eatyourbeer.com

Yeah, last post where I said I’d be writing more? Over a year ago.
Look how well that went!

Current favorite beers floating around…
- Harpoon 100 Barrel, Rye IPA.
Very tasty beer, quite hoppy with a nice rye bite to it. yum.
Pair with anything that can take on the hops. Spicy south-east Asian is especially good, and it went very well with empanadas at a porch picnic on Thursday evening.

- Schlenkerla’s Helles lager.
Not actually brewed with smoked malt, but it picks up a hint of smoke on it’s way through the Schlenkerla piping. VERY yummy.
Pair with lighter flavors, despite the hint of smoke it’s a very delicate beer.

- Cisco Pechish Woods
French oak wine barrel aged, peaches. It gets this amazing vanilla flavor going as well, a really lovely complex and slightly wild beer.
Pair as you would a fruit lambic, I had it against a seared Bluefish fillet, and it stood up well to the oily fish.

More soon? One can hope…

I have some sad news to report. One of my favorite beers in existence, Magic Hat’s Jinx, has been discontinued. I didn’t see it listed anywhere on the Magic Hat website, so I dropped them an email via their contact form and got the following in response:

It’s sadly so, Ry. Roxy has been threatening us for years now, and we finally gave in. She’s one mean b*tch, man. We made the decision to have a winter beer proper this year, and we really dig Roxy, so we moved her up and created a wicked good black-as-night winter lager called Howl. We’re pretty excited to have it out there in the coming months.
Cheers,
The Voice

I can’t be the only one out there mourning the loss of this Autumnal staple. How can one truly appreciate the crisp fall weather, crunchy leaves underfoot, nippy nights, and the tasty fruits and veggies of the fall harvest without a full-bodied and slightly smoky ale to wash it all down with? This fall just won’t be quite the same, perhaps I’ll have to try my hand at a homebrewed clone, stay tuned for that.

That said, I’m all for another black lager in the marketplace and will welcome Howl with open lips. I’m not a fan of light lagers, but black ones have always tickled my taste buds in a wholly fascinating way. Something about the interplay of the roasty with the very clean lager profile… It’s a style that I’ve always felt was under-represented on the shelves in the states, especially given the variety that’s available in more hoppy styles.

Out with the old, in with the new! Just give me a moment to mourn…

My dad’s a budding beer geek who tends to get stuck on one beer that he really likes and doesn’t experiment much with unknown flavors and concepts. Currently he’s infatuated with Flying Fish Brewery’s short-lived Imperial Espresso Porter, which was originally a limited run released in January ’07 but due to overwhelming demand they did another run of it in ’08. He snapped up two cases (and would have gotten more but demand was even higher the second time around) and hasn’t really tried any new beers for the past year or so.

The aforementioned father was in my town this past weekend to hang out for a few days before he heads off to the sun-drenched beaches of Maui for a month or two. Rough life. Saturday morning we went to Harpoon Brewery’s noon tasting to check out what they had on tap. They had their full usual range, as well as their current seasonal (Winter Warmer – quite possibly my favorite holiday beer – brewed with cinnamon and nutmeg) and a few special beers. I am here today to share with you those special beers.

Harpoon has a special series where they let one of their brewers have full run of the brewery for a single one-hundred barrel batch that will only be brewed the once. It’s their place for experimenting with unusual styles without having to have a reason. It’s called (appropriately) the 100 Barrel Series. The current beer is the one pictured with this post called Rauchfetzen, which we were told translates roughly to Wisp of Smoke. This is the best smoke-beer I’ve had outside of Bavaria, Germany. The version they had on tap was slightly less smokey than the version in the bottles I subsequently picked up, and had more subtlety to it, but the bottled version is still quite good. Definitely grab a bottle of this if you see it in a store, my wife and I had it last night along side our favorite BBQ (Redbones for the locals) and it went amazingly well. Of course pairing beer with BBQ is kind of like shooting fish in a barrel, but still. At the tasting they also had a cask version of this that had been dry-hopped – which was one of my favorite beers in quite some time – but I won’t go on at length about it since it’s only available locally. If you can get a taste of this, do not hesitate!

They also started brewing a new series recently called Leviathan, and the second of the series was on tap at the brewery. This appropriately named series is their monstrously big experimental beers. The first was an Imperial IPA which I heard rave reviews of at the tasting, but had been gone for a few weeks. The new one was a Baltic Porter at 9.5% ABV. It was a very thick, sweet beer that had a bit less roasty flavor than I was expecting. A very solid big, dark beer though.

My father enjoyed himself thoroughly, and tried a bunch of new beers which pushed him in new directions. Did it stick? I don’t know, but I do know that he had fun, asked lots of questions about what he was tasting, and definitely enjoyed the experience. We’ll try it again at a different brewery next time he’s in town.