which I emphatically second now that I’ve had it twice:

An easy-drinking yet still complex amber-colored scotch ale, with a porter/coffee taste. The malts are very rich and there’s a lingering smokiness to it. It has all the taste and characteristics of the best scotch/Scottish ales, with a little bit of smooth English porter sneaking in behind it. Totally worth seeking out in a big way. 8.5/10.

I had another beer round left in the chamber, so this time I went for BUTTE CREEK ORGANIC IPA, forgetting that I’d had it back in 2007 once before and rated it a 7/10. I did the same this time, which says something about the beer’s and my own reviewing consistency, I guess. This is a very solid and “normalized” IPA – clear pouring, a little piney, refreshing and by no means a big hoppy monster. It’s what they used to call an IPA before the style got redefined (for the better) the past 5-6 years. I’ll go with a 7/10 again as well, and I feel comfortable announcing that these are “probably” two of the best organic brews in the USA.

THE 2010 HEDONIST BEER JIVE BASEBALL PREDICTIONS

2010-03-30T06:00:00.000-07:00

Stepping outside of the beer “scene” again, it’s time once again for Hedonist Beer Jive’s baseball predictions. Why, what goes better with a 22-ounce bomber of Belgian strong dark ale than America’s pastime? I intend to watch many innings of my beloved San Francisco Giants in 2010 in the company of many beers to be reviewed on this site. Therefore, it’s important that you know how I’m heading into the season – my hopes, my dreams, my predictions……yeah. Last year we told you that the St. Louis Cardinals – a team no one was picking - were going to be really good; they ended up running away with their division. The year before that, we picked the Tampa Bay Rays to grab the wild card; they one-upped me, and everyone else, and went to the World Series. Then again, I picked both the New York Mets and the Arizona Diamondbacks to win their divisions last year, and both totally stunk up baseball for the whole of 2009. It led to a new rule around here: Never, Ever, Trust the Diamondbacks And Their “Young Talent”. Smoke and mirrors, man, smoke and mirrors.

Here’s the deal: I watch a ton of San Francisco Giants baseball, and I think all the good-pitch/no-hit stuff about them is overwrought and overstated. The Giants will finally win the NL West this year, on the backs of amazing pitching (breakout year for Matt Cain coming) and surprising hitting rebounds from multiple players and a rookie or two. My Giants won’t be able to hack it in the playoffs vs. the superior Braves, Phillies or Cardinals, but I’ll take a division this year and maybe a World Series in 2011. Unfortunately the New York Yankees are unstoppable, and will beat my sleeper pick the Atlanta Braves in the World Series this year. I prefer it not to be so, but at least it’s not the Dodgers, right?

MLB play starts this Sunday. Start your craft beer shopping early.

National League East

1. Atlanta Braves
2. Philadelphia Phillies (wild card)

3. New York Mets

4. Florida Marlins
5. Washington Nationals

National League Central
1. St. Louis Cardinals

2. Chicago Cubs

3. Cincinnati Reds

4. Milwaukee Brewers

5. Houston Astros

6. Pittsburgh Pirates

National League West

1. San Francisco Giants

2. Colorado Rockies

3. Los Angeles Dodgers

4. Arizona Diamondbacks

5. San Diego Padres

American League East
1. New York Yankees

2. Boston Red Sox (wild card)

3. Tampa Bay Rays
4. Baltimore Orioles

5. Toronto Blue Jays

American League Central

1. Minnesota Twins

2. Detroit Tigers

3. Chicago White Sox

4. Cleveland Indians

5. Kansas City Royals

American League West

1. Los Angeles Angels

2. Texas Rangers
3. Seattle Mariners

4. Oakland A’s

Playoffs
NL = Philadelphia over San Francisco

NL = Atlanta over St. Louis

NL Championship = Atlanta over Philadelphia

AL = New York over Los Angeles
AL = Boston over Minnesota
AL Championship = New York over Boston

World Series = New York over Atlanta

NEUSTADT SCOTTISH ALE – CANADIAN IN A CAN

2010-03-29T17:12:00.000-07:00

So my pal “Pete” comes all the way to Barcelona last month bearing a can of NEUSTADT SCOTTISH ALE, from NEUSTADT SPRINGS BREWERY in Neustadt, Ontario, Canada. We were meeting for business there, and sometimes we execute beer trades upon doing so, though I incorrectly and rudely assumed trades were off this time. This particular tall boy can flew from Canada, to Spain, to the United States, and finally flew down my throat this past weekend. Peet once brought me a can of the excellent brown ale NEUSTADT 10W30 back in 2008; I scored it a fetching 8/10 and wrote about it here. Could the magic repeat itself over three countries and two years? Could it? Let’s find out.

NEUSTADT SPRINGS BREWERY are very concentrated in their brewing. It appears they only make four beers for sale, all generally fairly low in alcohol and harkening to fairly traditional styles. No imperial Russian black IPAs for these fellas, no sir. NEUSTADT SCOTTISH ALE is a deliciously rich scotch ale, full of malty flavor and tasting of heather n’ rye. Nah, actually it just tastes like a classic clean Scotch ale. It pours quite light for the style, and is about 4.5% ABV. A little bit nutty, a little bit of sweetness, and a whole lot of malty richness. I think these guys get it. They’re a big two-fer-two for in my book. 7.5/10.

HOPPY, BELGIAN & AMAZING: THE BRUERY’S “MISCHIEF”

2010-03-26T09:42:00.000-07:00

Those big bottles from THE BRUERY, the upstart, new kid pride of Orange County, keep showing up all over California, and for some reason I haven’t been paying them quite the respect that I should be. Strange, because their SAISON RUE and ORCHARD WHITE beers are among my favorites anywhere. BRUERY beers are generally not cheap, and yet why should they be? These guys are envelope-pushers, and they do Belgian-style ales like few others. I think I’m going to have to vault them into the top tier of my personal pantheon after this latest creation, though. Whoa. It’s called MISCHIEF, and it’s a “golden, hoppy Belgian ale”. Is it ever. It’s also the “beer of the year” around my house so far, 2010’s first totally perfect quaff.

Since I now drink my ales with an eye half-cocked toward its place on the scale – sure, it’s pathetic, but it’s a natural outgrowth of rating beers to begin with – I always anticipate that first big gulp. I’ve tasted enough over the years to know in that first one whether I’m going to love it or just tolerate it. There are exceptions, of course – last week’s NEW GLARUS CHERRY STOUT was a huge deviation from the rule. Yet THE BRUERY’s “MISCHIEF” was a winner from the first millisecond it hit my tongue. I adore this beer. I think I wanna marry it. Is it a Belgian IPA? Sure, whatever. It has a slight lemony tartness and a really thick mouthfeel. The hops, the yeasts, the ingredients in general just totally coat the tongue. I also got a little bit of sweet pear and that pepper/spice characteristic you see in some saisons. It hits only notes of perfection. It even looks amazing. I also just learned THE BRUERY has made it a year-round brew. Huzzah! 10/10!

ALPINE BEER's “NELSON” – A FULL ONE

2010-03-24T17:07:00.000-07:00

THE BEER ROVER had it, and said it was the best beer of 2009. THE VICE BLOG had it, and gave it an A+, which I believe is the highest honorific one can bestow upon a beer. It made sense that HBJ was going to have to have it soon as well, but only if someone brought me one from San Diego or I found my way down there. As it turned out, Craig & Beth from San Francisco’s CITY BEER STORE brought me one – well not me exactly, but they brought several cases of ALPINE BEER COMPANY beers to their store and then sent out the “beer alert”. I foolishly wasted 48 hours before responding to the alert, and by then, all the bottles of ALPINE EXPONENTIAL HOPPINESS were gone, and all that was left was the “meh” PURE HOPPINESS that I’ve had a couple of times, and the lighter-only-in-relative-scale IPAs DUET and NELSON. Oh, and a bunch of other non-IPAs from Alpine Beer Company as well that we skipped this go-round.

The beer in question in our discussion today is ALPINE NELSON, the one that prodded the aforementioned gentlemen to bust a proverbial nut. Let it be said that this outstanding IPA busted my nut as well. This is a 7% or so ABV India Pale Ale that’s based around the Nelson Sauvin hop from New Zealand, and that also serves up some “European rye” in the mix (and which I admittedly did not pick up on whilst drinking it). NELSON is nearly opaque, thinner than most bombshell IPAs. The major fruits are all out in force on this one: oranges, tangerines and grapefruits all combine into a sweet/tart/delicious mix that adds up to a flat-out amazing taste. Bitterness is certainly there, but it’s no scorched-tongue hop beast by any means. Simply put, it’s the best beer by ALPINE BEER COMPANY I’ve had by a mile, and it’ll register in the upper half of the Hedonist Beer Jive 75 for sure once we update it. 9.5/10.

I WATCHED THE “BEER WARS” MOVIE

2010-03-23T14:53:00.000-07:00

Last year I very gladly sat on the sidelines when the documentary “BEER WARS” was released in a somewhat bold one-day-only-in-theaters marketing ploy. It got the beer blogosphere, such that it is, yakkin’ and shuckin’ and jivin’ all of out proportion with the film’s actual importance because finally someone, someone was paying attention to their beloved naval-gazing hobby. I figured I already had a pretty good sense of who the “bad guys” were; in fact, I don’t think the corporations behind boring tasteless lagers are bad guys at all. I’m completely uninterested in their product, and to that end, I’m about as interested in their machinations as I am those of the Snapple Corporation or the people who make Fiji Water. Which is to say – not very.

Yet I had hours to kill on a long flight to Europe, and I wanted to load up my laptop with some documentaries. “BEER WARS” was on iTunes for a can’t-be-beat rental price of $1.99, so I figured hey, I’m “reporting this beat”, I might as well see what the hubbub was all about. And there was indeed a hubbub – I remember paragraphs of dissent being spilled from the bellies of boors, young men dismayed with filmmaker Anat Baron’s lack of focus on their craft beer heroes (what about Stone?? Where was Vinnie??!?), or on her personal involvement in managing something called “Mike’s Hard Lemonade”, which she passed off as being relevant beer industry experience. The film was nitpicked to death in blog posts that I skimmed, not altogether unfairly in some cases. While well-edited and entertaining, how you approach “BEER WARS” should probably depends less on what sort of beer you like to drink and more on how you view the parasitic relationship between big business and big government. Perhaps I’m showing my hand by the use of word “parasitic”, no?

See, Anheuser Busch, InBev, MillerCoors and the others are doing what you’d do if you had archaic laws and government toadies protecting you. They’re not evil, per se – the lack of government-ensured healthy competition is evil, and even that is overplayed as craft beer continues to make incredible inroads into the big brewers’ market share the last few years, despite obstacles. Taste, quality, freshness, and experimental ingredients are starting to win over American palates, and even the post-prohibition three-tier distribution system that Baron and others rightly decry is not keeping great beer from changing minds, one person at a time. It’s why there are winners like Sam Calagione from DOGFISH HEAD, who makes wonderful beer and is thriving because of it, and losers like the film’s other “little guy/gal” foil, Rhonda Kallman. Kallman made a caffeinated beer called MOONSHOT that no one was buying, and no matter how hard Baron tried to tug on my heartstrings for this poor ‘lil upstart businesswoman, fightin’ against the big bad corporations with her pluck and heart of gold, I wasn’t moved, and was annoyed by the film’s insistence that I should be.

Baron’s film’s flaw is that she tries to “Roger and Me” the CEOs of the big beermakers, but only in the name of telling a stupid-simple story of Big Beer Bad/Little Beer Good. No, “big beer” doesn’t have to be bad (nor "little beer" good), and the palate-changing revolution is being led from below, which is a story she only partly tells while trying to bash corporations, what with their “greed and thirst for power”. No, like Google and Apple and Southwest Airlines, they’ve got a bottom line to focus on, which means giving the people what they want or think they want. To the extent that craft brewers can re-shape that perception – and they obviously are – it’s a wonderful thing for us lovers of quality. Salvation in the form of a completely disrupted business model is coming at the big brewers directly from the people like a slow-moving sledgehammer, just as it came at the music industry, the travel industry and the newspaper industry. That’s the David vs. Goliath story that I think “BEER WARS” initially wanted to tell, but it got derailed enough on cheap sentimentality and ham-handed populism to end up being something I’d not recommend you spend the 90 required minutes watching.

OUR LAST HOMAGE TO CATALONIA - MASIA AGULLONS “PURA PALE”

2010-03-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

Well, not “homage” exactly, but this Catalonian beer traveled with me all the way from Barcelona a few weeks ago, and I’m determined to try to find some love for it. MASIA AGULLONS floored me with a beer of theirs I had several times at LA CERVETECA in Barcelona called RUNA ALE; my pithy purple prose about it is proffered here. Based on that experience, I bought a bottle of their PURA PALE to take home with me, and on an otherwise uneventful Thursday night last week, I busted it open. PURA PALE’s a litte “raw”, just full of sediment and with a slightly skunky taste. Yet it’s not skunky like something that went bad, but rather like an off-beat take on the artisanal English pale ale.

You guys know that HEMP ALE from HUMBOLDT BREWS? I actually like that beer, even if few others do – well, this is sorta like that one in its uniqueness. Deep and rich, and colored slightly brownish-yellow, PURA PALE seems almost totally devoid of hops, and instead has substituted a weird mélange of fruit, malts and baked vegetables or something. It’s still very drinkable, but nowhere near the smokin’ greatness of RUNA ALE. Get that one if you’re heading to Catalonia anytime soon, and maybe give this one a sniff only if you see it on draft. 6/10.

LOST ABBEY’S “THE ANGEL’S SHARE 2009”

2010-03-19T06:00:00.000-07:00

Here’s a trend I’d like to applaud. Some pioneering, top-tier brewers have begun to notice that the common man has been effectively frozen out of purchasing their rarified ales due to price considerations, and they have therefore have rectified matters by introducing smaller, pint-sized versions of their large bottles at a slightly more approachable price. Ounce for ounce, it may not be as good of a deal, yet I happily bought this 375ml bottle for a mere $16.99, as opposed to the $30+ that the 750ml bottle typically goes for. Just noticed RUSSIAN RIVER’s also got a 375ml corked-n-caged version of their world-beating DAMNATION out there these days as well. Good for them both. These beers both deserve sampling by a greater subset of societies’ many stratas. I hadn’t had an ANGEL’S SHARE in several years, and I was beginning to think it was going to stay that way.

LOST ABBEY, as you may know, are among the greats. Just last month we tasted their FRAMBOISE DE AMOROSA, and it’s another one they’ve knocked out of PetCo Park. Did I suspect THE ANGEL’S SHARE 2009 was going to be amazing? Of course I did. And so it was. This bourbon-barrel aged monster has a deep, rich toffee taste that grabs your taste buds and keeps them singing. There’s no head on this one, nada. Just silent, still and intense-looking. You absolutely get alcohol in both smell and taste, another reason why I’m glad I got the small bottle of this 12% beast. Well, “monster” and “beast” – that’s just dumb hyperbole. It’s simply a wonderful big beer, with a smooth mouthfeel, and cocoa, raisins and toffee notes that are ever-present and definitive. Of course, there’s an undercurrent of woodiness/oak as well. Loved it, and again, I applaud the packaging decision made by the Lost Abbey marketing department. 9/10.

ONE NIGHT WITH NEW GLARUS “CHERRY STOUT” – UNPLUGGED

2010-03-17T06:56:00.000-07:00

Aaron from The Captain’s Chair blog proved to be a perfect gentleman whose mama done raised him right when he sent me replacement bottles of NEW GLARUS beers that broke in transit during our recent beer trade. Not only that, he threw in a bonus beer for my troubles. Now that’s a Great American. The bonus was this NEW GLARUS “CHERRY STOUT” – part of their “Unplugged” series where the brewer just goes off the hizzle and does whatever it is he wants, ye publick be damned. I love that sort of thing, and it’s why I was pretty excited to give this one a go.

But wait. Alack! My first impressions of this were just awful. An initial assault of cherry cough drop intensity – yes, cough drop, not real cherries. It even had that medicinal numbing feeling you get what you’re sucking on a Luden’s cherry cough drop, which is the goal when you’re trying to get over a sore throat, but not when you’re tipping back a craft beer for liquid enjoyment. I couldn’t taste any roasting, nothing stout-like at all nor any evidence of the professed “oak aging”– nothing. Then something happened. Room-temperature warmth started creeping into the beer, and lo and behold, that harsh flavor settled into something that was actually enjoyable. The roast started peeking through, as did some alcohol sweetness, molasses and even some hops. The overall body of the beer is thin, but I daresay I was flat-out bummed when I drained the last sips. Seriously, this is the most abrupt mid-beer mind shift I’ve ever experienced. I went from something close to disgust into something closer to worship. Now how did they do that? Recommended if you want to take a similar ride. 7/10.

CLEARING THE CACHE WITH “BEER HAIKU”

2010-03-16T10:18:00.000-07:00

You know how some of you drinkers are always going on about having to “clear the stash”; i.e. cleaning out your overloaded beer fridges, cabinets etc. with blowout tasting sessions? I myself have been to a couple of these stash-clearing parties, and depending on the host’s level of beer dorkitude, they can be the best ticket in town and a truly blessed event (I’m thinking of you, Brian Yaeger). Me, I’ve got a different problem. I’m still the guy who tries to drink a new-to-me beer just about every time I pick up a glass. Maybe 3 out of every 4 beers I drink is something I’ve never had before, which keeps it fun and invigorating. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a particularly heavy drinker per se, but I drink enough new ones that I don’t have enough time to review & document them all for you here in the proper manner. And not that you’d really want me to, right?

So let’s try something new to “clear the cache” of beer reviews tapped into my phone. I’ve never written haiku before, I don’t think, but seeing as I just had sushi the last two nights, I’m in a Japanese frame of mind. I really think so. Here are a few beers I’ve tried over the past month that we just haven’t gotten to reviewing here on the HBJ:

ABBAYE DES ROCS BRUNE (pictured here)

Oh, English brown ale/ Not Tripel Imperiale / Where’s the alcohol?
6/10

UNIBROUE “EAU BENITE”

One superb tripel / This isn’t La Fin Du Monde? / Yankees can’t get this
9.5/10

CERVEZA EL FLABIOL TORRADA

On draft in Spain bar / Made in Belgium, the dude said / I didn’t like it
5.5/10

CASCADE BREWING “APRICOT” (pictured to your right)

Fruity and tart, no head / Tartness lingers on mouth roof / Very good, not stellar
7/10

MOS’KA NEGRA

Dark ale – but wait / Who snuck lager in my house / No taste here at all
4.5/10

So I can’t write a haiku to save my life, it’s obvious – but I cleared five beers outta the cache and gave you a concise consumer guide to boot. What’s not to love.

GOOSE ISLAND’s “SOFIE”

2010-03-15T06:32:00.000-07:00

Chicago’s GOOSE ISLAND BREWING made a series of complex Belgian ales in simple packages this past year or two, and dubbed them all with fancy European names like JULIET, MATILDA, PERE JACQUES and this one we’ll be discussing today, SOFIE. This beer looks and tastes like a tripel, and bursts out of the bottle in a total explosion of foam, as you shall observe here. I got tired of waiting for it to calm down, so I snapped my picture, sat down for dinner, then came back to collect the beer five minutes later.

GOOSE ISLAND SOFIE actually isn’t a tripel, though. It’s an oak-aged saison with a lot of the characteristics of the tripel. There’s a pronounced taste of orange peel, along with lemon. SOFIE clocks in at a relatively approachable 6.5% ABV. It’s a zesty, yeasty sort of ale, with slightly more bitterness than I was counting on. Aged in oak, as I said, and that woody, earthy taste is present as well. Wow – “woody”, “earthy”, “bitter”, “zesty”, “yeasty” – I think we just blew all our Belgian adjectives on one single beer. It’s a complex craft beer for sure, but fell a little wide of the mark for me, as did PERE JACQUES and MATILDA (JULIET has yet to make herself known to me). 6/10.

REPORTING FROM THE FRONT AT GRAND TETON BREWING NIGHT

2010-03-13T06:00:00.000-08:00

It was to be a night like any other night – or so I’d thought. Just an average Monday night out, sucking down a couple beers with a bro – or so I’d thought. Nay, I stumbled upon GRAND TETON BREWING pint night at Barclay’s in Oakland this past Monday, an unadvertised, barely-promoted event where “punters” could sample a range of GRAND TETON beers and even cart home their own souvenir pint glass. I’m serious!! So throwing caution to the wind, I cancelled everything; called my wife and told her not to expect me until daylight, called in sick for the next two days, and went to town with the help of my #1 favorite brewer from the great state of Idaho. Here’s what I tried:

Oh wait a minute – let me tell you why my plans changed and I drank only GRAND TETON beers on this epic night. Just a few weeks ago I thoughtlessly threw a 12-ounce bottle of their BLACK CAULDRON imperial stout into my cart, and then drank it a couple nights later to “get it out of the way”. I loved it – an awesome, fantastic, big bad aggressive imperial stout. So naturally, I’m curious about this brewer. OK, back to the recap. Here’s what I tried:

PURSUIT OF HOPPINESS – Of course, they lose a half point on our ratings scale for the bad pun in naming the beer. But other than that, this imperial red ale was excellent. Smooth but biting, with maltiness not being laid on too thick, and really tingling and delicious. I didn’t see if it was bottled but if it is I’m going to grab me some. 8/10.

