Beers in Review: First of the North

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We'll be getting to the first of the beers I had over the holiday, one from Philadelphia, shortly. But first, I have one more pre-holiday beer to review.

This one is the winter seasonal from Boulevard Brewing Company in Kansas City, Missouri, called Snow and Tell. A Scotch Ale at 6.3% ABV and 28 IBU, this ale utilizes smoked malt (more on that in a moment) and is predictably malt forward. The ale itself is a deep ruby red color and has a heavy body. It is malty (as expected) and quite sweet, with toffee and caramel notes being the most prominent, with maybe a bit of dark fruit. It's not boozy at all, which can be frequent in this style, but not surprising here, given the relatively low ABV. Rounding out the drinking experience is just a hint of smoke, which is generating a final burnt sugar note in the flavor profile.

Next up is unique style coming out of Philadelphia, PA. St. Benjamin Brewing Company--as in, Benjamin Franklin--crosses a traditionally basic cream ale with an IPA to create Inca India-style Cream Ale. Fairly sessionable and perhaps at the high end of the Cream Ale range at 5.4% ABV, this ale is pretty light and smooth overall. There are mild citrus and hops, and is really an overall mild-mannered ale; to this point, there's not much bitterness, despite a claim of 50 IBU. The finish is fairly clean and crisp, matching the citrusy hop notes from earlier. The notes are fairly basic and mild in this ale, but I found it fairly enjoyable, overall.

Video: Reflections of Southcentral Pennsylvania

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Happy New Year!

I'm slowly getting back on track, and that includes the video release schedule. I don't have a review today, exactly, but I do discuss some of the places I checked out while I was up in Pennsylvania for the holidays, including Collusion Tap Works in York, PA and Troegs Independent Brewing in Hershey, PA. Check out my thoughts!

I'll see you soon with a Beers in Review blog post, and I'll resume video beer reviews on Tuesday, as scheduled. See you then!

Beers in Review: 2016 Finale

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Hello, friends! As indicated yesterday, I'm back from Christmas family time, which included a whole lot of high quality beer! I will be talking about that in a video this weekend, and writing about for probably the next couple of weeks, but I still have a few pre-Christmas reviews on which to catch up. So let's look at a couple of them now!

First up is the 14th Anniversary Ale from Terrapin Beer Company in Athens, Georgia. In addition to the anniversary celebration, this Tart Belgian Red is also Terrapin's "100th brew crafted in house". This ale utilizes U.S. Goldings hops and a multitude of malts, especially Crystal malts that generate this ale's pretty reddish-copper color. Coming in a 7.5% ABV, flavors include a great deal of tart cherry, along with berries and dark fruit. I also detected wine and wine barrels, as well as fruit rinds--perhaps peach, among others?--that bring a unique bitter note into the fold. A bit of funkiness is also present later in the drinking experience. Despite some lackluster reviews, I found this to be a nice beer, though I tend to be bigger on Flemish Reds and the like.

Next up is Grains of Truth Harvest Ale, a Biere de Garde from Brewery Ommegang. With an ABV of 5.8%, this ale is intended to utilize grains (barley, oats, wheat, rye) to honor the practice of farming and the harvest. The outcome is supposed to be balanced, smooth, and creamy. Grains of Truth nails the mouthfeel traits, but otherwise mainly holds a lot of typical Belgian traits. It pours a nice gold-to-orange color, and flavor notes include green/white grapes, apricot, and bit of banana and peach. Bubblegum is also pretty prevalent (I feel like this is a flavor quality I've just started to pick up in the last few months), along with a bit of funk and some spices, including black pepper and cloves. This was a terrifically deep beer, though if I had read the description that talks about things like "balance" before drinking, I would have been greatly surprised and possibly disappointed. Excellent beer, though.

Beers in Review: Greetings from PRB Northern Command!

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Hello, everyone! I hope you had a terrific Christmas or wonderful ongoing Hanukkah, or just got to enjoy some chill time with your family! I am working through a number of local beers here in Pennsylvania, and will have lots of reviews and more when I get back to South Carolina.

However, I still have some beers from before Christmas to review, so let's dive right in!

Buried among the seemingly endless (and having just drove it, I can attest to this) series of national parks and forests that make up the Appalachian mountain chain through the southeastern United States is tiny Banner Elk, NC. Flat Top Brewing Company can be found in this small town near the NC-TN border, and they pride themselves on using "fresh Appalachian mountain spring water", one of the advantages to being among the seemingly endless parks and forests. But for some reason, I've turned into a travelogue writer. Let's get to the beer.

