A few milestones

So while I was resting from not feeling well this blog reached two milestones: it had it's 1000th view, and today is the one-year anniversary.  So rather than do a new review I figured I would just highlight the highs and lows I've tasted in the last year (including a few I haven't reviewed here previously). 

Let's start with the bad.  Those are always entertaining.


The bottom of the barrel


5. Founders Devil Dancer

This deeply polarizing "Triple IPA" is simply the most unbalanced and unpleasantly bitter nonsense I have ever had, period.  There's almost no flavor besides UGH.  Besides that, I also noted garlic and onion.  Eeeeewwww.  Founders somehow found a way to brew a beer that has 112 IBU's worth of hop bitterness without retaining any of the pine or fruit flavors normally found in American IPA's.

4.  Millstream Great Pumpkin Imperial Stout

This beer is an imperial stout brewed with artificial pumpkin flavor, resulting in the uniquely unnecessary combination of milk chocolate, moldy gourds, cherry throat lozenges, stale vegetables, and garbage.

3. New Belgium Cascara Quad

This kaleidoscope of failure was one of the few beer's I legitimately poured down the drain in the last year.  I generally try to avoid drainpouring, but 22oz of bottled misery was just too much.  It tastes like the miscegenation of cherry NyQuil, coffee, and chalk. 

This is how it met its end:

2.  Smuttynose Wheat Wine

I am truly amazed a professional brewery with such a solid reputation released this; it is akin to releasing an unkempt animal into the public sphere to be brought home as a pet.  It bites people, dammit.  It resembles a really, really bad blonde doppelbock, or perhaps an exceptionally boozy malt liquor (without the corn).  It's truly a failure in a mash-tun: despite being over 50% malted wheat, it was extremely thick.  Flavors include bottom-shelf grain alcohol, nail polish remover, green beans and soap.  Burns going down too.  Harsh.  Ugh.  I don't know why this sells.  Another drainpour, this one actually made me angry.

1. Super Brew 15

I just couldn’t pass up a beer with this bad of a reputation.  It’s one of those comically bad beers that people drink for the same reason they watch Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus (not quite work-safe, due to language).  I was not disappointed.  It is (allegedly) a barleywine.  It is called “Super 15”  because it is 15% alcohol.  Booze rule of thumb: anytime a beverage relies on the "let's brag about how strong this is" marketing gimmick, it is going to be pretty bad (see also: Ice 101 and Bacardi 151).  And it’s from Romania, of all places.  After pouring it into a mug, I quickly realized what must have happened: someone brewed an extremely strong cheap beer, searched for whatever the Romanian word is for “strong beer,” Google-translated it into English, and found that most of the results for “strong beer” happened to be barleywines.  So they figured this must be a barleywine, in English.

Nope, it isn’t.  It looks like a pilsner, and has a carbonation level and foaminess resembling Miller Lite.  It smells like corn, swamp gas, and honey.  I laughed repeatedly while drinking it.  It's like the world's worst mead mixed with the world's worst adjunct lager.  It tastes like the most improbable combination of melted plastic, corn, swamp gas, honey, rubbing alcohol, and pure stainless steel.  This is topped off with an extra helping of cooked vegetables and the cleaning chemicals I used when I worked at a health club several years ago.  What chemicals, exactly?  Well, all of them.  Mixed together. 

The amount of brewing defects on display here is truly mind-blowing.  Fusel alcohols, dimethyl sulfide, solvents, metallic flavors....yikes.  The only people I can imagine enjoying this are masochists, people with tongue disorders, and people using whatever chemical combination has this side effect. 

Now for some more uplifting beers.

The Crème de la crème

1.  Alvinne Cuvee D'Erpigny (15% quadruple aged in wine barrels)

I first had this beer in October of 2011, and it was so good I bought three more over the next few months (it's sold in singles and is nearly a dollar-per-ounce, so getting more was out of the question).  I next had it sometime last summer....I misplaced my notes for that tasting, but it was just as good as it was in 2011.  It's  a very strong Belgian dark ale/quadruple aged in Monbazillac wine barrels.  It is quite a sweet beer, with huge notes of sweet red and white raisins, toffee, some oak vanilla, mild Belgian sugar and dates.  Also, it's 15% alcohol and has no burn whatsoever, unlike the one at the bottom of the barrel list.  A slow sipper nonetheless, purely due to the amount of sweetness.  It tastes as much like a Belgian barleywine as it does an abbey dark ale.  I'm sad it was a one-off that's never to be brewed again yet equally happy I have two more bottles.

