Tag Archives: tasting

Stoutfest 2016

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It’s a terrible First World Problem to have, but there are some really good beers that are just too intense to drink half of bottle of. For example, Russian Imperial Stout is a style we love, but even slowly sipping over the course of evening it’s usually too much – too much ABV, too much epic monolithic taste. So, bottles accrue. They multiply, even. It’s a terrible burden – what can beer geeks with a cellar full of beers like this do?  Luckily, we have friends who are willing to help out with this dilemma. If you’re splitting one of those bottles between six or more people, you’re getting a small pour like you’d get at a beer festival. And, even better, if your friends each bring a bottle or two, you wind up with your own little beer festival.

So, in the spirit of problem-solving and beer, we organized a small bottle-share last night with four friends, and we collectively put together an amazing lineup:

Hill Farmstead Nordic Saison 2014: This was the only lighter, more delicate beer and we thought it would suffer from comparison with the richer, bolder stouts, so we started with it first. (Wind: Plus, I’m a sucker for anything from my hometown region.) It was delightfully light, refreshing and citrusy.  This is a beer Wind and I agreed we could both definitely drink a whole glass of, and it was a great way to start off.

Pretty Things Fumapapa 2015: Unlike many smoked beers, this had a very gentle and smooth smoky character, that blended very well with the creamy stout. But, even still, it’s not something I’d want a whole glass of — but great to have a sample of, to give the smokiness a chance to shine, but not overstay its welcome. (Wind: I’m not usually a huge fan of smoked beers because brewers seem to think that if a little smoke is good then a ridiculous amount is better, but I really loved this. I agree, though, that a full glass would probably have been too much.)

Swamp Head Catherine’s Resentment 2014: A Habanero-infused stout that was painfully (Wind: undrinkably) hot when released, but had now mellowed somewhat. I’ve had a handful of chile beers that I really liked, but most of them are too much for more than a taste.  This is another beer that did very well with just a small sample, and even Wind enjoyed it. (Wind: In fact, I loved it – which surprised me a lot. I think we should age any such pepper-infused beers for at least two years in the future.)

Goose Island Bourbon County 2012 and 2013: The ’12 was much boozier and rougher than the ’13, but they were both luscious, chocolatey, and boozy.  These were 12 oz. bottles and the most balanced and drinkable stouts of the evening. (Wind: Okay, here’s the only place where Redbeard and I substantially disagree – to me, the 2012 was smooth and delightful, and the 2013, while still quite amazing, was boozier. I thought it would probably benefit from another year.)

Free Will Blood & Guts 2015: We took a break with this sour, which was muted by contrast.  It was not too tart, and had a good malty base. (Wind: This got a lot of “Whoa…  yeah… that’s sour!” from the group, with that tone of voice where you’re not quite sure if it’s a good thing or not. To me, this was an amazing sour – tart without that raisin-y flavor that sometimes creeps into sours, sour without making your mouth contract in self-defense. Really looking forward to trying more from Free Will.)

Cigar City Hunahpu 2015: This was very spicy, with cinnamon and chili providing a velvety complexity in addition to the booze and chocolate of the base imperial stout.  Wind and I had split a 750ml bottle of Hunahpu before, and it was overwhelming.  With a small pour, it was great to be able to savor the richness and complexity. (Wind: What he said.)

3 Floyds Dark Lord 2012: Completely different from Hunahpu, Dark Lord is a much smoother beer, with vanilla and coffee dominating.  This is a classic monster imperial stout, and I can’t imagine drinking a full glass of it. (Wind: Ditto. Amazing – so glad to have gotten to have some of this. Splitting the bottle provided the perfect amount.)