LOST CONTINENT OAK-AGED DOUBLE IPA – An understated oak-aged IPA, at least compared with the Southern Tier Unearthly I wrote about earlier in the week. It might be a notch down from that one, but it’s still really, really good. At this point, three beers overall into my exploration of Grand Teton Brewing, I decided that these guys are major alemaking heavyweights. 7.5/10.

SHEEP EATER SCOTCH ALE – ….And this one totally confirmed it. Our waitress told us this was “weird” and that we might not like it. I told her that she was weird, and that she’d better bring me one of these scotch ales, chop friggin’ chop. This beer is decidedly not weird. It’s a dark, roasted, deep and mysterious scotch ale, close to black in color and really rich and full bodied. If I didn’t have a set of car keys in my pocket and a home with a warm bed to get to (I lied above, of course), this would have been served to me in a much bigger glass than the one you see here – and then another after that to boot. 8/10.

AVERY BREWING’S “DuganA” IPA

2010-03-12T06:50:00.000-08:00

Not sure where things fell down on this one, but the gap between my review-stoked expectations of AVERY BREWING’s latest IPA “DuganA” and my pleasure with actually drinking it was far wider than I’d expected. Now granted, I’m not much of an AVERY MAJARAJA fan either. But just about everything else they make is stellar, and the advance word that this was a supreme IPA fit for the kings. And while I didn’t really dig it, it’s not a bad beer at all. Let’s see if we can figure this one out together.

AVERY DUGANA (I think I’ll start calling it that, Doo-GAHN-ah, just to be annoying) pours a lovely orange/copper color, just like you knew it would. It’s strong and piney like a particular strain of the IPA family should be. So you’re happy, right? Wrong. It’s not “juicy” by any means – in fact, I’d daresay it’s a DRY, almost chalky IPA. Say what? Wait a minute, it even tastes a little bit like aspirin. Yeah, aspirin – a “kiss of death” word for beer. That said, I can still see the appeal here, because it’s got some interesting balance and deep, rich IPA flavor going on. But compared to what I was hoping for? Not so much. 6/10.

SOUTHERN TIER’s “OAK-AGED UNEARTHLY”

2010-03-08T17:36:00.000-08:00

This is the first bomber I opened from my recent acquisition of East Coast beers from MM, the fella that more or less turned me onto SOUTHERN TIER BREWING and their incredible line-up of intense & wonderful beers a couple years ago. Now they’re one of my top 5 favorite brewers in the world, and the creators of the finest India Pale Ale to ever pass my lips, GEMINI. Now you may know that ½ of GEMINI is made up of another outstanding Double IPA from the Southern Tier family – UNEARTHLY. We reviewed that one right here. Now there’s an OAK-AGED UNEARTHLY. You know it’s totally gonna rule. And yes, it totally does.

SOUTHERN TIER OAK-AGED UNEARTHLY is truly all about the oakiness. You smell it, you taste the wood, and it lingers on the top of your mouth for a few heartbeats past the swallow. A very crisp beer, OAK-AGED UNEARTHLY brings forward the piney hops, and layers in a sweet undercurrent and a thin-to-medium body. If the sweetness is coming from the 11% alcohol, I can’t tell, but it would stand to reason. Again, it’s more oaky than it is hoppy, and really “renders” like a finely aged beer. Didn’t think you could do it this well with an IPA. I don’t know what else to say, folks. When you’re on a winning streak this hot the way SOUTHERN TIER are, why would you even listen to a piker like myself? Another flat-out superb beer from one of our nation’s best. 9/10.

YOU SAY LA TRAPPE, I SAY KONINGSHOEVEN – LET’S CALL THE WHOLE THING OFF

2010-03-05T06:00:00.000-08:00

Last September I finally had my first beer from famed Dutch Trappist brewer LA TRAPPE, who market their beers in the US under the KONINGSHOEVEN brand. It was their QUADRUPEL, and you may recall that I thought it was “shockingly bad”. A huge surprise, too, because people the world over seem to love this one. It also generated some of my favorite comments on this blog, including this one from Niklas: “You've lost your damn mind, son. Recalibrate your palate and try again. Disgraceful.”. So the other night, my first night in Barcelona on my trip a couple weeks ago, I took Niklas’ advice and recalibrated my palate. Then I ordered a LA TRAPPE BLONDE, this time under the native La Trappe branding. Now granted, I had this right after a CHIMAY BLUE in a beautiful Belgian chalice, and man o man is that a great beer. I think the ubiquity of CHIMAY Red, White (“Cinq Cents”) and Blue keeps me from drinking it except when it’s the best choice on a restaurant menu, but that BLUE is something special.

Anyway, I’ve definitely got a beef with LA TRAPPE/KONINGSHOEVEN after my second sub-par beer from them. I mean, really folks – this stuff’s just weak. LA TRAPPE BLONDE is thin, bland and almost like a lager, and it has this cloying perfumed smell that also shows up in the taste. Some yeastiness is present, way way back in the distance, placed there as an afterthought. It might quench one’s thirst, yet there are a lot of ways to do that, starting with water, which is the superior drink in my book. It’s so far removed from the masterworks of the other Trappist brewers – ROCHEFORT, ORVAL, WESTMALLE, WESTVLETEREN etc. – that it’s truly in a remedial class by itself. 4.5/10.

NAPA SMITH AMBER

2010-03-04T12:00:00.000-08:00

NAPA SMITH BREWING are upstart entrants hailing from Northern California’s wine country, a total family brewery (The Smiths!) who employ a longtime veteran named Don Barkley as their head brewmaster. They’re starting to catch on with the hoi polloi here in the Bay Area, and I remember reading a review of their BONFIRE IMPERIAL STOUT on a blog (Brewed For Thought, probably?) that made me rush out and buy one. It’s still in the fridge, awaiting the proper imperial stout star alignment. My only other experience with them was tasting their IPA on draft a few months back, and I scored that one a 7/10, which you best believe is better than yr average beer.

Draft is also how I encountered NAPA SMITH AMBER a few weeks ago as well, this time at the SF Ferry Plaza Building’s burger restaurant Taylor’s Refresher (which has its roots in the Napa Valley, and which sells this beer in their St. Helena location as well – I know ‘cause I saw it there). This is a really classic and slightly left-of-center amber ale. No, it’s not an imperial. It’s a tingling, somewhat bitter red ale, quite sweet as times and full of robust, mouth-filling malts that add a lot of character. It tasted absolutely like I want one of these to taste, “very 1990s”. Back in the 90s, the amber beer was my go-to style; I didn’t know about Belgian beer yet. Every microbrewery (that’s what we called them, kids!) has one, along with a wheat beer, a pale ale and a pilsner. This harkens back to that time, and adds that curveball hoppiness and bitterness that’s more a hallmark of the past decade. Nice. 7.5/10.

TWO FRESH ONES FROM CANADA

2010-03-03T10:53:00.000-08:00

Friend of Hedonist Beer Jive “MP” graciously donated several Canadian ales to our cause during his recent business trip to San Francisco. While we never actually met, this fine representative of his gold-medal winning hockey powerhouse of a country actually dropped off several beers at the front desk of his hotel for me; all I had to do was pick them up and then commit to drinking them. Done and done. There are little craft breweries spread across Canada; my recent visits to Toronto confirm that you can even run a world-class beer bar serving nothing but great Canadian artisanal beer. I recently completed the second part of my commitment to MP and drank the beer he so kindly provided me – here’s a report on two of them.

SCOTCH IRISH CORPORAL’S BITTER BROWN ALE – This Ontario brewer allow you to make no mistake about their heritage, and they reflect it well. This make a classic copper/brown ale (I’ll bet they love how Beer Advocate categorizes it as an “American brown ale”), very close in flavor profile to an ESB, with a light caramel taste and mild but noticeable hopping. The caramel is akin to those light tan-colored ones, not the rich and intense sugar bombs so popular with candy makers these days. This beer is bitter for sure, also a bit nutty and buttery. At 4.3% alcohol, it’s probably the easiest-drinking beer we’ve had in a long, long time. Please note that I enjoyed this in my rarely-used “Dusseldorf stein”, pictured above. It’s a high-quality beer that I’d definitely like to grab on tap at some point in life. 7/10.

GREAT LAKES DEVIL’S PALE ALE – Yeah, I was hoping this one would be devilish, too, what with the big “666” on the can, but – no. It’s a metallic English pale ale, totally thin and bland, all malts and bitterness and almost completely lacking in flavor. It pours dark, so that’s something. Sorry, MP, but I can’t condone this sort of alemaking, even if you guys are better in hockey and all that. 4/10.

More Canadian beer chicanery to come!

I LOVE YOU BUT I’VE CHOSEN SURLY DARKNESS

2010-03-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

If that title’s a little off-putting, check this out and you’ll see why I had to appropriate it. So here we are. SURLY DARKNESS. The 18th finest beer in the land. You know, every time we drink one of these over-hyped beers I’m in total anticipation at the first sip. Is this going to be an OMG OMG OMG mother of all beers, a la BROOKLYN BLACK OPS or THE ABYSS? Or will it give me a much-needed chance to post a jaded, curmudgeonly review about overhyped beers, a la PLINY THE YOUNGER or DREADNAUGHT IPA? That’s just one dimension of the anticipation, my friends. Then there’s – oh yeah right – the taste & enjoyment of the beer itself. Who could forget about that part of the experience? Let’s get to it, shall we?

SURLY BREWING came to my attention thanks to their punk-rock vibe & brewers all ratted out in tattoos, along with a lot of early excitement about the beer itself. Radical. Aaron from The Captain’s Chair was kind enough to send me SURLY FURIOUS, which totally knocked me for a loop, and the big boy, SURLY DARKNESS. Darkness doesn’t pull any punches, even out of the gate, featuring a member of recently-reunited garage punk band The Mummies on the bottle itself. It pours jet black with a beautiful head of coffee foam, and smells of barely-filtered coffee, some earthiness, and alcohol. 10.3% of this is alcohol, so that adds up. Then you get into it, and like a lot of these intense imperial stouts, it’s roasted, bitter chocolate and hops all the way.

Only a few sips in and I realized that despite the ingenuity that went into this one & the large, aggressive roastiness (which I often love), its filmy texture and chalky mélange of flavors would prevent it from being one of the greats. I drank the whole thing, looking for things that I'd love, and only found things that I liked. Say you removed any limited-edition, once-a-year whatsis, and conveniently forgot that people stand in long, freezing lines to buy this beer, and instead got a nice 10-ounce pour in a fancy-pants glass? You’d say, “thanks, that was real nice, now how about a different beer – maybe a blueberry pale ale or a goddamn ice water with lemon?”. I’m totally glad I tried this, I’m a better and more complete man for it, but I can’t in all due justice go with anything greater than a 6.5/10.

MORE THAN ONE WAY TO FOLLOW THE HBJ

2010-03-01T17:02:00.000-08:00

You guys are probably pretty technically sophisticated, right? So I don’t need to tell you that there are other ways to get your Hedonist Beer Jive ranting-n-raving delivered to you besides clicking on a bookmarked link every day or two. Or Googling “Hedonist Beer” every time you remember that we exist, and that you haven’t come to visit in a while. Here are a few ways to “enhance” your HBJ experience:

1. Follow us on Twitter. Or more specifically, follow me. I try to post a "chirpy" (I think that’s what they’re called) every time I write something here. I’m @jayhinman.

2. Add Hedonist Beer Jive into Google Reader. Google Reader, if you don’t use it, is an amazing way to stay on top of the many stellar blogs out there. Just cut this link – http://hedonistbeerjive.blogspot.com – and paste it into the “Add a Subscription” field in Reader. Then every new post will be there for you to marvel at, aggregated with all the other stuff you’re interested in. Easier that that – click on the “Subsscribe to HBJ” link you see on the right comlumn here, and just add it that way. You can even make it a box on My Yahoo, if that’s something you use. (Me, I set up a My Yahoo page in 1997 or something, and I’m too lazy to make the switch away from it).

3. Got an iPhone? Get Byline. BYLINE simply takes your Google Reader feed and displays it beautifully on the iPhone. I think it’s the application I use more than any other in the iPhone. It’s a couple bucks, but come on – you’re worth it.

Just a few ideas, you don’t have to take ‘em or anything, but we’d like to crack 200 average daily readers in 2010 (we’re still holding strong at about 130 a day) and maybe these tech tweaks will help make it happen.

DUPONT’S SURPRISING “LA BIERE DE BELOEIL”

2010-03-01T09:38:00.000-08:00

In the US, BRASSERIE DUPONT means saisons. Amazing, delicious saison-style ales from Belgium – yeasty, complex and refreshing. There’s SAISON DUPONT, DUPONT AVRIL, FORET, and several others. They’re all fantastic, seriously; to a beer, these are wonderful ales that I could drink anytime and anywhere. It took my trip to Spain a couple weeks ago to taste something of theirs that was dark and different, and when I ordered it, I didn’t even know it was a DUPONT thing. I found a big bottle of LA BIERE DE BELOEIL in the beer fridge at LA CERVATECA in Barcelona, and my pal AS and I split it with relish.

As I gingerly poked, uh, “tasting notes” into my iPhone, I saw that LA BIERE DE BELOEIL has some foreign gobbledygook on the bottle that said “Dupont a Tourpes”. You mean those Saison Dupont fellas? Well now how about that? To me, this is a classic Belgian dubbel, ripe and strong with the taste of dates and figs, with a thin body, strong aroma, and a sharp bit of zinging spiciness that’s rock solid. Over at Beer Advocate they’re calling it a “Belgian strong pale ale”. Hoooo-kay. This is a “meal” sort of beer, a big, bad complex 8.5% ABV sort of ale that will stand up to freshly-slaughtered animal of some kind. And so classically Belgian. Really top-tier stuff. Let me know if you see this one in the US after grabbing a bottle for yourself first. 8/10.

THE HEDONIST BEER JIVE 2010 GUIDE TO MUSIC

2010-02-26T06:00:00.000-08:00

There’s probably a contingent of folks who came to this beer blog at some point from one of my now-defunct music blogs – DETAILED TWANG or AGONY SHORTHAND. Others reading this probably have zero interest in obscure, sub-underground, dirty pop, garage rock and noise from around the world, and would much prefer this post to be about the SURLY DARKNESS beer I had two nights ago or another dig at PLINY THE whatever. As it turns out, me pontificating about beer has won out overall; I only have the quote-unquote “bandwidth” to write pithy posts about beers I’m drinking than my former free time to engage in long-ish posts about bands & records – though I do have yet another music blog currently active called HIGH WATER EVERYWHERE. But yeah, I sure miss posting mp3s, and trying to force my musical opinion on others.

To that end, let me present to you a slight diversion from our normal programming, and give you my gift to the craft beer and extended community: THE HEDONIST BEER JIVE 2010 GUIDE TO MUSIC. It’s a set of 27 songs from this past year, some even released just the past couple of weeks, that I find to be outstanding work by the youth of today. They’ve been gobbled up from a variety of other sites, bought straight from iTunes, or came off of old-school CDs that I actually bought. I’m constantly prowling for new stuff – just like I do with beer; in the blood, I reckon. In order to successfully enjoy this collection of mp3s, you have to be okay with a little bit of dirt and grime; with sometimes loud-ish guitars, and with Australians. I know that’s a leap for some of you. These 27 tracks can be burned to a CD if you like, or popped into iTunes or your “Zune”. You’ll find them to span the gamut from buoyant, garagy pop music (Dum Dum Girls, Happy Birthday, Rantouls) to unrelenting psychedelic noise (Kurt Vile & the Violators, Major Stars) to disjointed, stuttering post-punk (Wet Dog) to straight-up punk moderne (Overnight Lows, Black Jaspers).

The common thread is that this is the music I’m loving right now, and I sure hope you do too. Track listing and link to download is below – beer talk returns next week. Please go buy this stuff in iTunes or a store or wherever it is you do your shopping if any of this happens to catch your fancy.

Track listing

1. Jail La La – DUM DUM GIRLS
2. Girls FM – HAPPY BIRTHDAY
3. My Wet Tongue – HAPPY HOLLOWS
4. Little Green Hat – THE RANTOULS
5. Lower Leg – WET DOG
6. Clarence – SIC ALPS
7. (A Girl Called) Saccharine – DAN MELCHIOR’S BROKE REVUE
8. City of Rotten Eyes – OVERNIGHT LOWS
9. Smear – AN EXPERIMENT ON A BIRD IN THE AIR PUMP
10. Walkin’ Out – THEE ALMIGHTY HANDCLAPS
11. What Started The Noise – SUPER WILD HORSES
12. Purgatory – DICK DIVER
13. Vorpal – WHITE MYSTERY
14. Wandering – THE YOLKS
15. I Wear Black – TY SEGALL & MIKAL CRONIN
16. Little Bit of This – THE RANTOULS
17. El Jita – PUFFY AREOLAS
18. Malfunction – USELESS EATERS
19. Smart Car – BLACK JASPERS
20. Freudian Slips – BIG TROUBLES
21. She’s So Crazy – MICKEY
22. Still 16 – THE RANTOULS
23. Vietnam – HAPPY HOLLOWS
24. Aaron – WHITE MYSTERY
25. Denial – KURT VILE & THE VIOLATORS
26. Sugar Boat – THEE OH SEES
27. The Space You Know – MAJOR STARS

Download “The Hedonist Beer Jive 2010 Guide To Music” (this is a .zip file)

THE HOT KNIVES BEER BOOK!

2010-02-25T09:07:00.000-08:00

Before there was THE VICE BLOG, there was HOT KNIVES. Hot Knives was and remains a food blog with a heavy, hedonistic emphasis on great beer. They remain one of the best reads out there, and when these guys decide to cook some food and drink some craft ale, they get their hands dirty and go for it, then write about it with aplomb and panache. Now they’ve taken their beer writings – or at least the best of ‘em – and collected it into a mini-book called GREATEST SIPS. I just got mine in the mail yesterday and haven’t dug in yet, but just skimming through it, I was already laffin’ a bunch. I can recommend it in advance, mostly because I’ve read the posts that are collected here. It’s kind of cool, too – the publisher they’re using does this just-in-time thing too, where they only print it when you order it. You can do so here, and tell them the HBJ sent ya.

HOMAGE TO CATALONIAN BEERS – MOS’KA!

2010-02-24T08:00:00.000-08:00

While in Barcelona last week I did what I always do on work-related road trips, which is seek out the local ales for consideration (and comfort). Time was when I’d poke around obscure record shops, or maybe go to a museum or something, but now it’s pubs and beer bars like LA CERVETECA and CERVECERIA EL FLABIOL, the two best places I discovered in Barcelona for deep contemplation of Spanish (and Belgian) craft beer. At the former, I discovered a brewer from Girona, Spain called BIRRART MOS’KA. This guy (Josep Borrell) is on a one-man crusade to bring exceptional artisanal craft beer to Spain, and currently bottles four beers, all with a similar 12-ounce bottle design. I “considered” two of them, and brought another one home in my suitcase. Let’s discover together what I thought of them.

The first was MOS’KA TORRADA, and it’s a real humdinger. TORRADA is an artisanal amber beer that’s smooth and creamy and pours a nice red-tinged brown. Really, really flavorful – with strong malts, honey, and some hops that linger. TORRADA includes loads of sediment for you sediment fans out there. Picture a less-yeasty, more creamy version of a Belgian amber and you’re in the ballpark. I loved it, and after this and the RUNA ALE we talked about two days ago, it’s when I knew I’d stepped on beer paydirt in Barcelona. 8.5/10.

The other MOS’KA product I poured down my throat is called MOS’KA POMA. Spanish speakers in the audience may recognize that word translating as “apple”. And you’d be exactly right! Think of this one as a bitter apple wheat beer. It’s got that certain special I-don’t-know-what that I discovered in all the local brews; maybe it’s the water, but the local beers here just taste different than the imports and our own US micros. Fruity and citrus-packed, with a little bit of lemon and a TON of carbonation. A strange sort of pale ale that was not a thirst-quencher per se, but really one to work on slowly. And yeah, it was really good as well, just a notch down from the TORRADA at 7/10. I brought a MOS'KA NEGRA home in my bag, so we’ll talk about that one another time, OK?