2. Three Floyds Zombie Dust (6.4% pale/IPA)

This beer has over 3,000 reviews on Beer Advocate, and it's average score is 100 (4.64 out of 5).  That should tell you something.  There is no barrel-aging, no souring, no weird yeasts, no exotic fruits or spices.  This is just a straight-up, no-nonsense beer.  It is a single-hop pale ale/IPA brewed entirely with Citra hops, currently all the rage in the American Hop Belt.  Citra hops impart a crazy juicy flavor combustion of pineapple, kiwi, mango and papaya. No, really, that's what it tastes like.  Relatively mild bitterness, implying lots of dry-hopping, with a crisp body and a pretty clean ester profile.  All about the hop, but with very little hop bitterness.  For those of you in the suburbs, Bavarian Lodge in Lisle regularly has it on tap (have fun finding a bottle).  This is blessedly a year-round beer, not a seasonal or one-time release, and it isn't crazy expensive either.

3. Central Waters Bourbon Barrel Stout 2011 (9.5% imperial stout aged in bourbon barrels)

I gave a brief rundown of this and the 2012 a few months back.  This was extremely smooth fresh, and aging it was more an experiment than anything else.  I didn't expect it to get any better.  It did; after a year it more or less tasted like a chocolate-vanilla fudge brownie with bourbon added.  They now age this in the barrel twice as long and it's smoother fresh as a result, so don't feel like you need to age the new ones.  But it might be worth it.  This is also the cheapest bourbon-barreled stout out there.  Definitely grab a four-pack or two when it next comes out in December.

4. Samuel Smith's Yorkshire Stingo (8-9% barrel-aged strong ale/barleywine)

The top three are pretty much set in stone for the best I've had in the last year; it's a little harder to pick the 4th and 5th.  But this oak-aged English barleywine was pretty damn impressive, so I'll put it here (I briefly reviewed it a few months ago).  While most American barrel-aged beers are aged in freshly-spent barrels intended to impart the flavors from their previous occupants (usually whiskey, but sometimes wine), this was aged in barrels that had been repeatedly used for years, removing whatever wine or whiskey flavors that used to be there.  This is one of the brightest tasting barleywines I can think of.  The oak imparted some smooth mild wood tones of vanilla; the beer itself was rich in flavors of toffee, taffy apple, white raisins and bright caramel.  Yet somehow it isn't super sweet, and it's got some good delicate carbonation going on to keep it from being thick. The English continue to outshine the rest of the world when it comes to brewing barleywines.  I believe this is a yearly release.

5. Solemn Oath Chocobomb (5.8% "Cascadian Hefeweizen" with coco beans)

There's quite a few beers I could have put here in the 5th spot.  Other possible contenders included Brooklyn Companion Ale, Traquair 2020, Stone Chipotle Smoked Porter, B.O.R.I.S. the Crusher, New Belgium Tart Lychee...there's a lot of potential honorable mentions, many of which I actually didn't review here.  But this one was really just ridiculously good, and it's local to Dupage County too (Naperville).  I really hope these guys do well enough to start bottling or (as the rumor has it) canning their beer for retail, because all the draft stuff I've tried has been delicious.  This beer starts its life as Yarnbomb, a "Cascadian Hefeweizen"---a hoppy hefeweizen, in other words.  They then take that and add coco beans to it.  It tastes almost exactly like chocolate-covered bananas, with a bit of grapefruit from the hops.  It is incredibly unbalanced and just as incredibly delicious.  I'm sure the amount of coco beans added makes this expensive to make but....please, make it more often.  And put it in cans or bottles.  It will sell like hi-def TVs on Black Friday.




So, there you have it.  A year well-spent on good beer....with a few brown nuggets for entertainment value.  Here's to hoping the next year tastes as good as the last.