Cider Tasting

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It may be fall in other places, but we’ve got a few more months of 80°+ weather ahead of us in Florida.  So we recently did a double-blind tasting of several bottles of cider we picked up at the grocery store.  They’re probably not as good as some of the cider we can get in New York (like Eve’s and Bellwether), but then that’s not really the reason I wanted to do a double-blind tasting.  I really had two main reasons:

  1. There’s so much snobbery around beer and cider, and so much of the market is driven more by image and brand than by taste — so I feel like it’s a good reality check to make sure I’m not just buying into that.
  2. I often find myself in a restaurant with only mass-marketed beers and ciders to choose from — so it’s really helpful to know which ones I like better, and if any of them are worth drinking.

The methodology was the same as our lager tasting: one of us poured the ciders into glasses and assigned them numbers, and the other mixed them up and assigned them numbers.  So neither of us knew which ciders were which while we were tasting them, and we revealed them afterwards.

Unlike our lager tasting, there were no big surprises.  We didn’t agree on the exact ordering, or exactly where the drinkable/undrinkable line was.  But we were in broad agreement and our rankings lined up pretty well with what we thought coming in to the tasting:

  • Both of us thought Redd’s Apple Ale and Woodchuck Summer were pretty bad.  Wind ranked Redd’s dead last and thought it was the only truly undrinkable one in the bunch (finding Woodchuck Summer strangely un-summer-y but barely passable).  I thought they were both terrible and thought Redd’s was slightly less terrible than Woodchuck Summer.
  • Neither of us liked Stella Cidre or Woodchuck Granny Smith very much.  But they were definitely better than Redd’s and Summer.  I found Stella Cidre to be strangely mineral tasting, and we both agreed there was not much flavor at all.  The Granny Smith was at least crisp and dry, but still just not much there.
  • Strongbow Gold and Angry Orchard Crisp were the clear winners.  Strongbow is much juicier and Angry Orchard is much drier, but we both found them very drinkable.

With that in mind, I’m tempted to do another round, using Strongbow and Angry Orchard as controls for whatever craft cider we can find around town.  Though it would be hard to do a blind test of our favorite cider (Julian’s Cherry Bomb) since its strong red color would obviously give it away.

Vermont Brewers Festival

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We headed up to Burlington last weekend to visit family and go to the Vermont Brewers Festival.

From the beginning, the festival showed signs of careful planning.  Online ticketing went smoothly, even though the tickets sold out in a few hours.  There were three 4-hour sessions planned over the course of the weekend.  Each attendee received a number of tickets, so the beers were limited.  And the food/merchandise area opened 30 minutes earlier than the beer booths.  So we arrived early, had a quick lunch, and pored over the taplist while waiting for the main event.

When the beer started flowing, long lines quickly formed at three booths: two breweries you may have heard of, and one we hadn’t heard of (the only booth that we saw run out of beer).  The benefit of the multiple sessions and those long lines was that the other lines were pretty short, ranging from at most ten minutes to no wait at all.  So we were able to leisurely make our way through nearly 30 beers (15 tickets each).  Some of our favorites:

  • Lost Nation Petit Ardennes – a spicy, fruity saison — perfect on a warm day.
  • Alchemist Crusher – a sweet, resiny big brother to Heady Topper.
  • Brasserie Dunham Saison du Pinnacle – a tart saison with nice Brett funkiness.
  • Foley Brothers Fair Maiden – a big woody IPA with pungent grapefruit hopppiness.
  • Mystic Chardonnay Saison – a fine wine-barrel fermented saison, with notes of honey.

And of course, it wouldn’t be a festival without some strange beers you’d never try otherwise:

  • Burlington Beer’s Folklife – a gruit which tasted exactly like a nice loaf of rosemary bread.  Not unpleasant, exactly, but pretty far from what I normally expect from beer (even with a pretty liberal definition).
  • Kingdom Brewery’s Jack Piipa – a pumpkin IIPA, very rummy and hot.  One of the strongest beers I saw at the festival too.