HEY, LOST ABBEY MAKES A FRAMBOISE

2010-02-23T06:34:00.000-08:00

I started this blog back in early 2006, and back then the only experience I’d had with tart, sweet Belgian lambics were the ones from LINDEMANS. These are available even in corner liquor stores in the US, and I learned pretty quickly that these mass-produced lambics, decent enough as they are, use fruit adjuncts (gasp!!!) instead of real fruit. I remember taking a beer appreciation class in 2005 – which actually inspired me to create this blog – and the guy just relentlessly bagged on LINDEMANS and the fact that they didn’t stuff real bushels of raspberries or dozens of real peaches into their beers. Since then I’ve regrettably barely skimmed the world of the lambic. People who love this stuff really love it, and me, well I just don’t know yet. I had a CANTILLON FRAMBOISE back in 2009 that was so puckeringly perplexing that I couldn’t even score it, giving it an “Uncertain” rating.

At CITY BEER STORE the other night, I noticed that LOST ABBEY had a new beer on draft, LOST ABBEY FRAMBOISE DE AMOROSA. I marveled over the fact that I hadn’t tried a new one from these guys in well over 18 months, back in their glory days of 2007-2008 when new bottles were showing up on the shelves every month. Why not try their Framboise? Well guess what folks, it’s excellent. This is everything what I’d want a tart, ultra-fresh raspberry beer to taste like – packed with fresh and zinging yeasts, and puckering on the mouth but not so that you stop what you’re doing to clear the palate with water (which is what I had to do with the CANTILLON – rookie!!). It’s Belgian-style, full-stop, made right down there San Diego way. It’s absolutely drinkable and a much better intro to the style than those “adjunct” beers – right? You know Tomme Arthur and the gang don’t mess around. 8/10.

HOMAGE TO CATALONIAN BEER, PART ONE

2010-02-22T10:00:00.000-08:00

So you'll never guess where I was last week. Oh OK, it was Barcelona, Spain. Yeah, crazy, right? I may travel a lot for my job but getting an overseas pass - even if it's in cramped coach with an inconvenient flight change and a load of discomfort - is a new one. Last year I was in Madrid and Seville for pleasure and did, in fact, try to ingest local craft beer there with not a lot of luck (here's my dispatch about Madrid's NATURBIER). I casually mentioned to a couple of fellow drinkers at December's Pacific Coast Holiday Beer Fest that I was heading to Barcelona in February, and they burst with enthusiasm about this place called LA CERVETECA that was an absolute must-visit. Was it ever. Given that I had five nights in Barcelona, would the fact that four of them included visits to La Cerveteca surprise you? Yeah, this place is that great.

Jeez, where do I start? OK, I'll keep this and my next post limited to the Spanish (dare I say Catalonian) craft beers that I tried, though I found multiple unheard-of Belgian ales and other wild cards on this trip that I'll write about later. If you've heard anything about a burgeoning artisanal beer culture in Southeastern Spain (I hadn't before this trip), let it be said that there's no friggin' doubt about it. There is now some outstanding beer from this part of the world, and my cup raneth (??) over with the bounty of the region thanks to my targeted visits to La Cerveteca and CERVECERIA EL FLABIOL, both of which I researched via Beer Advocate's invaluable "BeerFly" beer-related travel guide. LA CERVETECA is just amazing - a beautiful, open, German-style beer nook where you drink while standing over barrels and which has local beer on draft and a deep selection of micros from around the world. Funny enough, outside of their many local beers (this has got to be ground zero for Catalonian beer), they also have heavy stock from CANTILLON, NOGNE Ø, AECHT SCHLENKERLA, FLYING DOG (!) and ANCHOR BREWING (!!). The guys that run and work the place are exceptionally friendly and even speak a little inglés, which helped me and my drinkmates in picking out the best in Spanish beer, stuff we may never see again.

Foremost on the list is the beer pictured above, one that I absolutely loved and had on draft twice - MASIA AGULLONS RUNA ALE. This is served on hand pump at La Cerveteca, and it's a superlative bitter brown ale. It has a giant frosty head of foam, and is remarkably fresh tasting. Tingling bitterness and lots of exciting dark fruit flavor - prunes, nuts, and some caramel. My friend PW, a guy weaned on UK ales, said this is one of the most exceptional British-style ales he'd had in a long while. I thought it was like a cask brown ale with wildly more hops & fruits than expected, all the while being light, refreshing and low-ABV. RUNA ALE was the highlight of the trip, drink-wise. 9/10.

Another interesting one I got to try is from a local outfit named DeDUES called DeDUES CERVESA D'AUTOR. I was actually gently warned against this by the proprieter of Cerveceria El Flabiol - he called it "unusual and indescribable" - but I thought it was kinda cool in its 13-ounce bottle, if exactly as he described. It's sort of like if you decided to make an "imperial" English bitter, then ramped it up with more hops and a really strange collection of yeasts. Mahogany red, chalky, bitter, and totally unique. Intriguing, but probably not something I'd want to try again. 6/10.

I'd tell ya more but I'm getting too thirsty just typing this stuff. Coming up - the beers of BIRRART MOS'KA and more....!

THE MAYFIELD “ICONOCLAST” SERIES, AS CONTEMPLATED BY A MERE COMMON MAN

2010-02-20T09:00:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you saw those bottles of $42 beers from a hitherto-unknown California beermaker called MAYFIELD BREWING hit the shelves of Whole Foods last year. “The Mayfield Iconoclast series?”, you asked yourself, as I did – “…How do I not know a thing of this nectar that must be so richly magnificent & otherworldly that it is able to garner twice and thrice the price of other already too-expensive beers from celebrated brewers the world over?”. I suppose that everyone who saw the three fancy bottles of MAYFIELD ICONOCLAST in their three fancy flavors asked themselves that, unless you already knew the back story, which I didn’t and still don’t. It is inevitable in this explosive abundance of artisanal craft beer that the market would evolve to support ever-higher price points, and as a good capitalist, I’m very much in favor of the market working out whether this gamble on the highest of the high end is a good one for John Aldrete, a one-man operation who started Mayfield Brewing in 2007. Yet forgive me my skepticism against the price multiple vs. other world-class beers would be equaled by a quality multiple as well. I decided to head to a rare Mayfield tasting at the very same Whole Foods where I first espied it to find out.

As part of SF Beer Week, Mr. Aldrete, accompanied by his helpful, glass-stacking 8-year-old son, was doling out 25-cent pours of his three beers in the wine section of San Francisco’s 4th Street Whole Foods one evening. I threw down a big $1 so I could try all three – and then some! The tasting was done very much the way a Napa Valley wine tasting is – a little bit goes into your glass from the luxuriously-appointed bottles, you swish it around, you chat with the owner, and you get maybe three swigs to form an impression. Given that, it was actually somewhat hard for me to get a read on the first one, ICONOCLAST AURORA. Aldrete called this an “altbier” infused with white wine, or perhaps it was aged in white wine barrels. Hmm. It sure tasted like wine to me, closer to chardonnay than altbier, and perhaps that’s where this high price-point stuff is coming from. Market this as a beer for people who love wine, and the market just might bat an eyelash your way.

Next was ICONOCLAST ECLAT, which I swear he called a “IPA”, aged in oak wine barrels. I could care less what someone calls anything as long as it’s good, but this small pours were making it hard to get a bead on anything. What do you want for 25 cents, right, Hinman? Shut up and sip your wine-beer. As suspicion mounted, Aldrete delivered the counterpunch in the form of ICONOCLAST NOCTURNA. Hold on here. This is incredible. A creamy imperial stout aged in port wine barrels, Nocturna tastes like a fantasy port/stout dream beverage, so delicious I made it my “bonus round” selection just so I could contemplate its magnificence again. You want 42 bucks for a big bottle of this? Why not? It’s a big party, your fanciest fancy-pants friends are coming over, and you want to bust out something that everyone’s going to swoon over and make you a superstar to both your beer and your wine-lovin’ friends. In other words, most couples you know – or should I say that I know, couples where the husband drinks beer with me, and the wife drinks wine with my wife. A ha. I’ve just divined the MAYFIELD ICONOCLAST angle, and at least with NOCTURNA, everyone will be happy and gay that you spent $42 to help get them that way.

I intend to ask Mr. Aldrete for an interview in the near future so we can all learn more about this stuff (seems like a totally humble, friendly and knowledgeable guy), but for now, let me say that it is indeed possible that this is no sleight-of-hand hocus pocus. I’d love to hear what you think if, in fact, your lips have graced the sides of a glass with Mayfield Iconoclast beer in it.

ELYSIAN & GREEN FLASH CORONATE “THE RED QUEEN”

2010-02-19T10:56:00.000-08:00

So after saying publicly on the Twitter that I wasn’t going to be attending any of the back-slappin’, shuckin & jivin’ SF BEER WEEK events, I turned coat & went to the unveiling of ELYSIAN BREWING and GREEN FLASH BREWING’s collaboration saison THE RED QUEEN last week. This took place at City Beer Store in San Francisco on a Wednesday night, and truly, I chose this event more out of convenience than anything else, seeing as how I’ve bagged on Elysian’s beers in the past & was only a fan of the Green Flash half of the partnership. And though I don’t know who’s truly pulling the strings with this beer, let it be said that Elysian is definitely getting a halo effect at a bare minimum from helping to produce this outstanding beer. Allow me to tell you about it.

THE RED QUEEN is a dark orange saison to die for. Fruity, incredibly juicy and just-out-of-the-vat fresh, this beer takes the saison sideways. It has a wonderfully earthy smell, which is something you’d expect, right? But it made its mark with me for its robust flavors of tangerine, honey and yeasts, all mingling together in one of the more fruit-forward farmhouse ales I’ve ever tasted. I’m willing to bet there are some similarities in pedigree with the GREEN FLASH SAISON I wrote about before and which currently resides in the Hedonist Beer Jive 75. That’s a picture of THE RED QUEEN right there, and yes, that’s the dollar I tipped for the privilege of being able to drink one. I don’t know if it’s a one-shot-and-done sort of beer or if there’s a potential for bottling & draft accounts, but like the Green Flash Saison from two years ago, this one’s easily scoring a big 9/10 on the HBJ scale.

DIEU DU CIEL's "SOLSTICE D'HIVER"

2010-02-15T06:00:00.000-08:00

Another day, another knockout beer from Montreal, Quebec's DIEU DU CIEL - or as they like to call themselves when they get excited, DIEU DU CIEL! This time we're talking about SOLSTICE D'HIVER, a winter seasonal that reached my eyes & ears via a number of channels, both online and off. The talk was that these guys make a ton of great beers, and yet besides the trophy-laden PECHE MORTAL, this was their flat-out best. I'm inclined to agree - this barleywine is totally top-tier stuff.

It comes in a 12-ounce bottle and that's OK cuz it's a big'un - 9.8% alcohol. SOLSTICE D'HIVER is a warming, sweet barleywine, without a lot of the intense hoppiness you'll find in some versions of this style. The taste is burnt sugar, maybe a little pineapple if you can believe it, and that delicious maltiness that gives off quite an aroma. You can smell that it's a high-ABV beer, but not necessarily taste it. Absolutely wanted another glass, and that doesn't happen to often with the big boys. I'm hooked on this outfit's beers, and I'll keep buying them as I see new ones. 8.5/10.

RUMINATIONS ON "PLINY THE YOUNGER"

2010-02-12T10:11:00.000-08:00

I've long slogged through life with the cross to bear of being what seems to be the only human alive who believes RUSSIAN RIVER's PLINY THE ELDER double IPA to be a "lesser" beer. Sure, it's good enough, but after careful contemplation of 5 glasses or bottles of it, I think I'm pretty certain that it's in the lower third of the Russian River (arguably our country's finest brewer) panoply, and it's a little south of average for the ultra-hoppy, Double IPA style. I find this opinion raises the hackles of the many who feel PLINY THE ELDER to be manna from heaven, and I've enjoyed some of the comments on this blog calling me heretic, "Judas" and whatnot.

Then there's the fabled PLINY THE YOUNGER. This beer comes out only once a year, and it's the 11% ABV, souped-up version of the Elder, and when it appears in its exceptionally rare handful of locations (usually just in a few California bars), it's snapped up & glugged down like a cooler full of Gatorade found after three parched days in the Gobi Desert. Right now it's actually tied with TRAPPIST WESTVLETEREN 12 on Beer Advocate's "Top 100 Beers" board as the single greatest beer in the entire world. Now me, I'm a San Francisco resident, and both Plinys are brewed about 80 minutes north of me. The fact that until a couple days ago I'd never tried RUSSIAN RIVER PLINY THE YOUNGER was a crime against drinking, and seriously lowered my credentials as a, um, "beer journalist" and maker of tastes. So when I got the email from Oakland's excellent beer bar THE TRAPPIST that they'd have a keg of this liquid gold on tap for a few hours, I drove- nay, I sped - over there after leaving work early to ensure I'd get to finally ingest a glass of the greatest beer on god's green earth.

Now you readers of this blog, you know I try to be a teller of truths, while holding a little bit of my tongue in my cheek at times. But I can't fathom this PLINY THE YOUNGER thing either, I just can't. Yes, it is ludicrously hoppy. It smells like a hop bath, and the only beer I've ever had this intense was DRAKE'S HOP SALAD - which, let the record show, is the better beer. I can't say that this is really that amazing of an experience. It is strong, it is well-constructed, but the sort of consciousness-raising beer experience one expects from the world's great beers? No, it's nothing of the sort. It's an experimental, kick-your-ass, hoppy ale that you'll remember for its intense bitterness and that's about it. And around here, my friends, that's what we at Hedonist Beer Jive like to call a 6.5/10.

SCHNEIDER WEISSE “ORIGINAL”

2010-02-11T13:21:00.000-08:00

I have an until-now unarticulated but dormant beer resolution for 2010 to actually drink a few German beers and try and develop some level of expertise on the great ones. I’m not a lager guy, but I totally love the hefeweizen, the dunkel weizen and even the hardcore eisbock, and I truly need to drink more of the original masters and less of the American copycats in order to get the proverbial big picture – and have fun whilst doing so. To that end, I ordered a SCHNEIDER WEISSE “ORIGINAL” the other evening at Café Biere. They had this beer listed as “ORIGINAL AMBER”, and that’s certainly fair since that’s its color, but this is rich, delicious dark hefeweizen all the way.

Tart and actually a little hoppy, this beer is probably closer to the “dunkel” side of the wheat beer tipping point, but who’s counting. It has an exceedingly fresh taste and smooth mouthfeel, giving it that whole I-could-drink-this-all-night feel that moves units & gets the German people good & drunk. Keep in mind that the brewer behind this, SCHNEIDER & SOHN WEISSBIERBRAUEREI, are the same masters behind AVENTINUS beers and the recent excellent collaboration with BROOKYLN BREWING. These guys don’t mess around. Definitely recommended. 7.5/10.

ITALIAN CRAFT BEER, UH, I GUESS

2010-02-10T10:17:00.000-08:00

Mention “Italian beer” to any beer drinker with a moderately-evolved palate, and until two years ago those two words would have been met with hoots of derision & outright mockery until you were forced to hang your head in shame. Nothing’s worse that getting all psyched up for a nice Italian meal, only to find the only beer choices being those “premium” Italian beers PERONI and MORETTI. Gross. Give me Coors Extra Gold or Blatz Light any day. Word on the street is that there’s this new wave of Italian brewers, bold risk-takers in the middle of one of the world’s great wine countries who are crafting incredible artisanal ales, some of which are starting to be sent over into North America for beer dork contemplation. Me, I’ve been looking for the right beer to get involved in the Italian scene. I believe based on last night’s evidence that I am still looking.

Johnny over at MONTEREY DELI – the outstanding beer store/market a mere two blocks from my house – got in this new Italian beer in a funny-looking bottle by an Italian brewer called ORO DI MILANO called RISERVA SPECIALE. He hadn’t tried it yet, so I decided that I would. It may be that I’m “breaking” this beer in the Northern Califorina market. It’s a dubious honor. ORO DI MILANO RISERVA SPECIALE is definitely a major jump above the Italian macros, but considering that those are undrinkable, it’s a small step to scale. This one’s still trending toward the “macro ale” side of the ledger, with an intense, off-putting malty sweetness that really defines and overwhelms the beer. It’s 8.2% alcohol, but the sugary sweetness tastes like a by-product of the malts, and I dunno, it’s just not done in a way that hits me where I live. Light, nearly opaque amber (they call it a “brown amber ale”), this has a thin-to-medium body, with tastes of really light caramel and even liqueurs. Yeah, that’s it – it’s like those cheapo liqueur-filled candies you get in those phony chocolate bottles of Jameson Whiskey, except this has a grainy, malty beer taste instead. I’m none too impressed. Who out there knows of a really stupendous Italian beer I can drop some coin on instead? 5/10.

AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVE HAUSLEIN OF HEALTHY SPIRITS

2010-02-08T06:00:00.000-08:00

I wasn’t yet a rabid, frothing fan of San Francisco’s HEALTHY SPIRITS beer store until my most recent couple of visits there, when I realized that over the past two years the place has become the SF Bay Area’s finest retail location for off-beat, one-of-a-kind, artisanal beers. The place has gradually changed from being merely an awesome beer store to a mind-blowing beer emporium - full of Belgian specialty ales, Scandinavian brews, Japanese craft beers and yes, the best in American microbrews as well. If you look hard enough you can also pick up some middle eastern treats and a pack of gum & some chips, too.

We decided to commission an interview with DAVE HAUSLEIN, beer manager at Healthy Spirits, as he’s been presiding over this transition and growth the past couple of years. Take a look at what Mr. Hauslein has to say here and you’ll revel that we live in an age where such a store not only exists, but thrives. Oh – and definitely put it on your beergenda when you visit our town – HEALTHY SPIRITS is located at 2299 15th Street @ Castro. Here goes:

HEDONIST BEER JIVE: Tell me a little bit about how Healthy Spirits, which was just a normal corner convenience store for most of its existance, has morphed & changed the past few years.

Dave Hauslein: Healthy Spirits has never had a traditional approach to the neighborhood corner store. In its infancy, the store focused on the diverse tastes of the neighborhood, putting a lot of energy into supplying the large Irish population with their favorite UK specialty items (candy, chips, etc.). Another popular, long running aspect of the store has been the Rami’s Mommy’s line of home-made Middle-Eastern food, which is made from scratch by the owner’s mother, from old family recipes. A little over 3 years ago Rami saw the growing interest in craft beer in San Francisco and decided to become a part of that scene. The original beer guy, Matt Pushinsky, worked with Rami to set up the solid foundation we have in the craft beer community. In the 2+ years I have been at the store, I have tried to continue in that direction, expanding our selection and starting the Beer of the Month Club.

HEDONIST BEER JIVE: What are you looking for when you choose beer for the store - Rarity? Quality? Ability to sell through?

Dave Hauslein: I have been into beer for a long time, and I know most of the major brands inside and out, so I tend to get excited whenever someone new comes along. I look for innovation, and obviously quality. Since we have so many beers at the store, we have the ability to bring in less known breweries and not always buy based on what sells fast. I am also careful about buying based on what’s rare, because sometimes it’s nothing more than a marketing strategy. Besides being as active in the San Francisco beer scene as we can there are some great resources out there such as beer advocate and rate beer, that really help us ascertain which beers are really worth seeking out. Of course the best method of determining quality is always going to be tasting them yourself.

HEDONIST BEER JIVE: Who buys beer at Healthy Spirits? Give me some examples of your most dedicated customers.

Dave Hauslein: Our customers are as eclectic as the beer we sell. We get local neighborhood people, people who drive in from out of town, and even out of state people. I find that the most dedicated customers are the Beer of the Month Club members. They get 15% off coupons with every issue that’s released, so many of them come in and buy large amounts of beer at once. There is also a growing number of customers who cellar beer at home. These people tend to buy limited release beers by the case.

HEDONIST BEER JIVE: Healthy Spirits is located in the Castro District, a heavily gay neighborhood with some families and scattered twentysomethings. Why do you feel this store fits the neighborhood well?

Dave Hauslein: The Castro is a neighborhood that has always been on the cutting edge, and with the rising interest in craft beer, we are in the right place. It’s an affluent area, where people feel comfortable spending a little bit of money to try something just to see if they’ll like it. We are also within walking distance of The Toronado, one of the best beer bars in the world. So we get a lot of cross traffic.

HEDONIST BEER JIVE: The focus at Healthy Spirits seems to be on Belgians, but I'm noticing a huge selection now of some of the most offbeat & artisanal beers from Denmark, Sweden, Japan, Norway and elsewhere. Is there a demand for those, and what are the best ones & the most popular ones?