Ryed Along Black Rye IPA is a nearly pitch black beer, as expected, that is 6.7% ABV and 70 IBU. To me, this beer expresses the "black" portion of the style, as in stout or porter, rather than the IPA part. Coffee joins up with a whole lot of sweet chocolate notes, approaching the point of being cloyingly sweet. There are lots of fruity notes as well, cherries and berries, specifically. All of these sweet notes come together to make me feel like there is a boozy sweet note. But at just 6.7% ABV, I think my brain is just reinterpreting a lot of the flavor notes. Decent beer, though the sweetness would likely prevent me from enjoying more than one at a sitting.

As I said in the finale of my Christmas beer video series, I did have one last Christmasy beer, though this one officially runs into the New Year, because it is called a Winter Ale. Goose Island Beer Company's winter offering pours a deep brown to copper color. The beer utilizes a massive malt line-up, including 2-Row, Caramel-60, Dark Chocolate, and other malts to create a nice flavor profile, including a nice malty sweetness to go along with the standard fall/winter spices such as all spice and nutmeg and a little bit of dark fruit. There are sweet notes, but at 5.3% ABV, it isn't boozy at all. Virtually no bitterness (25 IBU), either. Though not ground-breaking, I found this Winter Ale to be a solid representation of style.

Merry Christmas, and a brief review

Good morning, everyone, and Merry Christmas! I'm spending some time in Pennsylvania with the family, and based on pure curiosity, we tried out Dogfish Head Craft Brewery's Beer for Breakfast Stout, which is brewed with spices, coffee, maple syrup, and SCRAPPLE. Scrapple is a Pennsylvania and New Jersey "delicacy" where, basically, the leftovers of the pig are rendered down and formed into a loaf, sliced like bread, cooked/fried, and served. It's one of those things that sounds awful but tastes awesome.

Anyway, despite some reservations, our opinion of the beer was generally positive. I didn't have enough to do a proper review, but I found that the beer had lots of coffee notes up front, and was generally a little sweeter than I like. Probably, based on that sweetness, one 12-oz. bottle would be more than enough. Still, it was better than most of us expected, and was fairly well enjoyed.

I'll be back tomorrow (Monday 12/26) with another Beers in Review, along with more to come mid-week. See you then, and enjoy the day!

Beers in Review: Following the Golden Road

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A little over a year ago, A-B InBev's High End group acquired Los Angeles, California's Golden Road Brewing. Now, like Elysian and so many others before, this acquisition has led to Golden Road finding its way to the state of South Carolina! I recently attended one of their debut events locally, trying out their Wolf Among Weeds IPA and its little brother, Wolf Pup Session IPA.

Leading off the with the Session IPA, which comes in at just 4.5% ABV, and pours a slightly hazy straw color. Six different hops utilized in this ale produce considerable grass and hay notes, along with just a little bit of citrus. There is also a mild hop bite present (50 IBU) later on in the drinking experience that also leads to some dank notes and maybe just a little bit of tropical fruit, as well. But the grass and hay and straw are really what lead this beer and make up its personality. A fairly easy drinker, as expected for a session, Wolf Pup is quite solid.

Moving on to the Wolf Among Weeds, this is an IPA that really drinks and has the characteristics of a DOUBLE IPA. This crystal clear pale yellow IPA features a high ABV of 8% and a whole lot of hoppy, boozy sweetness. Flavor notes included some dank hop notes, along with a little bit of pine. This ale also had a strong carbonated mouthfeel that generated a whole lot of prickly sensations during the drinking experience.

Only the two IPAs were available during this introduction to Golden Road Brewing. I found both beers to be solid, though not necessarily first choices if given a number of choices in each style. I also enjoyed the Wolf Pup more than the Wolf Among Weeds. Neither beer is bad, though. Certainly, I hope to see more of their styles make it out this way.

Video Review: Frog Level Lily's Cream Boy

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Today's video review comes from one of my favorite breweries, Frog Level Brewing Company, and their easy-drinking Lily's Cream Boy Ale.

I updated the YouTube video description and the outro to include more contact info (adding Untappd and Instagram), and I also put in new intro/outro music. Feel free to offer thoughts on the changes. I made one error in the audio transition coming out of the intro that will be fixed tomorrow.

I am very excited for tomorrow's review. It's gonna be a big one, folks. Stay tuned.

Beers in Review: C'mon, Get Hoppy

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We begin today's Beers in Review with an offering from Boulevard Brewing Company. The Simcoe Harvest Wet Hop IPA is a limited release from this Kansas City, MO brewery's Smokestack series, a line of higher-end, more complex and more limited offerings. Simcoe hops with a high moisture content ("wet hops") are integrated at a specific time in the brewing process to maximize the flavors extracted from these hops. The result is crystal clear yellow-gold beer where massive grassy notes lead off the tasting experience followed by apricot and tropical fruits. At this point, heading into the end of the tasting experience, a mild hop bite makes its presence known and more grass and now wood notes dominate the flavor profile. While piney notes in hoppy beers are fairly common, I find that very few tend to go so all-in on green grass and wood, and it made for a pleasantly unique drinking experience from a bold, complex IPA. This beer checks in a 7.5% ABV and 56 IBU.