Overall, one of the best festivals I’ve been to — short lines, good portable bathrooms (not portapotties), good food, a great variety of beers and plenty to go around.  The setting in the park right on Lake Champlain was fantastic.  The only shortcomings I can think of is that there wasn’t much shade, and water was only available over at one side of the site.  Unlike Florida, you don’t have to have coolers full of water at every booth to prevent heatstroke.  But it definitely would improve the experience.

Speaking of Sours…

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We brewed a batch of saison in September and split it into five 1-gallon batches two months ago.  One batch was plain, one batch had Brett. Bruxellensis, one batch had Lactobacillus, one batch had both, and the fifth batch had White Labs’ sour mix.

I’m trying to be patient, and I’ve read that it often takes six months or more for the Brett. and Lacto. to work their magic.  But it has been two months, so we took some samples today to see how they’re going.  The first three batches were a little disappointing: they weren’t sour at all and had a definite sweet note, despite having attenuated pretty well (SG 1.014, 6.5%).  The fourth batch (Brett & Lacto) was lacking the sweet note and was just a tiny bit of tangy.  The fifth batch (White Labs’ mix) was decidedly sour.

So that’s promising.  We’ll park the growlers back in the pantry and check back in another few months, and try to be patient…

Double-Blind Lager Test

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So if you’re looking at my Twitter or Untappd feed and wondering if I’ve been replaced by aliens, or lost a bet, or something, I assure you there’s a more reasonable explanation.  No, instead we decided we should do a taste test of all the crap lager we could find at convenience stores.  For example, if I’m stuck at a party/restaurant/bar/whatever and they’ve only got Bud Light and Corona, which should I pick?  Probably neither, but if I really want a beer to go with those tacos, would it make any discernible difference which one I chose?  Inquiring minds want to know.

I know that brand perceptions and other biases play a big factor, so I knew that a regular tasting wouldn’t cut it.  So we decided to do a double-blind taste test so neither of us would know which beer was which when we were tasting them.

The Lineup

I started with a list of the top 20 best-selling beers (sorry, it’s a slideshow, but that’s the list I used).  Then I went to a couple of local convenience stores to see which ones I could actually find in single cans (I cheated a little and bought a 4-pack of PBR because of the hipster factor).  And for good measure, I included Cigar City’s Hotter Than Helles as a “control” beer that I have actually drunk on purpose, and found decent.  So I wound up with all of the top 6 beers, plus a smattering of other top 20 beers — I’ve added their sales ranking and brewery ownership:

  • Bud Light (#1, AB-InBev)
  • Coors Light (#2, MillerCoors)
  • Budweiser (#3, AB-InBev)
  • Miller Lite (#4, MillerCoors)
  • Natural Light (#5, AB-InBev)
  • Corona Extra (#6, AB-InBev/Constellation)
  • Heineken (#10, Heineken)
  • Miller High Life (#11, MillerCoors)
  • Natural Ice (#14, AB-InBev)
  • Pabst Blue Ribbon (#17, Pabst)
  • Cigar City Hotter Than Helles (unranked, Cigar City)

Price is not a big factor for me when I choose my beer.  But I found it interesting to see the price differentiation.  The beer cost about $28 total.  At the high end, a 6-pack of Hotter Than Helles cost $11 ($1.83/can), the singles cost $13.50 ($1.50/can most of them were $1.19/can, and a few were $2/can because they were 24 oz.), and a 4-pack of PBR cost $3.60 (90¢/can).  And the Hotter Than Helles cans were 12 oz., as opposed to the 16-24 oz. cans at the convenience stores.  The PBR would probably be closer to the other singles if it wasn’t in a multi-pack.

Methodology

I had two main goals for the tasting process: taste a lot of beers to get a broad sample, and avoid knowing which ones were which.  I also wanted Wind and I to be tasting the same beers at the same time, so we could discuss them as we went.  So we came up with this process:

  1. We rounded up all the taster and juice glasses in the house.  We had 11 beers, so we had to dig into the high cabinets to get 22 small glasses.
  2. Wind left the room while I gave each beer a number (the slips of paper in the photo above), poured two glasses, and wrote down the beer-to-number mapping.
  3. I left the room and Wind replaced the numbers with randomized letters, wrote down the number-to-letter mapping, and rearranged the beers in order by their letter.
  4. We tasted the beers and rated/ranked them.
  5. We then consulted our mappings to figure out which beer was which.