Dave Hauslein: We began by focusing primarily on Belgians, but it’s just one of the many countries that are now producing noteworthy beer. In the past few years we have seen mini-Renaissances in Scandinavia and Italy, as well as rising interest in American-style craft beers in countries like Japan. The demand is limited, but I am confident it will grow with time as people become more aware of what’s available to them. I am happy to see that breweries like Jolly Pumpkin and Stone are collaborating with Scandinavian breweries and creating interesting new beers with cross-cultural influences. And then there’s BFM from Switzerland, one of my all time favorite producers. Their Abbaye De Saint Bon Chien is a transcendent beer. A grand cru aged in oak that ends up somewhere between a Flemish sour ale and a Belgian grand cru.

HEDONIST BEER JIVE: What's the pricing strategy at Healthy Spirits? I've noticed that it's a place where you can drop a lot of cash in a hurry, and is perhaps the most "high-end" beer shop I've ever been to.

Dave Hauslein: Since we are a specialty shop and carry such a large selection, the prices are going to be higher than places like Bev-Mo, where they get special deals and sell based on bulk. But we think it’s worth it, especially when you consider the level of service we provide. We are able to give detailed information on most every beer we carry, and will assist customers in putting together vertical tastings, pairing beer with food, and helping them to find beers that are suited to their taste. We can even recommend glassware, show the proper way to pour various beers, and explain the history/background of many producers. That being said, we currently offer a 10% discount on mixed 6 packs, which includes all bottles and cans.

HEDONIST BEER JIVE: You told me that you're looking to also become a destination for high-end spirits the way you are for beer. What are some examples?

Dave Hauslein: Nate Breed is our wine and spirits buyer, and resident expert. He just launched a bourbon blog, and we have developed a sizeable selection of high quality bourbons. Nate hand selects each wine and bourbon that comes into the store, which ensures that we carry only the best.

HEDONIST BEER JIVE: How did you personally get involved with Healthy Spirits? Do you have a personal "beer resume" you can share with us?

Dave Hauslein: I first got into craft beer when I was about 19 years old. I tried a mixed case of Unibroue beers one New Year’s Eve, and that was it. I had never tried any Belgian-style beer before, and it turned into a minor obsession. This was when I still lived in Pennsylvania. I found a few specialty beer stores that didn’t ask me for ID and started experimenting with different styles. When I moved to Philadelphia to attend college I got a job at The Foodery, which is easily one of the best beer stores on the East Coast. There I learned a lot, and drank a lot. When I moved to San Francisco I worked at BevMo for a little while. When I found an opportunity to work at Healthy Spirits I jumped on it. I have been at the store for over 2 years and in that time Rami, Nate and myself have made major strides towards being San Francisco’s top bottle shop destination.

HEDONIST BEER JIVE: What are some of your personal favorite beers, either that you sell or that you wish you sold?

Dave Hauslein: It’s a tough question, because I change my mind all the time. I’ll start with a top 5 of stuff that we are currently selling at the store.

1. De Dolle Stille Nacht
2. Deschutes Black Butte XXI
3. BFM Abbaye De Saint Bon Chien Vintage 2007
4. Jolly Pumpkin Maracaibo
5. Drie Fontinen Oude Gueuze

New and interesting beers are coming in all the time, so if you were to ask me next week, I’d probably give you a completely different list. As far as beers I wish we carried, most of them are things I miss from the East Coast. Yuengling Lager brings back pleasant memories. I would love to have access to stuff from the Troeg’s Brewing Company, Brooklyn Brewery, Bell’s, Tyranena, Duck Rabbit, General Lafayette, and a few dozen others. Thank God we finally got some Victory brews out here!

HEDONIST BEER JIVE: Are there any plans to sell some of the beers you carry online, or are there legal hoops to leap through to do so?

Dave Hauslein: We ship beer on a very small scale. Beer laws vary state to state, so we have to check before we send anything.

HEDONIST BEER JIVE: Finally, how do you see the store evolving in 2010, and then beyond that?

Dave Hauslein: We are expanding our selection while keeping the emphasis on quality. We are also investigating the possibility of having a couple of beers brewed exclusively for Healthy Spirits. As the year progresses there will be lots of surprises for beer aficionados, and some fun stuff for Beer of the Month Club members. It’s going to be our biggest year ever.

MOONLIGHT BREWING’s “YOUNG PALE ALE”

2010-02-05T06:03:00.000-08:00

Remember MOONLIGHT BREWING? There’s the semi-legendary one-man operation based in San Francisco’s north bay area, a fella named Brian Hunt, and his beers are out of this world. They taste like hand-crafted, small-batch, experimental beers – if it’s true that you can actually taste such things. His beers are only available in Northern California, draft only, and while it’s pretty easy to find a pint of DEATH & TAXES or TWIST OF FATE, rare is the day that one sees anything else from Moonlight Brewing in their local beverage dispensary. The other night at CAFÉ BIERE in Emeryville, I was fortunate enough to grab a pint of his YOUNG PALE ALE, a beer so unknown that it’s not even listed on the Beer Advocate/Rate Beer sites yet. It is entirely possible that these words I am typing at this second are the first words ever digitally recorded about it. (Shudder). Wow, did you just feel that??

MOONLIGHT YOUNG PALE ALE is an orange-tinged, very hoppy pale ale. It’s spicy as all get out. You ever tried THREE FLOYDS ALPHA KING before? It’s that kind of pale ale – the one that’s really a strong, intense India Pale ale hiding behind the “American pale ale” category. Malts were interacting with spices interacting with big-ass hops – wow. This is the best beer I’ve had from Moonlight in a couple of years, and I even had my all-time fave pilsner REALITY CZECH just the other evening. I hope this one turns up in more locales in 2010 because you’re gonna want this one. 8.5/10.

NOGNE Ø 2008 WINTER ALE

2010-02-03T17:38:00.000-08:00

Like you, I’m intrigued by those Scandinavian beers and brewers that keep grabbing headlines, particularly since the ones I’ve had from NOGNE Ø (Norway), HAANDBRYGGERIET (Norway) and MIKKELLER (Denmark) have been so damn good. Yet these little bottles are often very pricey, so it takes a day like the one a few weeks ago where I stumbled into Healthy Spirits in San Francisco with a full wallet and a smile on my face to make me wanna spring for them. And oooooh there were so many to choose from here. (Stay tuned with an interview we’ve got coming up on this blog with Dave Hauslein, beer guru at this store). I went with NOGNE Ø 2008 WINTER ALE, just because it was something I’d never see again. They had another Winter beer there by NOGNE Ø called PECULIAR YULE, and it’s highly rated on Beer Advocate (A-). Then again, so’s the WINTER ALE (A-), or GOD JUL, as we say in Norway.

“Now THAT’S a strong winter warmer”, I sez to myself as I commenced to drinking it. A dark, rich ale, NOGNE Ø 2008 WINTER ALE is complex and maybe even a little nutty. No, not crazy-like – nutty-tasting, ya knuckleheads. Also tastes of caramel and more exotic things I could not place. “Complex”, I’m telling you – very complex. 8.5% alcohol and even a little sour as it warmed. And then it was gone. I was warmed, flushed and mildly exhilarated by this interesting brew. No clue as to what a year of aging did to it, but I’m glad I found one all the same. 7/10.

HELLO 21A, YEAH, IT’S BEEN A WHILE

2010-02-02T17:28:00.000-08:00

I made my way back into the physical confines of the 21ST AMENDMENT PUB & BREWERY in San Francisco the other evening for a couple of fresh ales. A lot has gone down since I swung by here before a Giants game last year. 21A’s got three kinds of canned beer in supermarkets and liquor stores across the land now – Hell or High Watermelon Wheat (one of their lesser beers); Brew Free or Die IPA (another lesser beer); and the outstanding MONK’S BLOOD, which we wrote about here. They’ve also been cooking up a batch of Belgian-style ales for their annual “strong beer month”, which goes down every February and which I missed by a couple of days. My rule of thumb with this brewer is that when you go “off menu” – i.e. to their specialty or seasonal beers and more dorkified creations – that’s where the real treasure lives.

I tried to do just that the other night during a wide-ranging discussion with a compatriot about school choice, free will and the Berkeley Unified School District’s organic gardening program. This line of conversation called for the strongest beers on the menu, so I grabbed a HOLIDAY SPICED ALE to get things going. Way back in 2006 this Christmas beer really blew me away, but the 2009 version is leaving something on the table before it hits the glass. Really spicy – they’ve not lost a beat there – but a little thin and just slightly “off”, as we like to say when things aren’t quite coming together the way we like them. A lot of winter beers seem to lack for imagination so these guys get points for trying to go way big with theirs. Let’s call it a 6/10.

Then there was this Belgian-style golden ale called GOLDEN DOOM. Good name, and really good beer. It’s pictured here. It’s a thick, orange-colored sweet ale, with just a TON of yeast collecting in the back of the throat. Yow. I think they may have thrown in a little butterscotch to keep the pundits guessing. A well-done take on an underappreciated (by me) style. 7.5/10. Onward to “strong beer month”!

NEW GLARUS "SPOTTED COW" - SAISON AMERICAN

2010-02-01T10:06:00.000-08:00

Since NEW GLARUS BREWING only brews and distributes in Wisconsin, and because Wisconsinites tend to l-o-v-e their beer, both beer dorks and hoi polloi alike, the beer's got a must-have quality for those of us who can't get it. And that's why beer trading exists. I received four bottles of NEW GLARUS beers in a recent swap. albeit two that were nearly empty of liquid due to shaking and damage in transit that had essentially drained the liquid without popping the cap. ("Have you ever seen a grown man cry?"). But there was this 12-ounce bottle of SPOTTED COW in there. This beer's been in the "beer news" of late, thanks to a NYC bar that smuggled four cases of it out of Wisconsin to serve it to the Badger-lovin' Wisconsin expats in the Big Apple who frequent said bar for football Saturday. Apparently it's a big whoop-de-doo that could lead to fines and whatnot. Good thing I, uh, got mine legally, right?

NEW GLARUS SPOTTED COW is the most "American" saison/farmhouse ale I've ever had. Less magnanimous people than myself might say that it's a Belgian saison "dumbed down" for an American audience of twentysomething college football lovers, but me, I flip it the other way. I think it's an American pale ale with heavy fruit characteristics that happens to also be mildly Belgian-ized. It has an exceptionally strong fruit smell and taste (apricots is what I'm getting), and it's amazingly refreshing. Like drink-a-six-pack-in-one-sitting refreshing. A fruit saison? Oh yes. There's the faint whiff and taste of the barnyard hovering on the nose and tongue, and this sets it one very large step above your basic fruit beer, a.k.a what an MCP might call "girl beer". Well I sure ain't a girl and I thought this thing was great - a terrific introduction to this heralded brewer for me. 7.5/10.

I DID IT - I DRANK A SURLY "FURIOUS"

2010-01-29T15:30:00.000-08:00

And I'm a far better man for it. My first beer from Minneapolis' SURLY BREWING came to via post by "The Captain" from The Captain's Chair blog - thank you my friend - and it's even better than I'd prepared myself for. Oh, no question I was "psyched beyond belief", but this hopped-out imperial red ale from a big tall boy can is flat-out outstanding. The gang from SURLY, who are newer on the brewing scene than even this blog, are hitting it out of the park by all accounts, which is why I was so desperate to finally trade for some. I'll admit, I've taken better photos before, but I've had only a couple dozen better beers in my drinking life.

SURLY FURIOUS smells fantastic, with fresh hops and an aromatic mix of scotch-ale style malts and even pineapple in the mix. The pundits call it an IPA, and maybe they're right, but it tastes to me more like a malty Scottish ale that's been infused with a insanely liberal dose of hops, then balanced perfectly. In case you're not familiar with the concept of "International Bitterness Units", or IBU's, this has got 99 of 'em, and that's about as high as you can go - so no namby-pambys allowed here. Fluffy head, fresh taste, and just a winning combination of flavors all around. 9.5/10.

GRAND TETON BREWING’s “BLACK CAULDRON”

2010-01-28T06:00:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you’ll be perusing the shelves of your local beer store, and some random brewery you’re altogether unfamiliar will all of a sudden have their entire lineup on display and for sale. Obviously someone just signed a distribution deal and is now available in your state or locale. What kills me is thinking of the breweries I wish were distributed in my state whom this new brewer’s perhaps scored a deal in place of – in Northern California, good examples of brewers we're missing include Southern Tier, Captain Lawrence, Boulevard, Smuttynose, Surly, Brooklyn, and so on. Now a few of those probably don’t have the production ability to distribute to all markets that desire their beers, and others just want to keep their stuff local for other reasons.

Then there are unheralded brewers like GRAND TETON BREWING from Victor, ID. Their beers all of a sudden showed up in all the better Bay Area beer stores late last year. Who are these guys? Why them? Who are they stealing shelf space from? Wait – what if their beers are good? I decided to buy one and find out. I’ve got this friend, Mark, and this guy just loves him an imperial stout or porter. Crank up the alcohol, make it as black and as coffee/chocolate/roasted as possible, and he’s in heaven. I was in the midst of buying him some of these beers a few weeks ago, and came upon GRAND TETON BLACK CAULDRON. Looked like a dark, evil, scary, high-ABV imperial stout. Aw hell, I reckoned, I’ll pick one up for him and for myself. “I’m darn glad I did”.

Wow! Where did this come from? BLACK CAULDRON is a smooth, medium-bodied, vanilla/cocoa stout that is actually quite approachable. Sure, it’s 8% alcohol, but it doesn’t have that harsh, deep-roasted flavor you get from a lot of these big boy beers (and yeah, I know that 8% is not quite the 10-11% a lot of these clock in at). But more than that – it’s really, really delicious. The balance is incredible, and the tastes are really rich and inviting. A bit of a surprise, and it’s a 12-ounce bottle so it’s not exactly a wreck-the-night, time-to-go-to-bed investment if you choose to drink it by yourself. I want to spread the word about this one. Will you help me? 8.5/10.

AVERY "SIXTEEN" - THREE IN A ROW?

2010-01-27T06:06:00.000-08:00

AVERY BREWING, like a lot of yr better brewers, are pumping out an anniversary ale every year, one named according to the anniversary of incorporation - e.g. AVERY FOURTEEN, AVERY FIFTEEN, etc. It just so happens that those two aforementioned beers were absolutely fantastic, and among the finest beers in creation the years they were created. I scored them a 9.5/10 and a 9/10 respectively, the latter score being an "upgrade" from my second tasting of it on draft at the Spuyten Duyvil in NYC. So it was with great gusto and aplomb that I hunted down a bottle of AVERY SIXTEEN last month. I like how the annual anniversary ale - like STONE, like PORT - is a wholly different style than the one before it. This one's a saison. Let's check it out.

AVERY SIXTEEN was brewed once - one batch, over and done. It is a clear, ultra-light, almost see-through saison. It steps on the scales at 7.7% ABV, which is what you'd expect from AVERY - no pussyfooting allowed. It's got tastes of citrus, honey and of course a very particular Belgian strain of yeast, along with a slight "grassy" aftertaste. Soft malts, a little bit of tartness, yet everything's in balance and quite good. It's not the intense anniversary bomb they've dropped on us in the past, but I'd say it's a good 'un. 7/10.

ALESMITH IPA & YOUR NEW IPA CHECKLIST

2010-01-22T16:55:00.000-08:00

If you’ve written about beer before on a blog, Beer Advocate, Rate Beer etc., you may have noticed that writing about the India Pale Ale can get a little samey after a while. There’s an A/B quality to this beer style – is it this, or is it this? Does it have a little of this, or a lot of this? Keeping IPA-reviewing boredom in mind, I submitted a big bottle of ALESMITH IPA, straight outta San Diego and one of the most heralded IPAs of our time, to a bruising checklist-style quiz as I ingested it. I believe you will find the answers highly illuminating. You may use this checklist for future IPA study in your own home, or when out at the bar with friends and loved ones. It is certain to take your conversation – and perhaps even your luck with the opposite sex – to the next level. Here goes – ALESMITH IPA:

1. Is this IPA hoppy, really hoppy, or ultra hoppy? Really hoppy.
2. Would you say it’s more West Coast, East Coast or English? West Coast all the way.
3. Piney, or citrus? Piney.
4. Smooth or sharp? Smooth.
5. Normal foam head, giant foam head or no foam head? Definitely a giant foam head here.
6. Light, medium or high carbonation? Highly carbonated.
7. Dissipating bitterness, or strong bitterness on the aftertaste? Very strong bitterness.
8. Any unusual fruits in the mix, or just the de rigeur grapefruit? Grapefruit only here.
9. Golden, deep golden, amber or orange? Amber.
10. Hop lover’s dream, hop lover’s wet dream, or hop lover’s orgy in heaven with 42 virgins? Hop lover’s dream.
11. Most importantly - where does it fall on the Hedonist Beer Jive ten-point scale? 7/10.

A TRIP TO CAFÉ BIERE

2010-01-21T09:47:00.000-08:00

There’s this place that opened last year & has existed under the radar in Emeryville, CA called CAFÉ BIERE that I’ve been meaning to check out. First, let’s talk about where Emeryville is. It’s basically the first town you hit as you come off the Bay Bridge from San Francisco, so on a traffic-less day (right!) you can get from the heart of SF to the heart of Emeryville, such as it is, in about 15 minutes. Emeryville, where I happen to work 5 days a week, is a tiny, formerly-industrial burg sorta nestled at three angles between Berkeley, Oakland, and the San Francisco Bay. When I was growing up it was all warehouses and driftwood; then IKEA opened in the mid-90s, and it got on urban folks’ radar. Condos were built, a big outdoor mall was built, dot-com companies moved out there, and voila. The conditions were created for a below-the-radar, out-of-the-way Belgian beer bar/restaurant called CAFÉ BIERE to open in 2009.

No one I know had ever told me about this place, but I think it came up in a Yelp or Google search I did one time and I was dumbfounded. A killer beer place just a mile or two from the office? Are you kidding me?? Before my jaunt to last night’s Golden State Warriors game in Oakland, I decided to check it out. CAFÉ BIERE is on Adeline Street at the very border with Oakland, across the street from some condos and just a couple blocks away from the PIXAR campus. It re-creates what I imagine to be the Belgian bar/restaurant feel quite well – small, cramped but not annoyingly so, and with wood-block tables for all customers (no actual bar). The beer menu is outstanding, with the not-insignificant complaint that it only slightly matched the menu they had online (so my goal of having a sober glass of DESCHUTES BLACK BUTTE XXI was dashed). Moreover, of the 12 or so draft selections, 5 of them were gone – naturally, including the really special, high-demand stuff like THE ABYSS and DRAKE’S DENOGGANIZER. I understand that taps run dry – happens to the best of ‘em – but this place needs to get its supply chain and web updating skills updated for the 21st century.

OK – so they still have a fantastic selection. Tons of Belgian and Belgian-style beer in bottles, including all the Trappist beers, the entire Unibroue lineup, even my #2 fave beer of all time, BRASSERIE DES ROCS TRIPLE IMPERIALE (to say nothing of #1, TRAPPIST ROCHEFORT 8, which is here as well). There are a number of American beers from DOGFISH HEAD, ALLAGASH and other heavyweights, and some cool locals like 21ST AMENDEMENT’s MONK’S BLOOD, which they had on tap. Service – at least for the one pint I had time to quaff – was excellent. I ordered a draft DESCHUTES HOP HENGE IPA, trying to give it another chance after savaging it in this 4/5/2007 review. Alas, my review was spot-on back then: a medicinal, over-hopped, poorly-balanced IPA that is just a little too much of a good thing. The ideas are fine, the execution is not – and when there are 200 other highly-hopped IPAs vying for a share of your wallet, this one should not get the nod. It certainly won’t for me. 5.5/10.

Great vibe, cool little space, and I definitely want to come back here and order some mussels and pomme frites. HBJ says check it out.

BRUNEHAUT ABBAYE VAN ST. MARTIN TRIPEL

2010-01-20T06:00:00.000-08:00

You remember how we told you we were going to be trying more random Belgian beers in 2010? “Belgian roulette”, we like to call it. Well the other day I made good on that claim, and picked up a bottle of BRUNEHAUT ABBAYE VAN ST. MARTIN TRIPEL, on the indisputable & completely inarguable notion that tripels from Belgium are among the greatest pleasures to be known by man. Never heard of these fellas (BRUNEHAUT BREWERY in Brunehaut, Belgium- just outside of “Rongy”), never seen there beers before – but something about this one was fetching. Turns out that it was a good call, as Belgian roulette often is.