The next beer is from Grand Teton Brewing Company. It is called Pursuit of Hoppiness, and the use of Bravo, Chinook, and Columbus hops to create a beer that hits 100 on the IBU scale might make one think this is the world's most insane IPA. However, this is an Imperial Red Ale that utilizes 2-Row and specialty German malts to create a malty alter-ego for this beer. Let's start breaking it all down. The ale rates at 8.5%, and pours a hazy copper color. Generally, this beer brought chocolaty malts to the front end and a mild hoppyness to the back side. The chocolate malts were complimented by some dark fruit and berry notes, eventually leading to grassy hop notes with perhaps a hint of pine. Now, in this beer, the hops and malts don't really work together. But unlike the Stone Mixtape I reviewed earlier in the week, this one actually works, because the malts and hops stay out of the way of the other ingredient. The front half is almost 100% malt notes, then they clear out and completely give way to the hop elements. The result is a very good beer, but it is not one for hopheads--I found it to be much more of a malt beer experience, despite the name.

Beers in Review: Mixtape is mixed up

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I begin this BiR post with a beer that had loads of potential, only for it to be unrealized. Among the many unique series of beers offered by Escondido, California's Stone Brewing is their Mixtape series, one-off batches created by blending of various Stone beers, an otherwise rare practice at Stone. I recently had Volume 14: The Gatekeeper, which seems to have been a release for the World of Beer chain, though there is some availability elsewhere. Gatekeeper is a blend of the 2015 and 2016 versions of the Imperial Russian Stout along with the Stone IPA. The result is a brown-to-copper colored beer that has almost no harmony. The Stouts and the IPA are seemingly at odds with each other throughout the drinking experience, as the separate entities and their hop/malt mix make no attempt to blend together or work as one beer. I found the hop bite to be on the harsh side. There were nice flavor notes hidden in the chaos, including some dark semi-sweet chocolate notes, as well as a little bit of fruit (in addition to the three beers, this blend also included figs, plums, and Hallertau Blanc hops, which should yield tropical fruit notes). There was also perhaps a slight cola note floating around there, as well, though it may have just been my interpreting the sweeter notes of the beer. The beer isn't really boozy at all, despite an ABV of 7.9%. This beer was not bad, and got sweeter, fruitier, smoother, and generally more enjoyable when it warmed up a bit. But this feels like two good-to-great beers that just didn't get along, and missed out on every ounce of potential the glass held. Not drinkable, but this beer was a disappointment.

Up next is J. Wakefield Brewing and their 24th Street Brown Ale, named for the street on which the brewery resides in Miami, Florida. There isn't much information to be found out there about this beer (get on that, J. Wakefield!), but it drinks as a straight-forward, on-the-mark Brown Ale. Coming in at 6.8% ABV, the beer pours a hazy chocolate brown, which is kind of pretty, if you've seen enough hazy dark beers (otherwise, it just looks like mud). The fairly standard but very tasty flavor profile includes lots of chocolate, as well as a fair amount of caramel maltiness, some coffee notes and nuttiness. I also enjoyed the creamy, smooth mouthfeel. J. Wakefield hit the nail on the head with this brown.

Six-Pack of News: Volume 16

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It's been close to a month since I've done one of these, but seems non-release news has been relatively sparse through the start of the holiday season. But I've saved up enough articles to fill up my carrier, so let's get to it.

Mark DeWolf from The Chronicle Herald in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada tries to bridge the gap between the beer-drinkers of the world and the wine-drinkers of the world by providing a guide that recommends beer styles based on one's preferred wine style choice.

The folks at Vinepair sure like their lists, and this week is no exception, as they list ten of the best Winter Warmer-style beers, which is appropriate, given the cold weather that has pushed through the U.S.A. recently. A number of the beers on this list have widespread or national/near-national distribution, so you should be able to find at least a couple of these in any area.

Vinepair also discusses the potentially-charged question of whether the craft beer scene suffers from a lack of diversity.

Draft Magazine getting into the listicle format with their selections of the 25 best beers of 2016. Like with so many of these lists, the beers almost completely come from small breweries, and likely were made in small batches, so good luck if you don't live near one of the breweries listed.

In the Thanksgiving edition of the news round-up, I mentioned that Avery Brewing Company elected to restructure its beer line-up to focus on barrel-based beers. Firestone Walker announced earlier this fall that it would discontinue a special line of beers, and New Belgium just announced an overhaul to their line-up, eliminating some core beers and creating some new ones.

Finally, one of the very first Six-Packs of News mentioned information from the Brewers Association noting that there were over 4200 breweries across the United States. Well, the 2016 Craft Beer Year in Review reported that there are now over 5,000 breweries in operation in the United States. The Association also notes that over 99 percent of these breweries are "small and independent".