Findings

The first thing we noticed was the color, or rather lack thereof.  Looking at the table full of tasting glasses, the color differences were minimal, and mostly attributable to the glasses or lighting.  So we’re definitely talking about pale yellow fizzy stuff.

The second thing we noticed was that there were actually differences between the beers.  Some had a very pronounced lager twang, but others didn’t.  Some of them had a little aroma, but others had absolutely none.  Some had honey-like sweetness or even a touch of maltiness, while others had basically no taste at all.  Some were very highly-carbonated or astringent like wheat, while others were smooth and clean.

By the time we were half-way through, it was obvious we were not going to agree on ranking the beers.  In particular, I rather liked the beer that wound up being PBR and found Bud Light to be middling, but Wind hated both of them.

That said, we were in complete agreement that Heineken was clearly the worst (which is pretty amusing since back in the days when we didn’t particularly like beer, Heineken was the main beer we did drink).  We also agreed on most of the bottom tier, too: Natural Light, Miller Lite, and Coors Light.

We also mostly agreed on the top of our rankings: 4 of our top 5 were the same, though in different orders: Corona, Budweiser, Hotter Than Helles, and, surprisingly, Natural Ice.  It was somewhat reassuring that we both included Hotter Than Helles in our favorites, though it’s worth noting that neither of us could pick it out of the lineup, and neither of us ranked it higher than third place.  This definitely confirmed my suspicion that a blind tasting was needed here.

Hogtown Craft Beer Festival

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We went to the Hogtown Craft Beer Festival — our local beer festival here in Gainesville.  We missed the inaugural event last year, but were glad to make it this year.  It was held in the Kanapaha Botanical Gardens, which are very beautiful this time of year.  Unfortunately, it had been raining most of the day before the fest, so the ground was pretty muddy.  Luckily the rain let up so we didn’t get soaked at the outdoor festival.

The local and regional beer selection was very good.  There were a ton of breweries from Jacksonville (Bold City, Green Room, Intuition Ale Works, Engine 15), Tampa (Cigar City, St. Somewhere), Tallahassee (Momo’s, Pesacola Bay), and St. Augustine (Mile Marker) which I’d heard of but mostly never had any beer from.  There were also several regional and national brewers — it was good to see them represented, but with so much local beer we’d never had, we decided to focus on the new and local.

There was a good variety of styles of beer represented, with lots of IPA, porter, stout, but also saison, rye, wheat, etc.  By far our favorite beer of the event was Engine 15’s Doolittle Rye Saison.  It gets mixed reviews on RateBeer, but we both loved it.  I generally hate rye beers, but this one was a very solid saison, with just a touch of sweetness and not too much rye astringency.

There was quite a crowd, but the lines for beer moved very quickly.  There were around 50 breweries pouring, so it was also easy to shift to a shorter line if anything had a long line.  We only had to wait in two long lines: one for free burgers (which makes sense) and the other was for Swamp Head just after they tapped a special keg of saison.  Other than that, there were at most two or three people ahead of us for any given line.  And many times you could just walk up with no line.

So other than being afraid of getting rained on, I think it was one of the best beer festivals I’ve been to.  There was way more beer than we could drink, and tons of local beer we’d never had before.

Sour Beer Fest

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I went to the Sour, Lambic & Berlinner Weisse festival at Cajun Cafe on the Bayou in Tampa this weekend.  The flyer listed an impressive selection of sour beer, about half from Florida, about half from Belgium, and a few others (including BFM from Switzerland and Ommegang from New York).  There were also a few other domestic bottles that were not on the program (more on that later).