ST. MARTIN TRIPEL is a classic tripel-style ale, true to form in every way. Spicy, smooth, with a light sweetness and a definite citrus character. It’s a hazy, straw-colored beer, just as you’d expect, and its yeasts are aromatic and dominant; as I understand it, that’s what brings out that intense “spicy” characteristic in the best tripels. I’m not gonna say that this is ultimately world-class, but it’s really good and easily worth a grab if you get the gumption. 7.5/10.

HITACHINO NEST “COMMEMORATIVE ALE”

2010-01-19T06:00:00.000-08:00

Craft beer from Japan is a improbable reality these days, with KIUCHI BREWERY (commonly known under their brand, HITACHINO NEST, and their wacky owl mascot) leading the way, at least in terms in imports & perception in the USofA. I can’t speak for the others I’ve read about – primarily BAIRD BREWERY – mostly due to lack of availability and/or cost when I have found it. But KIUCHI/HITACHINO, I know them. Their WHITE ALE is everywhere, including a ton of Japanese restaurants I’ve been to over the past year. The other day while shopping for new ales to put into my belly, I picked up a 12-oz. bottle of their COMMEMORATIVE ALE, mostly because I thought I’d read somewhere that it was outstanding. Turned out that that was actually their CELEBRATION ALE. Ah well.

HITACHINO NEST COMMEMORATIVE ALE is a real “foamer”, as the picture you see here will attest. Don’t worry, that thing calms down after a spell. It’s actually a pretty interesting beer. Close your eyes. Picture if you will a Belgian witbier – a little spicy, with tastes of orange peel and cinnamon. Now give it the malty heft and the darker feel of a winter warmer, along with a nutmeg-like taste. I know, right? It’s got a great smell, and there’s a lot going on here. For the most part it comes together really well, and it’s adventurous without being obnoxious or too difficult for a craft beer rookie to ingest. Hedonist Beer Jive says, “Oishii desu ne!”. 7/10.

DOGFISH HEAD GIVES ME A RAISON D’ETRE

2010-01-18T10:21:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago I was lucky enough to try a beer from DOGFISH HEAD called RAISON D’EXTRA, a 2005 imperial & seasonal version of their year-round beer RAISON D’ETRE. It blew me away. I called it a “barrel-aged cookie beer”. I knew I got lucky to encounter it on tap in Washington DC, and yet I’d never seen its precedent beer, RAISON D’ETRE, until the other night in Las Vegas. That beer’s pretty damn good as well. It is described by the brewer as “A deep, mahogany ale brewed with beet sugar, green raisins, and Belgian-style yeast. As complex as a fine, red wine.” I would hasten to add that it is also a thin-bodied (not deep), near-opaque beer that tastes very Monk-like – smooth, mildly sweet, and rocking some serious caramel malts. It has 8% alcohol and you taste every bit of it. This is the kind of beer that has made DOGFISH HEAD’s reputation – bursting with craft and care, and “off-centered” enough to be truly unique & cool. 7.5/10.

MIKKELLER/BREWDOG “DEVINE REBEL”: THE WALLET AND THE DAMAGE DONE

2010-01-15T06:00:00.000-08:00

We humans can’t help but be hornswaggled at times by the whole “price as a cue for quality” trope. If you’ve read anything about the psychology of shopping – and I actually have – you know that a desirable piece of merchandise priced higher than you might otherwise have expected gains a certain bonus cachet simply by virtue of the high price. "It’s expensive, so it must be good". How often this turns out to be untrue – and yet, how fantastic when it is true.

I’m talking of course about the $16.99 twelve-ounce bottle of MIKKELLER/BREWDOG “DEVINE REBEL” that I tried this week and was floored by. Take one outstanding itinerant Danish brewer (MIKKELLER), and pair them with an upstart Scottish brewer (BREWDOG), and put ‘em to work making an English-style barleywine. Release it in limited quantities, keep the information on the label vague, then price it high enough to make it super-desirable for beer dorks like Jay Hinman to spring for in a moment of weakness. Check, check and check. I walked out of the store feeling guilty and remorseful, consoling myself that it were bad or even mediocre, I could savage it on Hedonist Beer Jive as consolation.

DEVINE REBEL is the best beer I’ve had in 2010 (OMG!!!). It is a 12.5% bomb of a barleywine, and yet so smooth and perfect and flavorful that you might as well be drinking the proverbial liquid nirvana. Butterscotch, caramel and dried fruit mix with straight-up scotch, and the results are stu-friggin’-pendous. It’s full-bodied and just about completely uncarbonated. I’ve never had a BREWDOG beer before, so if you’ve got any recommendations for their stuff, lemme know. MIKKELLER, well so far I’ve only had their single-hop IPA series, because everything else I see of theirs is so off-the-charts expensive, but this is one time I’m glad I let the insidious marketing manipulators get to me. 9.5/10.

ST-AMBROISE VINTAGE 2009: MEDIOCRE THINGS COME TO THOSE WHO WAIT

2010-01-14T10:23:00.000-08:00

In January 2009 I was presented with a cylindrical object, a “tube” you might call it, from a Canadian gentleman of my acquaintance. This fine fellow went out of his way to procure for me a bottle of ST-AMBROISE 20TH ANNIVERSARY VINTAGE ALE, 2009, a product of McAUSLAN BREWING from Quebec. I’d had their APRICOT WHEAT ALE (6.5/10) and their OATMEAL STOUT (6/10) – hmm, some very middling scores there – but this one, now this one was going to special. I was asked to “age” it, a concept very foreign to me. “Age” a beer instead of drink it right away with extreme prejudice? Por quoi? Well, I did as I was told, and tucked VINTAGE ALE 2009 into the dark recesses of my garage for a year. When the clock struck 12 and 2010 began, I brushed the dust off the never-completely-forgotten cyclinder, carefully unpacked the twelve-ounce bottle inside, and I commenced to drinking. This was going to be a very, very special evening.

…..Or was it? ST-AMBROISE 20TH ANNIVERSARY VINTAGE ALE 2009 is a reddish-brown strong ale, with somewhat-defined “notes”, you might say, of sugar, rum and dates. That said, these tastes are not defined nor bold enough to be particularly interesting. Malts rule the day here. In fact the word on the street for this one is that it’s actually an “English Barleywine”, which, given my Amero-centric barleywine biases, means that it’s probably a bit “watered down” compared to my imperial assumptions. That turns out to be the case here, though by no means is this a bad beer or even a less-than-good beer. It’s just not complex enough to be worth the grandiose packaging & the whole “aging” hoo-hah. 6.5/10.

MOYLAN’S AND THE SINGLE IPA THAT WASN’T

2010-01-12T06:00:00.000-08:00

It’s another in a liquid parade of beer reviews here at the HBJ – thanks for keeping up. I hope we’re directing you toward your next set of drinks every week; if not, well, we’re just not doing our job. The next up is the seemingly unflashy IPA from MOYLAN’S BREWING. Now if you’ve been reading this site anytime in the past four years, you know we’ve tended to make a really big deal about HOPSICKLE, their “triple IPA”. It’s one of the all-time hopped-up greats, and currently resides at #6 on the Hedonist Beer Jive 75. These guys are also rocking a double IPA called the MOYLANDER, and then there’s the “single IPA” called – that’s right – MOYLAN’S IPA. I checked the blog archives recently and realized I’d never had it. Otherwise, we would have told you. Hence my purchase, and hence my ingestion of it Sunday evening.

This is the biggest, baddest “single IPA” I’ve had all year. MOYLAN’S IPA brings forth exceptionally strong hops, and they’re balanced in a fantastic citrus vs. pine blend. There’s a ton of sweet malts and a decidedly spicy aftertaste. It may “only” be clocking in at 6.5% alcohol, but there’s no doubt that any blind taste-tester would call this one a Double IPA for sure. It’s excellent. Now the leap from here to HOPSICKLE is a big one – Hopsickle is just insane with the hops – but not as much as you might think. They may be under the radar nationwide and even locally, but man, does MOYLAN’S make a fantastic set of IPAs. 8/10.

TENAYA CREEK’s “10TH ANNIVERSARY ALT”

2010-01-11T06:00:00.000-08:00

Every time I go to Las Vegas, which unfortunately is at least twice a year for work, I always get a hankering to visit the one and only true craft brewer I know about out there, TENAYA CREEK BREWERY. Trouble is, on an expense account it’s still difficult to justify a $30 cab fare each way “for dinner”, as this place is nowhere near The Strip (and good for them, because The Strip is maybe my least favorite place on earth). So I have to let their beer come to me. I’ve only tried one other drink from these guys before, TENAYA CREEK IMPERIAL STOUT, which I rated 7/10 two years ago. This time I was served up a glass of TENAYA CREEK 10TH ANNIVERSARY ALT; yep, the pride of Dusseldorf, transplanted to the Las Vegas Strip by a Nevada brewer. Let’s see what transpired.

10TH ANIVERSARY ALT is a clear copper altbier, very clean in its taste but still with a sharpness I didn’t recognize from my alt-drinking days in the altstadt in Dusseldorf, ahhhh, back in 2002. Some hoppiness and bittering to go with the faint caramel taste, and medium carbonation. You know what? There’s just not a lot of there there. It’s not an easy-drinker that you’d want to have a few of, nor is it “an event” the way some I’ll-only-try-it-once-in-my-life beers can be. I’m going to keep trying TENAYA CREEK beers as I come across them – just not this one. 5.5/10.

DOGFISH HEAD “INDIAN BROWN ALE”

2010-01-09T14:16:00.000-08:00

While it’s fantastic that DOGFISH HEAD started distributing beer within California about a year ago, the lineup of ales that they allow into my state is only a subset of their overall lineup. We get the 60- and 90 Minute IPAs; the Festina Peche; the Midas Touch, Palo Santo Marron and the Aprihop, and maybe one other that I’m forgetting. No bombers, and none of the stuff I’ve been drooling about for years. So I’m in Las Vegas this week for work, and what do I see at Mandalay Bay’s excellent beer oasis BURGER BAR but a solid selection of draft & bottled DOGFISH HEAD specialties, many of which I’ve never had before? That’s what I decided to have them pull me first, starting with the INDIAN BROWN ALE. And yeah, those are my fries.

The shtick with this one – and with these guys, there’s always a shtick – is that INDIAN BROWN ALE is an IPA crossed with a traditional English brown ale. Hence the name!! And it truly does have the hoppiness of a very well-hopped IPA, no question about it. It’s a 7.2% ABV beer, and to me it tastes much like a strong ale loaded with hops a la ARROGANT BASTARD. A little jarring, actually. Medium carbonation, slight roasted flavor, and a “finish” that had me reconsidering my initial love for this one. Yeah, they had me at “hello” for sure but start losing me right before “goodbye”. Perhaps a little too bitter, but still an ale of class and distinction as you’d expect. 6.5/10.

SOUTHERN TIER’s “CRÈME BRULEE STOUT”

2010-01-08T07:52:00.000-08:00

Sure, I expected this to be a “dessert beer”, but perhaps I wasn’t prepared for the dessertiest dessert beer in dessertland. Man, SOUTHERN TIER’s “CRÈME BRULEE STOUT” is a sweet, creamy stout that tastes like a big fat cake – and OBTW (“oh by the way”), it’s really, really delicious. This was my New Year’s Eve beer, and came into my possession courtesy of Aaron over at The Vice Blog in our recent bomber-for-bomber exchange.

The first thing you’re looking for in a beer of this ilk is the whole, “well is it really gonna taste like crème brulee or just some sickeningly sweet beer”? I’m here to report that from the first fragrant whiff, which smells like vanilla and cream, you’re in for a pretty special glass or two of beer. It really invents a new category for itself: "Cake beer". It is balanced well and even feels a little liquor-like at times, but I don’t think the ABV is all that high. Wait, let’s check the internet and see. Shut my mouth – it’s 9.2%! CRÈME BRULEE STOUT pours with no head and is medium bodied, with very mild hops tingling in the distant background. Mine even had lots of sediment in it, just the way the Belgians do it. This was about perfect for kissing off the decade and I’m dang glad I drank one. I hope you get to as well. 8/10.

ODIN! ODIN! ODIN!

2010-01-06T15:26:00.000-08:00

Anyone remember the late 80s hair metal documentary “The Decline of Western Civilization, Part 2: The Metal Years”? Then you probably recall a ridiculous band (among the many ridiculous bands) called ODIN, and the bubble-brained blonde who was interviewed about them (“I’d like to go into actressing”) and then led the meager crowd into a pre-show cheer of “Odin! Odin! Odin!”. Now let’s loop back to the post I’m writing for you right now about LA JOLLA BREW HOUSE’s excellent imperial red ale called…..wait for it…..ODIN.

I’ve said before, but I’ll say it again – the “imperial red” – aka a malty red/amber ale will a ridiculous load of hops – is one of my favorite styles of beer, period. I know it’s a brand-new style, but it is truly differentiable from the IPA or Double IPA by virtue of the rich, caramel maltiness that goes with the tongue-bruising hops. LA JOLLA ODIN, which I had on draft at the pub last week, is a dark reddish-brown, very carbonated ale. Yes, it is highly hopped, to the point of tingling bitterness (you know you love it). If these guys were going to start bottling their wares, this would be the one to go with, and which gives LAGUNITAS IMPERIAL RED a good run for its proverbial money. 8/10.

THE MORTAL SIN – DIEU DU CIEL’s “PÉCHÉ MORTEL”

2010-01-05T06:00:00.000-08:00

PÉCHÉ MORTEL is a well-loved coffee-infused stout from our pals at DIEU DU CIEL up Canada way, and it’s currently the #21 ranked beer in the world, according to the dorkosphere. I remember whinging about not being able to find a bottle of it a few months ago in another DIEU DE CIEL review of mine, and was reminded by a reader that it’s been available all over the US, including in my area, all along. I just saw right through it. Well, bought a bottle of it the other day to see what all the hubbub was about. Is it another imperial hype-mongerer, or is it a truly world-class beer? Let’s check.

First things first – it’s a full-on coffee beer, no doubt about it. That’s the predominant taste, so hopefully you’ve a java hound like I am. Think it was any accident that I took a picture of this beer next to our espresso machine? Well actually it was. PÉCHÉ MORTEL has a decidedly boozy smell, but I’m not really getting it in the taste – which is just the way I like it. It’s roasted, a little like burnt coffee and wood - and even a little spicy – yet it brings the alcohol and the coffee together really well. I’ll be honest, though – compared to some of the other inky-black, roasted/bitter stouts on the block these days, this one’s a bit of a trailer. I really enjoyed it, and may very well buy it again – but if I stack it against the PANNEPOT OLD FISHERMAN’S ALE I had last month, PÉCHÉ MORTEL takes a backseat. With an HBJ score of 7.5/10 though, there’s still lots to love.

HEDONIST BEER JIVE’S RESOLUTIONS FOR 2010

2010-01-04T06:00:00.000-08:00

It was a banner weekend on the beer front this past 4-day stretch. I purchased my first beer fridge, guaranteed to make my electrical bill go up by a good 25%, all for the lofty and very worthwhile goal of fresh, unspoiled beer. I then filled that fridge on a mother-of-all-beer-runs citywide trip to HEALTHY SPIRITS, CITY BEER and BEVMO. Finally, I ran over 20 miles in a single week (over 3 individual days, no less), thereby earning the right to continue this bad, filthy, vice-filled craft beer addiction. With that in mind, here are 7 resolutions for 2010, all formulated during the last of those three runs:

1. Let exercise beget drink, and drink beget exercise. In my world, these two passions are highly correlated. Beer is the reward for my running regimen, and running is, at times, the penance for my beer regimen. Otherwise I let my 42-year-old creaking carcass fall into a shambles & I move into the “sweatpants stage” of middle age. I’m just not ready yet.

2. Ingratiate myself more into the craft beer world without becoming a self-serving, suck-up toadie. This simply means that I’d like to be a little more social and a little less hermetic. Having met other folks over the years who enjoy this great beverage in the same manner that I do, I’ve found that some of them are actually OK, including brewers, journalists and beer shop operators. I’d like to find ways to break bread with more of them, without becoming a namedropping, star-chasing, ass-kissing cretin.

3. Try a gueze for the first time. Yes, you read that correctly. I’m well overdue to try this style of ale. By 2011, I shall have ingested one or several.

4. Conduct more interviews on Hedonist Beer Jive. Who wants to read about me and my drinking habits all the time? I’ve enjoyed the interviews I’ve posted here over the years, but in ’09 we only did one. I promise to do better this year.

5. Never, ever make beer puns like “good for what ales you”, “Hoppy Holidays”, etc. Folks, beer is not funny. You are not funny when you conduct in this type of reprehensible behavior. Let’s only reserve this type of wankery for truly hilarious blog post headlines such as “There Will Be Monk’s Blood”. Now THAT – that is funny.

6. Drink more of the obscure Belgians, at the expense of the falsely hyped American micros. I’m going to slow down my chasing of overly- and often inaccurately-hyped American beers and try and get to all those Belgian ales I’ve never had before. Seems like I’m always happier when I’ve got a bunch of complex tripels, dubbels and Abbey ales in the fridge. I plan to have more of them, from smaller breweries from the darkest wilds of Belgium, in 2010.

7. Drink beer from Surly Brewing and New Glarus Brewing. Now all I need is a Minnesota/Wisconsin-based beer trading partner. I’ve got some Anchor Steam to trade ya!

A TALE OF TWO SMUTTYNOSE

2010-01-01T16:36:00.000-08:00

I've got a backlog of beer stories to share with you, so let's go all the way back to early December 2009. Dateline: December 2009. Location: New York City. Hedonist Beer Jive is on a business trip. We've, in the preceeding 48 hours, been to both the RATTLE-N-HUM and GINGER MAN bars in Midtown Manhattan and imbibed fantastic ales. Now we've finished all work-related activities, which concluded in Times Square around 3pm. We know that the secret H&H Bagels store is walking distance away, and needing to bring something special home to the family the next day, proceed in that direction. Having done our homework, we also know that Manhattan craft beer hotspot THE PONY BAR in only blocks away, so, with a spring in our step, start walking just a little faster.

Stepping into The Pony Bar for a celebratory post-work, post-bagel procurement beer, we find that SMUTTYNOSE WINTER ALE is on draft, along with about 29 other good-lookin' beers. But at 4.8% alcohol, this WINTER ALE seems about the ticket for an afternoon beer. After all - it ain't 5pm yet, right? What a great call this one was. This has a really intense "winter warmer" flavor, totally fresh and well carbonated. Mellow, I'd say, with the slight taste of cola. Truly like a winter dubbel if there was such a thing. Easily the best "basic" holiday ale I had this season - as opposed to the high-ABV homewreckers I'm usually throwing down. Delicious - a definite and indisputable 8/10. Oh, and I really dug this bar as well - clean, homey, and just out of the way enough I'd imagine that amateurs likely shy away. As a great man once said, "I'll be back".

The second half of this SMUTTYNOSE BREWING story isn't quite as fabulous. Flash-forward three hours. We're in Brooklyn getting dinner at an excellent, but totally empty, Italian place called PT. I order up a SMUTTYNOSE IPA - seems like all restaurants in NYC these days have good beer available with your grub. I immediately wished I'd ordered something else or refrained from beer entirely. Sharp, highly hopped, piney and just a little "off" - this is like a "microbrew" IPA from ten years ago, before the form started being perfected in this country. Honestly, I've come to expect really good things from Smuttynose, but their IPA ain't one of them. 4.5/10. More spine-tingling beer tales to come in this new year.

THERE WILL BE MONK'S BLOOD

2009-12-31T08:01:00.000-08:00

Considering they're my favorite brewer in my hometown of San Francisco, I've done just an awful job of staying current with the beers of 21ST AMENDMENT. Since they opened well over a decade ago, all sorts of new non-TORONADO beer options have sprung to the fore in town & nearby, and so when someone wants to go grab beers these days, 21A tends to be the afterthought to The Trappist, La Trappe, the Monk's Kettle and so on. When HBJ started out (four years ago!) we worked almost across the street from the place, and thus filed frequent dispatches from the bar. Now we're over in the east bay during the 9-5, and I miss the easy access to 21A's many excellent beers of all stripes and colors, particular the many experimental Belgians they unleash during the winter months.

All that's a long way of saying I was stoked to buy a can of their brand new MONK'S BLOOD offering the other day. It's great to see a complex Belgian-style ale in a can, and it's even better when it's really good. MONK'S BLOOD is dark and malty, with an undercurrent of sweetness the dominates the brew. I taste molasses and something that tastes like bourbon, or some spirit of unknown origin. Why there it is on the spec sheet - "aged on oak". You don't get that in yr beer can every day, now do ya. It's a medium-bodied beer with almost no head retention (that's dork-talk for "no foam"), and I'd put it close to the dubbel and/or abbey ale categories if I have to pick. 7/10 - and oh yeah, happy new year folks. We'll see you with bells on in 2010.