There were a couple of tables run by shops, with a wide selection of imports.  And there were several local breweries, brewpubs, and homebrew groups with broader selection of their brews.  I think my favorites of the afternoon were:

  • BFM’s Abbaye de Saint Bon-Chien (2007): they actually had four years of this brew (2006, 2007, 2009, 2010), with pretty significant differences between the years.  2006 was very funky but not very sour at all.  The 2009 and 2010 bottles were good, with varying sourness, funkiness and other flavors.  But the 2007 was really strong and tart, with just enough funkiness to make it interesting.
  • Hanssens’ Oude Gueuze: There were a several bottles from Hanssens, with various fruits.  But I think the plain gueuze was the best.  A very clean and sour gueuze.
  • 3 Fonteinen’s Schaerbeekse Kriek: This was the one kriek I really wanted to have when we were in Brussels, but couldn’t find.  I was not disappointed to have it at last: it had a great, almost gritty cherry base, with a big tart lambic bite.  Probably the best kriek I’ve had, with a nice combination of cherry and lambic flavors (instead of just having one of them prevail as often happens).
  • Cascade’s Sang Noir: I was really glad to see a few Cascade bottles were there.  This was a very nice, strongly cherry-flavored kriek, with a richness and creaminess that you don’t often see in sour beers.
  • Mikkellers’s Funky E *: The first glass of this I had was terrible and watery — I think it probably fell over in the ice bath.  But they opened up a second bottle and I’m glad I gave it another chance.  It had a nice oakiness, and more malty sweetness than most sours.

Another real treat came just after the second glass of Funky E * — I saw the server pull a bottle of Pliny the Elder out and put it in the ice bath under the counter.  I don’t know if he was planning on sharing, but I said “Hey! I saw that!” and he gave me a glass.  Within a few seconds, a crowd formed and the bottle was soon gone.  It definitely lived up to the reputation as being a very balanced, world-class IPA.  And I was a little amused to see the biggest commotion at the sour fest was for an IPA.

In fact, there were really only two disappointments of the afternoon:

  • I’d never had Berliner Weisse before, and I had several examples from a range of breweries.  I didn’t find any of them better than drinkable, and most of them I poured out.  So I can scratch that style off my list.
  • I didn’t like the offerings from Cigar City (one of the berliner weisses) or Saint Somewhere (a strange refermentation of their Saison Athene).  I generally count on them to make beers I like (and sometimes love), so that was a little sad.

Dutch Lager Tasting

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I was in the mood for something new, but Bert’s in Utrecht was closed, and we’ve had a few bottles from our local beer shop that seemed off (pouring Trappist quad down the drain is pretty painful).  So on a lark, I picked up some half liter cans of the popular Dutch lagers at the grocery store, and we did a tasting (in order of cost):

Albert Heijn Pilsener: This store-brand pilsener was the cheapest of the batch (€0.57/can).  Also the most different from the pack.  It had more color and body than I expected from cheap lager.

Bavaria Pilsener: Not really much “there” there, for this mid-range (€0.67/can) lager.

Amstel Lager: Not Amstel Light (commonly available in the US), but Heineken’s mid-market lager.  A little grassy, and something elusive in the aroma.

Heineken Lager: This is the main premium (€0.91/can) lager here, and obviously the most famous worldwide.  Much more inoffensive in cans, since it’s not lighstruck and skunky as is typical with their trademark green bottles.

Grolsch Premium Lager: Probably my favorite of the bunch, but still pretty bland.

Hertog Jan Naturzuiver: This is the “ultra-premium” (€1.23/can) lager, which we often see at nicer restaurants.  Not noticeably better than Heineken and Grolsch.

So, I think my main conclusion from the tasting is that I’m an ale snob, spoiled by an ample supply of strong, interesting, artisanal beer, and the mild, mass-produced lagers just can’t keep up.  But I was also surprised at how much more I liked Heineken from the can than from bottles.  Although I’m generally a big fan of bottles, this makes we think I should go for cans over at least green and clear bottles.

Weisse Roundup

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As the weather turns a little warmer, our thoughts are turning to lighter beers.  We’re also planning on making a trip to Germany in a few weeks, so naturally we’ve been drinking Bavarian hefeweizen, aka weissbier.  As it turns out, we’re going to Cologne not Munich.  But we can’t find much Kolsch in shops (other than the very nice Früh), so we’ll just have to work on that when we get there.  Weisse, on the other hand, is available everywhere, from the specialty beer shops to the grocery store, and even on the train.

Our favorite is probably the Paulaner Hefe-Weissbier — it has a little more character than your average hef, fruity and even a little sour.  Their Dunkel is also very good, nutty and a little dry.

We also quite liked Weihenstephaner Vitus (a stronger weizenbock), which was malty and creamy, while retaining the usual grassy weisse notes, with just a hint of herbs to round it out.

For a straightforward, no-nonsense weisse, my favorite is definitely Löwenbräu LöwenWeisse.  It’s sweet and grassy, light and refreshing, and I can imagine happily drinking it by the liter in a tent somewhere.

Of the other weissbiers we’ve had recently, the most striking thing about them is their consistency. We’ve been drinking mostly Belgian beer lately, and it’s easy to forget what a well-defined style is like, with beer after beer hitting all the standard notes, with only small differences. This means they’re all pretty good. On the downside, however, there’s much less excitement with these beers – very little chance of getting a surprisingly  outstanding beer. Wind has taken to calling weissbeir the “merlot of beers” – never terrible, but never fantastic, either

I’ve also been reading through the Oxford Companion to Beer, which talks about Germany’s very traditional brewery apprenticeship program and speculates that this might be why German breweries tend to stick with traditional styles and fine-tune their recipes, rather than experiment more widely (or wildly) like the Americans, or even the Belgians.

In any event, the rest of the lot are all perfectly good.  Based on our experience, I’d trust pretty much any German wheat beer to be good and conform to style.

Cantillon

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This weekend, we visited Brasserie Cantillon in Brussels. This is a small, family-owned brewery that’s been in business since 1900 (and is still brewing beer pretty much the same way as when they started).

Cantillon is not far from the center of town, just a couple of blocks off a major boulevard near the main train station.  The neighborhood is pretty nondescript, none of the shops were open at 10am on a Saturday.  But once you open their big wooden door, it’s a completely different story.  Right away you see the brewery is not like other breweries.  It’s much more cozy, with a small tasting room and gift shop right as you enter, with aging bottles stacked all along the corridor leading back to the brewery proper.

The self-guided tour takes you through the brewery, where you can see their wood-clad mash tun, their beautiful copper kettles, their kegging and bottling lines, and fermentation tanks for the fruit beers.  There is an endless array of barrels and bottles aging:

The real difference comes when you get to the attic, where you see their coolship — a giant shallow copper dish where the wort cools, and begins fermentation from wild yeast brought in on the wind.

Of course, no brewery tour is complete without a tasting.  We tasted their gueuze and frambozen.  We’d had their gueuze before and liked it quite a bit, but the frambozen was really fantastic.  Unlike other frambozen we’d had before, it wasn’t overly sweet or cloying.  Instead, it had more of an earthy, raspberry-leaf flavor that blended well with the lambic tartness.

Of the breweries I’ve seen, Cantillon has the most character, by far.  Every other brewery I’ve seen, from a giant mega-brewery like Guinness to the tiny Swamp Head, is basically the same: a variety of stainless steel cylinders in a warehouse, connected by a crazy assortment of pipes.  But Cantillon is completely different.  Their equipment is from a completely different era, and is truly beautiful.  The open fermentation runs completely counter to the sterilized and controlled fermentation standard everywhere else.  They have some modern equipment too (including some modern cylindrical fermentation tanks for aging their fruit beers).  But the core brewing operations are a living antique.