SO HOW IS THIS YEAR'S ABYSS?

2009-12-26T12:23:00.000-08:00

DESCHUTES BREWING unleashed a deluxe imperial stout called THE ABYSS upon the world at the tail end of 2007, yet in such insanely limited bottled quantities that I didn't even hear of it. Last year's THE ABYSS got out there in just about the right amount to both start a cult of believers (myself included) and to ensure it was limited enough to help generate a little supply-and-demand hype action. While the beer obviously speaks for itself (we rated last year's a 10/10), the marketing worked as well. This year, late 2009, DESCHUTES has let a lot more ABYSS unto the world than ever before. There are tons of bottles at my local BevMo, Whole Foods and at speciality retailers, all around a $11.99 price point, which is more than worth it in my book.

THE ABYSS 2009 version is called ABYSS 2009 RESERVE. As you might expect if you had last year's, it's amazing, and deserving of all the kudos raining down upon it. It's a rich, creamy stout - extremely roasted and intense. It has a deep coffee flavor that you can even taste in the foam, but unlike last year, I don't really taste chocolate. And I was looking for it. It's got some real burnt, "bitter" qualities, but it's all good. I've kinda got a crush on it, and I'm terrified if I don't buy some more bottles they'll stop making it. So I'm off to BevMo this weekend. Need anything? 2009 version = 9/10.

SAISONS ON PARADE: PRETTY THINGS' "JACK D'OR"

2009-12-24T09:28:00.000-08:00

Somehow it happened that I'm drinking saisons this winter. Must be the fallout from the Pacific Coast Holiday Beer blow-out, which was all dark, rich Christmasy things. Or maybe it just happens to be what was hanging around the garage this week. In any event, I was excited to give this one a try - it's a new beer called JACK D'OR, (subtitled a "Saison Americain") from a new Boston-based brewery called PRETTY THINGS BEER & ALE PROJECT. Aaron G over at the Vice Blog picked this up for me and handed it under the table at our blow-out meet-up at Rattle-N-Hum in New York a few weeks ago. Thanks, esse.

PRETTY THINGS say "we don't brew styles per se. Instead, we re-imagine everything and leave the style numbers in books on the shelves where they belong.". They're not kidding. JACK D'OR is like a cross between a lager, a saison and an IPA. It is spicy, true - and I like that. Really strong, malty, spicy mouthfeel, and even some of the citrus characteristics of the IPA - along with the glassy, off-putting taste of a lager. And would you believe the massive, misshapen head of foam on this thing? Like nothing I've ever seen before. Fresh, full-bodied and ultimately moderately satisfying. I'll see what I can do to try the rest of their lineup in the near future. 6.5/10.

DUPONT’s “AVEC LES BONS VOEUX”

2009-12-22T09:19:00.000-08:00

I’m a huge fan of the BRASSERIE DUPONT beers, just about all of them being subtle shades of the saison, You know – FORET, SAISON DUPONT, AVRIL, etc. Never had one I didn’t like, and well, now it’s Christmastime, and it’s time to uncork their biggest beer yet, the holiday-only AVEC LES BONS VOEUX. It’s available at Whole Foods, BevMo, and the usual places. I actually brought it to a holiday party on Saturday night, then greedily stood around shifting from foot to foot, waiting for the host to open it so I could pour myself a giant glass.

It’s a really stunning-looking beer – a cloudy, hazy, goldenrod color, like a beer-filled crystal ball. I’m not sure I’ve had a more “bready” beer in my life. Very yeasty and malty, with a slight kick of alcohol that only seems to make itself known in the aftertaste. Would you believe it’s 9.5% ABV? That’s a record for these guys. Fruity and a little pungent, in the best possible sense of the word. Vaguely sour, but more fruity and bready that anything else. Just as good as I’d heard, and even better than that big, world-class saison we reviewed yesterday. 8/10.

BOULEVARD BREWING’s “SAISON-BRETT”

2009-12-21T06:00:00.000-08:00

When Kansas City’s BOULEVARD BREWING first came out with their limited edition “Smokestack Series” in 2008, there was a lot of deserved hullabaloo about the whole thing. These bottles had beautiful labels & were big and bountiful – but far more important, the beers themselves were fantastic. Nothing so amazingly off the charts that entirely new brewing paradigms were created, but still – this brewer does a great job with just about everything they touch, even their more pedestrian stuff, so it’d make sense that when they allow themselves to go off the rails a little, it’s gonna get interesting.

Last year they added a new jumbo beer to the stable, and I’d been waiting to get back to KC to hunt one down. As luck would have it, I was sent there for work last month, and came back with a big 22-oz. bottle of BOULEVARD SAISON-BRETT. It’s about as collector-fetish as a beer can come without putting it in a sealed box & making you line up in the morning to buy it with the great unwashed. It’s individually numbered, just like all those old 45s I used to buy. I got #4497 out of a total run of 13,400. SAISON-BRETT is a “wild saison”, made with ample amounts of uncaged yeasts. Picture if you will a very sweet farmhouse ale with a big thin head, dosed with a huge amount of tart, grapefruit-like taste from the various bacteria floating around. You’re thinking that won’t drink easy? OK, now picture it drinking really easy. Yessss…..this one’s surprising you, because YOU thought it was going to be a little more wild than it is, but it’s just a little funky, that’s all. It compares very favorably to RUSSIAN RIVER TEMPTATION, and that’s saying something. There are at most 13,399 of these left in the world (likely far less), so you might wanna get going. 7.5/10.

RIDING THE BUZZ AT THE PACIFIC COAST HOLIDAY BEER FESTIVAL

2009-12-18T06:00:00.000-08:00

I’ve made it to the annual PACIFIC COAST BREWING “Tasting of Holiday Beers” for three of the last four years now; it’s beginning to become a regular part of the beergenda every winter. And despite the fact that during the 24 hours following this event last Saturday I’d made up my mind to never drink alcohol again – I think you probably know why – I’ll likely be there next year as well. Check this report for my 2008 briefing, and this one for my 2006 dispatch.

This time the lineup of beers was as stellar as it always is, but I knew it might be a tough road to hoe when they announced that of the 15 beers being served (and these were decent pours, roughly 5-6 ounces each), only two were below 9% ABV (and those were both above 6%). They keep the beers they’ll be serving as a secret every year, so you show up, take your assigned seat and then greedily look at your “score sheet” in front of you to see what you’ll be gobbling over the next four hours. I had two high hopes: that I’d get a chance to drink the SIERRA NEVADA/DOGFISH HEAD collaboration LIFE & LIMB again, and that SHMALTZ BREWING would be rolling out their 13% ABV, 13th-anniversary monster JEWBELATION this time. Guess what. Ka-ching. I got ‘em both, and then some.

So this score sheet they gave us, it’s got its own scoring system on a 30-point scale that’s very different than the Hedonist Beer Jive 10-point scale. They actually care about “appearance prior to taste” and assign 3 of the 30 points on that alone – HBJ could give a rat’s ass. We like a good-lookin’ beer, sure, but when you see something scored high on this blog, it has nothing to do with looks, just those elusive “inner qualities” (promise!). There are a few other qualitative quibbles as well, but you know, that’s what makes the beer dork world so goddamn interesting, doesn’t it? I recalibrated my score to my own rankings, and proceeded to rank the many beers thusly:

1. SIERRA NEVADA/DOGFISH HEAD – Life & Limb (an absolute masterpiece)
2. DESCHUTES – Black Butte XXI (big surprise here. I had not heard many superlatives thrown at this beer, but man, I absolutely loved it. A deep, rich porter with amazing coffee & roasted malt taste).
3. FIRESTONE WALKER – Double Jack (A crazy high-ABV double IPA that’s a must-try. Anyone know if this is in bottles yet?)
4. ST. BERNARDUS – Christmas Ale (this was last year’s winner for me, and it’s fantastic this year as well)
5. ST. FEUILLIEN – Cuvee De Noel
6. DRAKE’S – Jolly Roger (Delicious – you can see it pictured at the top of the post)
7. SHMALTZ – He'brew Jewbelation 13 (truth be told, this was at the end of the afternoon and I was blurring a bit. My score may be a bit informed – negatively or positively - by the fact that my tongue was already lacerated with 13 intense beers by that point)
8. STONE BREWING – 13th Anniversary Imperial Double Red (good beer – I liked it much better on draft than from the bottle)
9. ANCHOR BREWING – “Our Special Ale” aka Anchor Christmas
10. SIERRA NEVADA – Celebration 2009 (had another one of these yesterday and it’s fantastic, like it is every year, so pay no attention to its relative standing among these heavyweights on a drunken day)
11. LAGUNITAS – Brown Shugga
12. NORTH COAST – Old Stock 2007 (maybe not aging as well as before – we loved it last year for sure)
13. PORT BREWING – Santa’s Little Helper Imperial Stout
14. RUSSIAN RIVER – Consecration (Yeah, I know. This was the first time I’d ever had it, and the first beer we’d had all day, so my palate was clear. Not all that impressed, to be honest, especially compared to Temptation – maybe I need to buy a $25 bottle of it and give it another go. It’s pictured here, in case you want to get a visual contact high)
15. PACIFIC COAST BREWING – Holiday Ale (blah)

The best part was the fact that only three of these beers was a repeat from last year’s tasting. The worst part was my intense desire to drink them all, coupled with my intense desire to avoid drunkenness, which, at my advanced age, doesn’t fit me as well as it used to. In fact, I’d been riding a two-year winning streak with no hangovers that was broken by this event, which was all the more remarkable when considering that I stopped imbibing at 4pm. I cursed the light, I swore myself to a life of teetotaling, I prepared a blog post called “HBJ To Beer Events: We Quit” – and then 3 days later, I broke out a 22-oz. bottle of BOULEVARD SAISON-BRETT and enjoyed it at home. More on that next week. See you again at the PCB Fest in 2010.

BROOKLYN BREWING’S “BLACK CHOCOLATE STOUT”

2009-12-16T06:52:00.000-08:00

BROOKLYN BREWING has this BLACK CHOCOLATE STOUT that complements their mind-blowing BLACK OPS stout very well. It’s like a little brother beer, if said little brother was an over 10% alcohol, easy-sippin’ stout that tasted like it was about half that. In fact I had to check multiple sources to corroborate that high-ABV – looks like unless everyone’s lying, that’s what it is. Wow. I enjoyed a big glass of this in New York two weeks ago as I cavorted with the coat-n-tie crowd at THE GINGER MAN – Wall Street was obviously hanging out in midtown on this night.

BLACK CHOCOLATE STOUT pours with a lovely puffy head of foam, and predictably, has a predominant aroma of chocolate. It’s a medium-bodied ale with a slightly “nutty” taste, like you might find in an English brown ale. The taste is quite bittersweet – as opposed to sweet. That chocolate gets even more pronounced as it warms, and as I said, it goes down really easily for a scary-high-ABV Russian Imperial Stout. I want another one, right about now. 7.5/10.

SAY IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT: “BLACK XANTUS”

2009-12-15T10:59:00.000-08:00

While in New York a couple of weeks ago I had about 20 minutes to kill while visiting some friends in Brooklyn – and as luck would have it I was a mere four blocks from the famed SPUYTEN DUYVIL bar in Williamsburg, a place HBJ visited last year and wrote about here. I knew where it was, and I knew their reputation as being a bit on the know-it-all, brusque & dismissive side. Not a-holes like the douchy tattooed warriors at THE TORONADO, but the sort that throw off a we-know-best attitude when it comes to beer, and who let it show as often as possible. So I guess it was no surprise when I ordered the highly-touted NECTAR ALES “BLACK XANTUS” from the hirsute fella behind the bar and got some immediate ‘tude. I pronounced it “Black ZAN-TUHSS”. He gave me a quizzical, jeez-I-never-heard-of-it look, and told me that nope, they didn’t serve a beer called that here. I’m serious. I pointed at the tap handle to help sharpen his thinking a bit, and he gave me a big, “Ohhhh, ohhhh, you mean Black Zan-TOOS”. Zantoos. Not Zantuhss. WTF.

Here’s a terrible picture of the beer in question. It goes for double figures in bottles out in San Francisco, and I’m sure everywhere else - $16.99 is a typical price. It’s made by FIRESTONE WALKER, under their confusing NECTAR ALES brand – the same folks who make that hemp beer that I actually like. It’s a super-dark, very strong black ale. BLACK XANTUS is a succulent Russian Imperial stout, with light carbonation. The dominant flavors are vanilla and bourbon – whoa, lots of bourbon. Truly, it’s almost cocktail-like, and it lacks a lot of the richness and “meaty” quality I like in beers of this ilk. I’d call it a true beer lover’s beer, but as a beer lover I found it just a tiny disappointing. In conversation with others, reactions are all over the map – some think it’s the second coming, others think it’s a whole lot of nothing. Me, I call it a 7/10.

A TRIP TO RATTLE N HUM, NEW YORK CITY

2009-12-11T16:34:00.000-08:00

Going to New York City for work in the olden days – i.e. my many, many trips there 2004-2006 – always meant good meals & excellent streetwalking/impulse buying, but rarely did it mean good beer. Sure, I went out for drinks with co-workers from time to time, but going to New York now means going to a city utterly transformed when it comes to your & my favorite adult beverage. This place is just loaded with amazing bars, and incredible restaurants with incredible beer selections. I was introduced to a site called BEER MENUS that the New Yorkers all seem to use to find their way around town, drink-wise, and – well – just look at it. There’s no shortage of wild Belgians, high-ABV one-offs and fresh local pints to consume across at least two of the five boroughs (I'll try Staten Island and the Bronx next time).

I decided to set my first-night-in-town sights on RATTLE N HUM in midtown Manhattan, and booked my hotel room accordingly. (“Why are you staying all the way at Park & 39th, Jay?”. “Hmm, no real reason, that’s just what came up as being in our travel policy when I tried to book a room”.). I was wary of this place initially, when I saw their name – yeah, named after the U2 album. Ouch. Yet I walked by there right when they opened last year, took a gander inside, and decided that it would be a fine place to drink some of the strangest & most unique east coast beers – what a tap list! So I shot an email to Aaron from THE VICE BLOG, whom we’ve never actually met but whom you may remember from the interview we did with him here, and he informed me that only an hour before my email another similar email had some in from The Captain, as in THE CAPTAIN’S CHAIR beer blog. He was coming to town as well, same night, and they’d already planned to meet here. Beer dork city all the way. So we made the plan, rendezvoused at Rattle & Hum at the anointed hour, and threw down a few big ones.

This was definitely a night where socializing, not note-taking, was the primary objective. So my descriptions & accounts of the beers I consumed are taken from memory & the “scrawled” digital notes I pecked into my phone. That said, I’ve rarely had a night where my shot-in-the-dark picks were more spot-on. 4 beers, 4 big winners, none of which I’ve ever had before, and only two of which were recommended to me. The others I was just wingin’ it. Here goes:

KUHNHENN “PLAY IN THE HAY” – I don’t think it’s possible to get the real story on this beer online – we had trouble even getting it at the bar itself. This weird-ass Michigan brewer, who apparently were a hardware store at one point who changed to craft brewing when Home Depot moved across the street, have a number of fruit beers, several of the cherry persuasion like this one. When Aaron G had this one a week ago, they called it HAIRY CHERRY; now it’s apparently PLAY IN THE HAY. Whatever, it’s not a lambic, as is claimed on Beer Advocate. It’s a low-ABV fruit beer that’s out of this world. Sweet, smooth and not tart in the least – just a beautiful fruit ale, with sediment at the end just to remind you that this ain’t no fruit juice. 8/10.

ALLAGASH ODYSSEY – This is the first Allagash Brewing that’s absolutely knocked my friggin’ socks off. I’m pretty sure this dark photo to your right is a picture I took of it. It’s a 10% Belgian strong dark ale; I remember thinking it tasted incredibly smooth and like something you’d have out of a snifter – oaked and mysterious and so good. Conversation and yuks kept me from doing anything but going wow-wow-wow under my breath and typing a 8.5/10 into my phone.

LONG TRAIL BREWMASTER SERIES DOUBLE IPA – Expecting a simple hoppy beer, I got this delicious double IPA with balance to die for. Never had anything from these guys before but you can bet I’ll be going back to the well next time I’m in Vermont – or here. 7.5/10.

CAPTAIN LAWRENCE FRESH CHESTER PALE ALE – I wanted to take it down a notch, have something really easy to send me back to the hotel, but with Captain Lawrence Brewing, nothing’s quite what you think it’s gonna be, and it’s usually 10 times better than anything else. This is a terrific pale ale, really creamy and piney and quite hoppier than expected. Really tasty and totally recommended. 8/10.

HUMBUG IN A BOTTLE: BRIDGEPORT’S “EBENEZER”

2009-12-10T06:00:00.000-08:00

There’s one or two every year. Holiday beers that exist simply to round out the portfolio of a mediocre or less-than-heralded brewer, to maybe grab some shelf space they might not otherwise get. I guess my feeling is if you’re going to make a “winter warmer”, please make it a good one. Do something that makes it special, befitting what is supposed to be a special time of year. Don’t make something as boring and bland as BRIDGEPORT BREWING’s “EBENEZER”.

This Christmas ale is spiced like a 5-year-old was let into the vats and started mixing in nutmeg and hops with play-doh, flour & Burt's Bees rash cream. A real wheaty and grainy taste results, and the body of this beer is so thin it – it – why it oughta be arrested for anorexia is what I’m sayin’! Couldn't even finish it. Definitely a must to avoid this holiday season. 3/10.

TOP 40 IN FILM, 2000-2009

2009-12-09T06:00:00.000-08:00

Seldom do we use this platform for anything but our own joie de vivre over beer, but there have been exceptions. There were the baseball picks for ’09 this past April. How’d that Boston over St. Louis World Series pick work out for us? Hey, at least they both made the playoffs. My top films of the last ten years? Well, there’s no argument there – probably not even from you once you see my picks. Yeah yeah, I got the idea from Aaron over at The Vice Blog – he did his own Top 25 last week, and challenged me, you and others to do the same. Me, I’m a listmaker – love ‘em. I went as far as 40 great films and stopped there, because after about 40 things ran a little more thin. And of course I’d have put this list on my film blog, but I don’t have one anymore.

Overall verdict? Great, great decade for film. Arguably the third best ever, after the 1970s and the 1960s, in that order. Many of the films listed here are commonly recognized as masterpieces, but I encourage you if you see something on here you’ve never heard of (my bets are on “Nobody Knows”, a sparse Japanese film about children abandoned in their apartment by their wayward mother, and “Reprise”, an excellent Danish film about what happens to two young writers & best friends when one drifts into mental illness), give it a try on Netflix or however you consume the films of the past.

Here are 40 excellent reasons why this decade was a fantastic one for film, ranked in order of how much I enjoyed them:

1. MEMENTO (2000) – I’ve seen it a half-dozen times, and it blows me away each time as much as it did the first time in 2000. Saw it two successive weeks in the theater, and spent an hour-plus each time afterward arguing it through and piecing it together with friends. Amazingly inventive, reverse-narrative thriller that’s one of my favorite films of any era. #1 with a big fat bullet for these past ten years.

2. UNITED 93 (2006) – I shed real tears after this one, probably because I’ve never seen such a hyper-real film that wasn’t a documentary. I was more caught up in and emotionally devastated by it than I was 9/11 itself. The story of United Airlines flight 93, told just as it happened in near-real time on September 11th, 2001, and starring some of the same air traffic control personnel who actually lived through the horror of that plane’s fate on the real day itself.

3. CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS (2003) – A harrowing documentary that plays like a whodunit, all within the confines of a single messed-up Long Island family in the 1970s. Duly recognized by many as one of the great documentaries of all time and a standard-bearer for what the form is capable of.

4. THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2008) – This was an instant film classic the moment it came out, an epic sweep of one man’s greed, ego and lust for redemption in oil-crazy California a century ago. Daniel Day-Lewis puts on the performance of his lifetime, which is saying something, but the script & the direction were just as much the stars of this newly-minted landmark.

5. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2008) – Only a hair’s breath behind “There Will Be Blood” in my book; I, like most others, saw both films within mere weeks of each other in 2008. That’s when I decided that the 2000s were a decade nearly as special as any other, cinema-wise. This film was terrifying for two entire hours, with foreboding & fear punctuating every slow scene, with every moment about ready to erupt. Javier Bardem is one of the all-time evil bad guys, and this is the best film the Coens have ever made as far as I’m concerned.

6. ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004) – I remember walking out of the film and telling my wife that we’d just seen a masterpiece. A film with Jim Carrey (!), no less. This was all about Michael Gondry’s direction and his & Charlie Kaufman’s masterful script. A couple undergo a procedure to erase each other from their respective memories when their relationship goes bad, yet in their loss find ways to connect again. Totally original and a blast to watch unfold on screen.

7. THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU (2005) – Romanian film got a lot of very deserved attention this past decade, primarily thanks to this sad, strange film & only afterward to those that followed. The camera essentially follows a dying man through the morass of Romanian healthcare and personal indifference on one single night, as his lonely and (on the surface) meaningless life flickers out. Never seen anything quite like it. Not a feel-good film by any means, but one I can’t recommend highly enough.

8. MY SUMMER OF LOVE (2004) – This British film seems to have been passed over by a lot of folks, but it was one of the best films I saw in 2004. Two teenage girls spend a summer together in the Yorkshire countryside, and the film “charts the emotional and physical hothouse effects that bloom one summer” between them. Just when you think you’ve figured out where it’s all headed, it heads in a very unexpected direction, and turns into some devastating mind games, the kind that are all the more painful when you’re young & infatuated. Ingmar Bergman would have been very proud.

9. BORAT – CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN (2006) – A trailblazing comedy that took the mockumentary/documentary form to new highs and lows. These are some of the best pranks (and the best editing) of all time, and I’d watch this film anytime, anywhere.

10. DOGVILLE (2003) – I almost wouldn’t go see this when I learned it was filmed completely on one stage, with a “set” like you’d see in a theater play (nonexistent doors that people “knock” on, etc.). But it was Lars Von Trier, and I totally dig (dug?) Lars – outside of “Breaking The Waves”, this is his best. It’s a three-hour transformation of Nicole Kidman from “poor girl on the run from the mob” to vengeful murderess, in a film that explores goodness and good intentions in that bizarre, off-kilter way that Von Trier has made his signature, and which is nearly impossible to describe.

The next 30, all of which are must-sees:

11. BLOODY SUNDAY
12. Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN
13. MARIA FULL OF GRACE
14. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
15. AMELIE
16. REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
17. 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS
18. SIDEWAYS
19. NOBODY KNOWS
20. GHOST WORLD
21. CHILDREN OF MEN
22. GRIZZLY MAN
23. LANTANA
24. THE DARK KNIGHT
25. DANCER IN THE DARK
26. WALL-E
27. 21 GRAMS
28. LET THE RIGHT ONE IN
29. TRAINING DAY
30. ADAPTATION
31. TOUCHING THE VOID
32. BRICK
33. MATCH POINT
34. TRAFFIC
35. AFTER THE WEDDING
36. THE HURT LOCKER
37. UNDER THE SAND
38. CHUCK & BUCK
39. JUNEBUG
40. REPRISE

TERRAPIN BREWING’s “MAGGIE’S FARMHOUSE ALE”

2009-12-08T15:23:00.000-08:00

Nothing burnishes a brewer’s reputation more quickly these days than the introduction of a limited-edition, one-time-only series of 22-ounce bottles. It’s all the rage. It’s rescuing the stale reputations of brewers from WIDMER to RED HOOK to SAMUEL ADAMS/BOSTON BEER. Luckily, TERRAPIN BREWING from Athens, Georgia needed no such rescuing. Their core series of beers, anchored by the RYE PALE ALE, were excellent already, and their “Side Project” series is only additive to their fairly exalted standing among beer dorks at large. I tried the 90 SHELLING SCOTCH ALE earlier in the year and loved it; now it’s time to tackle MAGGIE’S FARMHOUSE ALE, a 22-oz. saison that’s got “limited edition” stamped all over the bottle.

In truth, I was a little bummed I’d picked this up in Atlanta after seeing this review afterward from the always-reliable DRUNKEN POLACK. He don’t lie. Except for this time. TERRAPIN MAGGIE’S FARMHOUSE ALE is a fantastic saison, quite a far sight sweeter than your average farmhouse brew and bursting with fruit and butterscotch flavors. It’s not a sticky beer, but a smooth, tangy beer with a nice bit of zest to it. They say they even threw some oats into the mix, and the general graininess of this leads me to believe ‘em. Again, the real surprise here is how sweet & smooth the beer is, and yet still so saison-like. It’s a really delicious beer, and worth a pick-up since you’ll never see it again if you don’t grab it now. 8/10.

ITHACA BRUTE, YOU SILLY SAVAGE

2009-12-07T06:00:00.000-08:00

Golden. Sour. Strong. Different. These are words one might use to describe ITHACA BRUTE, another one of those 100-best-beers on the Beer Advocate list that Hedonist Beer Jive got a chance to try recently. ITHACA BREWING, as I've come to find out, have a whole corral full of big beers in big bottles with big price tags; I saw a bunch of them on my trip to New York last week, and pulling five of them off the shelves would be roughly the financial equivalent of buying the Top 75 games in iTunes for your iPhone. Except you'd get to consume those for a couple years.

In any event, I knew I couldn't finish this enormo bottle on my own, but d*** it, I came pretty close. ITHACA BRUTE, a golden sour ale brewed with three different champagne yeasts, is a very effervescent and bubbling sort of beer, one with a decided banyard funk to it. That would be those "brettanomyces" we've heard so much about. It's a really dry and tart beer, not althogether unenjoyable, but one that I felt I had to work at a little. There are sour ales that just roll off the tongue and lead to instant conversion for the uninitiated; I can't say this would be one of them - Top 100 slot or no. 6.5/10.

PANNEPOT "OLD FISHERMAN'S ALE" - 2009'S LAST 10/10?

2009-12-04T06:00:00.000-08:00

I'm really getting a lot of these Beer Advocate Top 100 beers tackled these days. In fact, Wednesday's post, today's post, and then next Monday's post collectively review 3/100s of the list. I just ran the numbers and my personal count on the Top 100 comes to.....well....a somewhat meek 39, at least compared to a lot of all y'all. I'll hit forty-one when I drink two beers currently sitting in my quote-unquote cellar, so let's call it 41. You know what? I'll take the Hedonist Beer Jive 75 any day over this glorified barrel-aged ultra-imperial stout list. Then again, of course I would.

Yet it was this list, and perhaps several reviews by folks who contribute to it, that got me to throw down $8.99 for a 12-oz. bottle of PANNEPOT OLD FISHERMAN'S ALE from DE STRUISE, currently clocking in at #56 on the big board. I want to thank you people, because this 2007 version is instantly one of my favorite beers I've ever had - yeah, better even than fifty-sixth. What a homewrecker this quadrupel ale is. 10% alcohol, and you don't know it nor care. Huge, foamy head of vanilla candy smell that never totally went away, even when I was nearing the end. Sweet, sure, but in a this-is-a-beer-of-the-godz sort of way, not like a dessert. Imagine a combination of dates (the overriding taste here), molasses and vanilla, all brewed up with a batch of eastern spices that play their role and stay well hidden before revealing themselves in the aftertaste. Incredible stuff. Unfiltered, bottle conditioned and with a medium body. I've only had one lone DE STRUISE beer before (and I didn't like it!), so shut my mouth, but wow o wow - this one's a 10/10.

STONE BREWING's "RUSSIAN IMPERIAL STOUT"

2009-12-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

When I started this blog in early 2006, let me tell you what the hot beers were at the time - what I remember beer dorks were spouting off about the most at the one time I was truly engaged in active listening with them. Dogfish Head -anything. They were the top dawg at the time, maybe still are in many respects. Russian River stuff - though nobody outside of the San Francisco Bay Area could find it with any regularity back then. Avery Brewing's "The Reverend". Alesmith "Speedway Stout" was big. This strange little chain brewery down in San Diego called Pizza Port. And of course, anything STONE related, especially Arrogant Bastard and their RUSSIAN IMPERIAL STOUT.

The first time I drank it - the STONE RUSSIAN IMPERIAL STOUT I mean, - in September 2006, it was rated as the #3 best beer in the world by the collective wisdom of Beer Advocate readers. Today it's still at #22 on the charts. I figured after three years it was time to try it again. I bought a 12-ounce bottle of the Spring 2008 version, and let it be said that it was good. This beer is a chocolately, roasted and very, very still ale - surprisingly thin-bodied, and not that luscious, velvety pillowtop-in-my-mouth I was sorta hoping for. Not even toasty-tasting, nor harsh. Nope, either I've progressed or this beer's mellowed or something, but it was pretty easy-drinkin' as these things go. You wouldn't frighten the womenfolk nor the children with this one. It's no twenty-second greatest beer on the entire planet, but it's a very strong 7.5/10 in my book.

SMUTTYNOSE BREWING's "HANAMI ALE"

2009-12-01T06:00:00.000-08:00

I've enjoyed most of the ales I've tried from New Hampshire's SMUTTYNOSE BREWING, some incredibly so - but it wasn't until The Vice Blog's knock-down, drag-out review of multiple Smuttynose Ales that I decided I needed to get on the stick & try a bunch more. As luck would have it, I was in Atlanta a couple weeks ago, and one door down from my favorite non-bottling brewery 5 SEASONS, is a beer store called Hop City. We've told you about them before; I'm just sayin'. They've got the SMUTTYNOSE stuff. I took some home in the suitcase, wrapping everything tightly with socks, running clothes and well-worn jeans. Wanna come over to my place and party with me?

SMUTTYNOSE HANAMI ALE is a spring seasonal, and the big reveal here is that it's made with "copious" amounts of cherry juice - natural cherry juice, not some powder from a bag. It's a little rattling, to be fair. It tastes like - you're not gonna believe this - beer crossed with cherry juice. Hoppy, sure, with a nice medium body and a real "crispness" to it that I enjoyed. It's grainy, and pretty easy to get through. I gues I'd call it a little one-dimensional, but that's just me. I'm glad I tried it. If you want to as well, consider the HBJ score of 6.5/10 and proceed as you see fit.

INITIAL ENCOUNTERS WITH "LIFE & LIMB"

2009-11-30T06:00:00.000-08:00

I swear I wasn't going to drink on Wednesday afternoon. It's just that CITY BEER STORE in San Francisco had this beer I needed to pick up for an upcoming east coast/west coast beer trade throwdown where I'm representing the left coast. At least I thought they did. So there I was, stuck at maybe my favorite non-domestic longitude & latitude in the City, and I glanced up at the what's-on-draft board and saw that they had LIFE & LIMB, this winter's latest and most highly-hyped collaboration beer. The players are SIERRA NEVADA BREWING - who are on a killer win streak right about now - and DOGFISH HEAD, who've never stopped riding one. LIFE & LIMB is a limited beer, my friends. Like, you see it & you should probably start reaching for your wallet - before someone else does. Let's hear what they have to say about it:

Life & Limb is a collaborative effort, the brainchild of Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. and Dogfish Head Craft Brewery. Life & Limb is a 10% ABV strong, dark beer that defies style characteristics- brewed with pure maple syrup from the Calagione family farm in Massachusetts and estate barley grown on the Grossman "farm" at the brewery in Chico, CA. The beer is alive with yeast-a blend of both breweries' house strains-bottle conditioned for added complexity and shelf life, and naturally carbonated with birch syrup fresh from Alaska.

Life & Limb is dedicated to the family of beer drinkers and enthusiasts worldwide who continue to support the little guys, iconoclasts, entrepreneurs, and pioneers who risk life and limb to shape the vibrant craft-brewing community.

Hey, that's us! Check this out - there's also a "LIMB & LIFE", which is a low-ABV session ale made with some of the runoff from its big brother. Hmm. City Beer Store had that one too, but like I've said before, I'm not an afternoon drinking man. It's all about the nightlife for me, baby. I'll be up at 9:45pm long after you've gone to sleep.

So, in three words: believe the hype. This is a tremendous beer. It's thick and dark black ("it's like how much more black could it be? The answer is none more black"). Very strong, very woody, and tasting very much like a thick barleywine. A delicious chewy sensation defines the mouthfeel, and there are roasted barley tastes, big hops, and a faint smoked sensation. I think that's the part of it I like the best and which makes it so unique. Really, this is something you'd find only in America's wild, wild brewing culture right about now, from two guys who've helped to define said culture without codifying it. Fantastic beer. Should I encounter it again, I shall pounce. 9/10.

DIEU DU CIEL! “EQUINOXE DU PRINTEMPS”

2009-11-27T06:00:00.000-08:00

Well, I finally found it, the much-slobbered-about PECHE MORTEL from Quebec’s DIEU DU CIEL! brewery. But this post’s not about that beer, which is still sitting “on deck” as we say, waiting to be consumed at the proper moment. The same afternoon I procured that one, I also bought EQUINOXE DU PRINTEMPS from the same brewer. If you missed the name of that brewer, allow me to please type it again for you: DIEU DU CIEL! That exclamation point is theirs, not mine, but I gotta say, I’m pretty friggin’ excited about this brewer. After this one, they’re a big 3 for 4 (one misfire, everyone has ‘em), with PECHE MORTEL waiting in the wings. Here’s what I’ve tried from them so far, and each respective score:

ROSEE D’HIBISCUS – “Hibiscus flower wit” (7/10)
CORNE DU DIABLE – IPA (8/10)
RIGOR MORTIS ABT – Quadrupel (5.5/10)

EQUINOXE DU PRINTEMPS is an 8% ABV scotch ale brewed with maple syrup. Very Canadian, you might say. Maple syrup is hot hot hot in the brewing world this year, sort of like wood-aging was in 2008. Speaking of wood, this fantastic beer tastes of it in spades. A real woody, boozy taste right from the start, but the funny thing is, you don’t mind. You like it. You revel in it. That’s some real Quebec maple syrup in there, yessiree (hic!). The beer provides a very “full” mouthfeel, and the beer is almost meal-like. Sweet, with a heavy dose a caramel and maltiness. It’s absolutely delicious, and a real credit to the Canadian people. As always, it has one of the most art-tastic labels in the business. These guys don’t mess around. 8/10.

MY FIRST WITKAP PATER TRIPEL

2009-11-26T06:00:00.000-08:00

There I was, at an amazing San Francisco restaurant called BAR BAMBINO, with a bunch of wine drinkers. We were celebrating Ari’s 37th (38th?) birthday, and in highfalutin Italian-restaurant gatherings of couples such as this, it’s rare that the collective mood turns toward beer. Bottles of red wine were quickly procured, even before I had a chance to peep, “b-but they have Belgian beer on the menu….!”. It is true, even in these craft beer-explodin’ times, that Italian restaurants such as this limit their beer selection to Peroni, Heineken, Fat Tire, Newcastle and Anchor Steam (the last if you’re lucky). So when I saw several beers I’ve never tried before – including WITKAP PATER TRIPEL – I knew I’d have to do a surreptitious, under-the-radar, in-between-glasses-of-wine order, and try not to upset the social apple cart any more than I had to.

This TRIPEL from BROUWERIJ SLAGHMUYLDER in Belgium is a perennial shelf-sitter at the stores I frequent, meaning that I always see it around, but I never hear anyone talking about it. That’s a shame, because it’s a good ‘un. Classic tripel smell and mouthfeel – very clean, yeasty and biscuity. A little more sweet than some of these can be, with the taste of honey and the ever-present tingling yeasts. On a scale of “thin” to “thick” I’d have this one at about a 3, far closer to the thin side of the scale. Really carbonated, and that’s just fine. It was really a relief to sneak one of these in, and let me say it again, I have no problem with wine at all, it’s just that when someone deigns to throw a beer like this on their menu, you sometimes just have to open up the wallet and let your worries go. 7.5/10.

ON THE SCHLAFLY BREWING “APA”

2009-11-25T06:00:00.001-08:00

These folks at SCHLAFLY BREWING have been busy carving out a reputation as “St. Louis’s other brewery – you know, the good one”. I’ll say that said reputation has resonated, even reaching my clogged & jaded ears in the San Francisco Bay Area. So, when in Kansas two weeks ago, I asked the barman to pull me a pint of their offerings. While it was listed under the “IPA” section of the menu of the bar we were at, this most certainly is not an IPA. It’s an “American pale ale”, hence SCHLAFLY APA. I don’t know about you, but it’s been a while since I willingly ordered a pale ale in a bar with 50+ beers. This style, once a kingpin, is now in also-ran in the HBJ style rankings.

SCHLAFLY APA doesn’t do a ton to change that, though it’s pleasant enough. Very light, very fruity, and a grainy sort of thirst-quencher – but little more. The hops are present, and taste of grapefruit and lemon, maybe even a little sweeter than that. I’d drink it again if you were paying. 6/10.

THE BEST NON-BOTTLING BREWERY NO ONE’S HEARD OF

2009-11-23T06:00:00.000-08:00

One thing that fans the flames of the beer obsessive’s world is the fact that, thankfully, most of our chosen brewers actually bottle their wares. This mere fact ensures that we don’t typically have to travel to one set location to try a particular brewer’s creations, and can instead choose from a variety of pickup locations within their distribution areas. Moreover, there’s the ability to order online from great retailers like ARCHER LIQUORS or SOUTH BAY DRUGS; there’s ease-of-portability that comes from having a big suitcase with nooks & crannies big enough to hide 3-4 twenty-two-oz. bottles of beer in; and of course, the wonders of beer trading. All are facilitated by the glass bottle, or in rare cases, the aluminum can.

Sure, there are some people who’ll go even further when things get desperate. And when do things get desperate? That’s right, when the brewer you’ve been salivating over doesn’t do any bottling/canning. That’s when you start seeing things like “growler trades”, which are patently preposterous, and yet commendable in some odd way. That’s where I go to my local brewer, fill up a growler (i.e. a giant container) of beer from the tap, box it up, pay ridiculous fees to ship it to you, and then you get it 5-7 days later, at which point you put it in your fridge and drink it fairly quickly. That had better be some damn good beer. That had better be some beer from Atlanta’s 5 SEASONS BREWING, who, upon the evidence, I’ve decided is the best non-bottling brewery that no one’s ever heard of.

And it’s not like you’d expect it from these guys. They’re no one-man indie experimental show like Brian Hunt at MOONLIGHT BREWING, experimenting with spruce tips and such, and straight-up refusing to bottle. Nope, 5 SEASONS are a high-end, three-location, Atlanta-based chain, with beautiful interiors, fresh dinners – and oh by the way – incredible beer. I went there two weeks ago right after landing in Atlanta for work. It was my third trip there, twice to their Westside location & once to the Sandy Springs location. Not only have I yet to have a bad beer from them, I’ve had some absolute knockouts, like their VENUS witbier that I reviewed a few months ago. This time I tried two more winners, and with head buzzing & mood greatly improved after a 4-hour flight, I bestowed upon them the honorific we’re discussing presently.

Here’s what I enjoyed:

5 SEASONS DARK WHITE – Wow, we’re reviewed two weirdo white beers/witbiers in a row on this blog, after tasting zero in the first four decades of our (my) life. This has that hallowed witbier smell – orange, coriander, yeast – and yet it’s as dark as night. Like any dark beer worth its salt, this one has a vaguely roasted taste to it, which is pleasantly befuddling in light of the more broad smell/taste of the beer, which is excellent. The yeasts and orange flavors absolutely coat the tongue here, contributing to a fresh, delicious and wholly unique beer. This was my epiphany beer, where I realized I was truly in the hands of the masters at 1000 Marietta Street. 9/10.

5 SEASONS 1972 BELGIAN BROWN ALE – Well, this too doesn’t taste like a traditional brown ale at all, and hallelujah for that. It’s got a slight, very mild funk to it, and man does it taste Belgian. Bruges comes to Atlanta in this glass right here. Very carbonated and fizzy. Yeasty. Spicy. Great tang to it. Totally and utterly unclassifiable. My only regret is that I didn’t bring you a growler of it. 7.5/10.

Need it be said that, along with the BRICK STORE PUB in Decatur, this should be a must-stop for you should your adventures ever bring you to Atlanta, Georgia, in the heart of “the Peachtree State”?

CISCO BREWERS’ “LADY OF THE WOODS”

2009-11-20T06:15:00.000-08:00

I’m pretty intrigued with two facts about this beer – no, make it three. First – CISCO BREWERS are from Nantucket, Massachusetts. Me, I’ve been to Martha’s Vineyard a couple of times, and it’s great, but Nantucket was always explained to me as the poor, windblown, redheaded stepchild to not only Martha’s Vineyard, but Cape Cod as a whole. A place where only whalers, clam-diggers, and salty old sea dogs with 3 yellow teeth live. So having a first-rate brewer from there is something of a surprise, but I guess nothing should surprise me in the continued explosion of craft beer anymore.

Second, my pal Chris just sort of bought this on a whim for me, which was beyond the call. Hauled it back in a suitcase; never would have heard of it otherwise. Third, and we’re going to talk about the beer itself now, CISCO BREWERS’ “LADY OF THE WOODS” is an imperial, oaked witbier (!). Yeah, I know. That’s not something you see everyday. They make a witbier called GREY LADY; this is the souped-up version of that. It’s a bottle-conditioned, corked, 22-ounce big boy, and it’s really tasty right out of the gate. It is really, really “tangy” from the barrel aging; very carbonated and effervescent; and with an awesome, fluffy pillowtop that barely receded the whole time I was drinking it.

It tastes a little bit like chamomile tea, if said chamomile tea was an imperial, oaked, wheat-heavy high-ABV beer instead. To my surprise, it got more bitter as it warmed, in a somewhat jarring fashion, and it knocked a point or two off from its initial very high score on the HBJ point board. Still, this is a well-crafted ale, the likes of which I’ve never really encountered before, and beer dorks should probably add it to their lists. Thanks to Chris for scooping it up for me; it truly brings a figurative tear to my eye to come to grips with the ephemeral, never-see-it-again nature of beers such as this. 7/10.

IT’S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE ANCHOR CHRISTMAS

2009-11-19T06:00:00.000-08:00

If it’s November, it’s time to plunk down $1.79 for a bottle of ANCHOR BREWING “OUR SPECIAL ALE”, a.k.a. ANCHOR CHRISTMAS ALE, as I’ve been doing every year since time immemorial. As legend has it, this was the first holiday beer produced in the United States in the modern era, and it’s one of the few that actually changes up the recipe every year to produce something unique – and often wonderful – for the 2-3 months it’s on the shelves. There may be other holiday annuals that I like better than this one, but I’m never going to let a year pass without imbibing a bottle of Anchor’s.

Been a couple of years since they’ve blown me away, however, and ANCHOR CHRISTMAS 2009 is no exception. You’re hit with an incredible whiff of spices right up front, just as you would be with a batch of nutmeg & cinnamon-drenched cookies. The beer is a medium-bodied, very malty ale with a “lightly roasted” feel to it. There’s one spice in there that’s really interesting and hard to put my finger on – I could swear it’s ginger, as it has that sort of sharpness to it. The other predominant taste is brown sugar. I was quite surprised that, given what I’ve just told you, how quickly I drank this thing. Normally I like a glass of contemplative beer to go with dinner, and this beer was done & gone before we’d even sat down to sup. I recommend picking up a bottle – everyone seems to have a different take on this beer each year. HBJ’s take is 6.5/10.

MY WILD, WILD BOULEVARD NIGHTS

2009-11-17T06:00:00.000-08:00

I may have mentioned in an earlier post that I was working in Kansas City (well, Overland Park, KS) last week. Well, after a long, hard, sweaty, backbreaking day in meetin's and whatnot, one needs a cold-to-room-temperature beer or three to let it all hang loose and shake off the shackles, am I right? Given my location, I thought it was a fine time to aggressively explore the beers of BOULEVARD BREWING, based right there in Kansas City. It wouldn't be the first time. No, we actually did some damage to Boulevard beers a few years ago on another visit to KC, and then again when we traded for the first four bottles that came out of their much-renown extreme-beer "Smokestack Series". Put it this way: Hedonist Beer Jive's really impressed with Boulevard Brewing, so any chance to try their wares is a good night by us.

It didn't take place in one location, nor two. Nay, over the course of a long Thursday, HBJ tried three different BOULEVARD beers in three different crazy-ass nightspots, including "party central" in Overland Park: The Cheesecake Factory. Yeah, I know. Don't ask. Sometimes you do what you gotta do for the good of the firm. Here's what we tried:

BOULEVARD BOB's '47 OKTOBERFEST - Not my favorite style in the world, I'll be up front about it. They call it a "good all-around food beer", and since I was at the friggin' Cheesecake Factory, I wasn't eating. Some sweetness and a little bitterness, with hints of caramel. 4.5% ABV. A lager. Your basic decent Oktoberfest beer. 6/10.

BOULEVARD TANK 7 SAISON - Hey, now this one's not bad. It was labeled simply as a "Belgian-style" beer at the bar we were at, Barley's Brewhaus (yes!), so I thought it was a tripel whilst drinking it. While it might lack a lot of the punch I'd like from a typical Belgian saison, it's really pretty faithful to the style. Bready, with light citrus fruits and a lot of zing to it. I know it's not bottled right now, but it probably should be. The picture you see here is the last two swallows I had left when I realized it was definitely photo-worthy. 7/10.

BOULEVARD DRY STOUT - Served on draft at Jacks Stack BBQ. Gotta admit, this is the best sub-4% ABV beer I've had since that SAISON AVRIL earlier in the year. I could session the hell out of this beer. A super creamy stout, with the patented frothy head leading to "mustache mouth". Not too roasted or harsh, just smooth as silk and very delicious. 7/10.

FLOWERS ARE BACK! MEET THE WEED EATER

2009-11-16T08:57:00.000-08:00

FLOWER POWER, man. From ITHACA BREWING in upstate New York. You know as well as I do that there’s really no such thing as a West Coast, East Coast or Michigan IPA any more. There’s just great, good and not-so-good. Unfortunately this ITHACA FLOWER POWER falls on the short side of the ledger. Sure, I liked its bottle artwork – maybe that’s worth a half-point right there. And check the picture – it certainly “presents well”. But after the superficial stuff it gets a little shaky. Definitely one of the more bitter IPA’s we’ve had in recent months, with accents of citrus, especially grapefruit. Ordinarily all well and good, but this one’s a little off. It’s a little dry and at times reminiscent of aspirin. If they’re going after a “perfect summer quaff” they’ve fallen down a bit, as this is a little too carbonated and chalky to be something really enjoyable and refreshing. I have to think that even a hippie would be seriously bummed out on this one. 5.5/10.

LIVEBLOGGING THE BOULEVARD BREWING "NUTCRACKER ALE"

2009-11-11T19:08:00.000-08:00

I'm doing something so outrageously dorkified right now, something I've never considered doing before simply because I was afraid you'd make fun of me: I'm "liveblogging" a beer. That's right, the BOULEVARD BREWING "NUTCRACKER ALE" I'm only halfway done with is being consumed in a hotel in Overland Park, KS at this very moment, and I'm writing about it as I inhale a salad I picked up at Whole Foods at 8:45pm at night.

Here's how this craaaaazzy turn of events came to be. I work in the wireless industry, and if you know anyone who does stuff in wireless, you know that the sun, moon & stars pretty much revolve around Verizon, AT&T and Sprint. Thus, many of my trips for business are to Basking Ridge, NJ; Atlanta, GA or Overland Park, KS - particularly the latter two. I just flew here from Atlanta, in fact, and I immediately had every intention of getting some JACK STACK BBQ, GATES BBQ or one of the other half-dozen barbeque places in the Kansas City area that totally rule. Yet I'm beat - the man is grinding me down - all I want is a quick dinner and a good beer. Thus the spur-of-the-moment trip to Overland Park Whole Foods and the great liquor store next door, where I bought myself a bomber of the fabled BOULEVARD SAISON-BRETT to carry back in my suitcase. I also bought this 12-ounce bottle of BOULEVARD NUTCRACKER ALE, which I am consuming presently. Oh, and how do you like this photo? Taken in the bathroom of the Sheraton Overland Park, I kid you not. As if you couldn't tell.

NUTCRACKER ALE continues the winning streak for the most excellent Boulevard Brewing. It's their holiday ale, their "winter warmer", and I'm pleased to call it my first of the season. It smells and tastes just like it should. The spicing permeates the entire thing, and lingers for a good 10 seconds after each swallow. Very malty, with a full-bodied feel to it without being overly heavy. In fact, it's a pretty easy quaff. Cinnamon, light molasses and maybe even a touch of honey. That last taste is sort of out of left field - and I like it. In all, this is an excellent introduction to "that most wonderful time of the year". Goes great with chicken, artichoke heart & corn salad in an earth-friendly recyclable container. 7.5/10.

EEL RIVER BREWING’s “ORGANIC AMBER”

2009-11-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

There may be a few of you who came to this blog from one of my music blogs, AGONY SHORTHAND (defunct) or DETAILED TWANG (on hiatus, I guess). So it won’t surprise you that even at my advanced age I’m still out there from time to time, hittin’ the clubs, living la vida loca with my homies, raging hard, slammin’ in the pit, stagediving and getting in fistfights, and then going to bed before 11:30pm if I can. In other words – I don’t really see that much live rocknroll anymore, but when I do, at least half the time it’s at The Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco. They always seem to book the weird-ass bands I like the most, so that’s where the action is for me. They even have a decent beer selection – they were one of the first local bars I tried PLINY THE ELDER at; RACER 5 is always on tap; BOONT AMBER’s always there, and sometimes there’s even a wild card beer. Me, I like a wild card. Except when I don’t. Except when said wild card is EEL RIVER ORGANIC AMBER, as it was the other night.

It just might be that organic beers are crap across the board, I don’t know. It sure seems that way, even though that wouldn’t really make sense now, would it? EEL RIVER BREWING brew up in Humboldt County, California, and you may recall we’ve got a soft spot for that area. Their ORGANIC AMBER appears to won a host of medals, but not in my stomach. It’s a medicinal, medium-thin, chalky-as-hell concoction, really a bit of a chore to enjoy, even with hundreds of decibels pounding at your unprotected ears on a Tuesday night. No flavor, no flavor at all. OK, the flavor is 100% malt, as if they forgot to even dust this thing with hops. (They say “balanced with a liberal dose” of hops, but I think they’re lying!!!!). As I’ve said before with organic beers, I truly want to believe. It’s just that this is another in a long line of clunkers for me. Sorry if that harshes on your mellow. 4/10.

MIDDLE AGES’ CLASSY “WAILING WENCH”

2009-11-09T06:00:00.000-08:00

Thinking back to the 1980s, it’s tough to remember a time when boobs weren’t being used to sell beer. From the ubiquitous heaving-bosomed St. Pauli Girl, to the Swedish bikini team, to the Coors beer wolf chasing skirts around a table, it was just sort of de rigueur during my teenage years to link boobs = babes. Then a few things happened. One, I got a TiVo in 2003, and I never watched commercials again. I don’t even know how macro lagers are marketed these days, but I suspect from the billboards I’ve seen that it has more to do with some lame, unconvincing appeals to quality, consistency and cleanliness – and not to T&A. Two, I stopped drinking that stuff decades ago anyway – and the “microbrews” I put in their place (and how!) have been unanimously tasteful and/or irreverent in their marketing, never once calling in the flesh card to move product. I’m not actually totally against the flesh card, to be honest, but I do recognize it as an act of marketing desperation that also tells me something about the stupidity of the brewer, and his condescension for me as a drinker.

It was therefore a bit of a surprise to get this bottle of MIDDLE AGES WAILING WENCH in the mail from my pal Aaron. It’s all one can do to keep from jumping two feet in the air with one’s eyes popping out of their sockets, Big Daddy Roth-style, and shouting, “Woooo-hoooo!!! Look at those gazongas!!!”. Once you get past that, and past contemplation of the fair wench’s dazed, I’m being-filmed-for-an-Al Jazeera-hostage-video expression, it’s well past time to actually sit and drink the beer. I finally got there, and I’m a better man for it.

MIDDLE AGES are based in Syracuse, NY, and I’ve heard them described by more than one party as an underrated brewer, even in their home state. WAILING WENCH is a deep rust brown colored “old ale”, or “strong ale” you might call it instead. It’s really, really assertive. Full-bodied and super-hopped, it clocks in at 8% ABV, and has a really deep syrupy mouthfeel. I’m getting brown sugar and really strong caramel malts. And a quick, big buzz-on, too. There’s no mistaking it for an easy-drinkin’ ale – it is a real bitter biter of a beer, and my notes say “definitely not for everyone”. It was, however, just fine & then some for me, and I’m guessing for you too. 7/10.

NEW HOLLAND “DRAGON’S MILK”

2009-11-06T14:15:00.000-08:00

This is a big beer for those boys & girls who like a little grit in their beverage and don’t mind wincing when they drink. NEW HOLLAND BREWING, of Holland, MI have made appearances on this site twice before, for their RED TULIP ALE (7/10) and the recent review we provided of their BLACK TULIP ALE (6/10). Unfortunately they’re headed in the wrong direction. This DRAGON’S MILK is an oaked stout – at least that’s what it tastes like. It smells like rum, to be honest, and its 8.5% alcohol feels just a little hotter and heavier than that. While there’s some good vanilla flavor in the medium-bodied black tar liquid, there’s also a strong and somewhat gritty aftertaste that is anything but subtle. There’s a certain amount of heroism that needs to be present when taking one of these down your esophagus, and frankly I just wasn’t feeling all that heroic. 5.5/10.

HBJ IS ON THE TWITTER

2009-11-05T17:16:00.000-08:00

Hey, have you guys heard of TWITTER???!? Well, we’ve got an account over there. It’s not really a Hedonist Beer Jive account per se, and is more my personal thing, but what the heck. If you’re not aggregating this blog via Google Reader or some other cool RSS tool, Twitter’s another way to find out about any posts that happen on this site. If you’re lucky you’ll even get some navel-gazing “tweets” from me about my family, my commute, and what I’m snacking on right now. Check it out – and come follow me! – at http://twitter.com/jayhinman.

SILVER CITY BREWERY’S REVELATORY “FAT”

2009-11-05T13:29:00.000-08:00

Last night a pal dropped by with a corked & caged liquid present from Nantucket for me, so naturally I returned the favor and busted open a bottle of something weird & wild from my fridge. It was a bottle of SILVER CITY BREWERY’s “FAT”, a scotch ale that I picked up more or less on a whim while in Seattle two months ago. It’d been stowed away in my suitcase, then in my garage, and finally the final victorious transfer to the refrigerator, where I’m “allowed” by my significant other to store three beers at any given time. (Fridge space being what it is). I didn’t know a thing about it. I don’t even know where Silverdale, Washington is. I think it’s in the Northwest or something.

SILVER CITY FAT is a revelation. My pal and I didn’t talk about it much, but I’m pretty sure he was thinking what I was thinking, which was WHOA. A 9% ABV, sweet, smooth and ridiculously flavorful scotch ale, one that rides a delicious combination of malts into something that’s both smoky and dessert-like at the same time. It’s almost creamy, this one, with darker fruits & sugars like cranberry and molasses being the tastes I could grab out of this while I was busy gabbing. The alcohol in it is really hidden well, and there’s no question that this brewer’s all of a sudden on my radar. If they can make a scotch ale this fantastic, what else can they do? 9/10.

BEER DORK BACKLASH BACKLASH

2009-11-04T16:44:00.000-08:00

First there was good beer of the amber, pale ale, IPA variety – to say nothing of long-existent Belgians and Germans. Then there was big beer. Then the bigger beer. Then the beer bigger than that one. Then the limited-run, foil-sealed, imperial xtreme wood-aged monster stout, sold out of a warehouse at 6am one day a year in the freezing cold (as in this photo from Three Floyds Darklord Day). And lo, it was good, all very good for all of us, because the other stuff never went away, and there was plenty of choice and abundance for everyone. Yet some panty-waisters seem to think that because American quote-unquote “beer advocates” tend to get most excited about the big, high ABV stuff (just check the Beer Advocate 100 for quick proof), we’ve lost sight of the magical qualities of, say, the lager – or the session ale, or the ESB, or what have you.

I’m here to tell you that that’s okay. It is all part of a growing recognition and celebration of quality, craft and taste that’s going on across all food and beverage categories, not just beer. I see it in cheese, chocolate, meats, coffees, etc. Let us embrace creative destruction, and not cling to the past, simply because we once lived in it. When something has a demonstrably higher level of attention paid to its creation (think Vinnie Cilurzo and the amazing sour beers he tinkers with over at RUSSIAN RIVER BREWING), I think we can call a duck a duck, and flat-out admit that it’s better beer. Same goes for the limited-run imperial porters and stouts that people are trading and celebrating on online forums; just because some people tend to take the fetishization of these things into ridiculousness in no way diminishes how good the grand majority of them are. Complaining about this market-driven consumer trend is like having filet mignon available to you, but still clinging to your rump roast and trying to pawn it off as “just as good”.

Look, I get it – there are really satisfying lagers out there, and the <4% session ale has its time and place. I, for one, continue to love red ales, even the wimpy ones. But let’s recognize that high alcohol content delivers a certain taste that’s incredibly appealing in beer, when it is harnessed correctly. It’s not simply about getting drunk more quickly – it may be for some, but I doubt it is for the majority of us recreational drinkers; buzz comes a lot easier when it’s not coming at $13.99 a bottle. Higher alcohol, combined with barrel-aging techniques (which often brings out that alcohol), combined with creative ingredients, combined with the touch of a master brewer, has resulted in some of the most amazing concoctions called “beer” in the history of the beverage – many of them just in the past couple of years.

I just can’t accept that there’s any reason to whinge about this and bemoan the fate of the lager (for instance). Let it coexist and find its place in the new marketplace where we’re learning - in America, anyway - just what it is that makes a great beer truly great. Often alcohol's a big part of that, and I think that’s just fine.

ITHACA BREWING "CASCAZILLA"

2009-11-03T10:48:00.000-08:00

Here's a big, hopped-up red ale, just the way we like 'em. I swear I get more excited about opening a bottle of insanely hoppy red ale more than I do just about anything else save my beloved tripel; I mean just look at it. It's my first encounter with ITHACA BREWING; they've received some kudos over the years, but given that they're in New York somewhere I don't often stumble across their wares. There's a bottle of their much-beloved ITHACA BRUTE sitting in the cellar that'll make its way down my gullet sooner rather than later.

CASCAZILLA is a 7% ABV amber ale, tingling with really fresh-tasting hops, and balanced well with caramel malts. Medium bodied. A little sharp at times, actually - definitely a beer lover's beer, and not a simple, no-frills red ale. I like it, and I really like its availability in 12-ounce bottles; seems like all the heavyweight good stuff skirts that size these days. 7.5/10.

ROLL OVER, ST. BERNARDUS: SOUTHAMPTON “ABBOT 12”

2009-10-30T06:15:00.000-07:00

This is a mighty fine quadrupel from a Long Island, New York brewer whom we’ve praised before on this site, most recently for a FRENCH COUNTRY CHRISTMAS ALE and something called CUVEE DES FLEURS, a flowery saison I had last New Year’s Eve. SOUTHAMPTON ABBOT 12 is a tribute, I guess you’d call it, to the fantastic ST. BERNARDUS ABT 12, one of the world’s most renown quadruples, and a permanent resident on the Hedonist Beer Jive 75. I got it in the mail from The Vice Blog’s Aaron G, and now I’ve downed the two beers I was most looking forward to in his “package” (the other being BROOKLYN BLACK OPS). Well, we still have the beer with the marginally sexist label “WAILING WENCH” that I can’t wait to show my wife (what’s wrong with being sexy?).

SOUTHAMPTON ABBOT 12 proves that they’re being well-taken care of beer-wise out on windswept Long Island. It’s a very sweet, malty beer, and you could swear it just arrived off the boat from Antwerp, or Ghent, or one of the other two cities in Belgium that I can name. It’s a beautiful, dark reddish/brown, loaded with intense tastes of raisins, caramel and molasses. Imagine dark fruits soaked in sugar for days, then balanced out with deep, rich malts until near-perfection is reached. No question it’s a “treat” beer, and a real pound-packin’ parcel at 10.5% ABV. St. Bernardus himself would be awfully proud of this one, and I’m going to hunt another bottle of it down for suitcase carriage next time I’m in New York. 8.5/10.

“HOPTIMISM” – A GLASS HALF FULL

2009-10-29T16:13:00.000-07:00

This HOPTIMISM from Stockton, CA’s VALLEY BREWING is what they call a “Black IPA”. Given how much I dug their orange IPA called UBERHOPPY a few weeks ago (8.5/10), I figured going a few shades darker could go either way up or down the scale. Black IPAs are a bit of brewer “slight of hand” whereby dark, roasted malts are added to the normal hop-laden concoction, sometimes adding just color, sometimes adding a completely different taste. HOPTIMISM definitely trends toward the latter, and takes it into an unfamiliar realm. It’s very roasty and hoppy. It’s got a creamy, Guinness-like head, and a surprisingly tingling aftertaste that just doesn’t go away. It has a slight “burnt” quality I’m not wild about, and said quality increases as the beer warms and turns it almost into a harsh, charcoal-like taste. It’s an “interesting” beer. So this is an IPA? Nah, I don’t think so. What it is is a 6/10.

(Note: in my research for links to this post I found this one that indicates that it’s actually a collaboration beer between Valley Brewing, Sacramento Brewing and the Auburn Alehouse. Well shut my mouth. The Monk’s Kettle listed it only by the former, so apologies to the latter).