Southern Tier Warlock Pumpkin Stout

Now is the time of year when people start drinking the pumpkin beers.  Though typically a brownish-amber beer ranging in alcohol from 5% to 7% with little hop character, brewers pretty much do anything they want with this loosely-defined "style."  The only constants are pumpkins and a variety of pumpkin pie spices, usually some combination of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, brown sugar, and allspice.  This particular beer is an imperial stout, to go along with the rest of the brewery's large collection of insanely spiced stouts.

And for the life of me I struggle to think of a more inhospitably repellent pumpkin beer. 

Warlock does not look any different from a thousand other imperial stouts; I love the style, but jet-black gets boring right quick.  The foam that rises to half a finger in height retains poorly.  Predictably for a stout, Warlock is completely opaque.

As is the case with its cousin, Pumking, Warlock smells like bottled pumpkin pie.  Cinnamon and clove are the easiest to pick out.  There is only a subtle hint of dark chocolate to indicate the base beer is a stout; I didn't expect much stout aroma, but was still hoping for more.  Predictably, hops make no appearance here; hops in a Southern Tier stout?  Never.

Everything goes from bad to worse at this point.

The banality of evil: Warlock looks just like any other stout

 
I recall one time, when I was a child, raiding the kitchen spice cabinet and adding just about everything to...some food item or another.  I cannot remember exactly what it was because by the time I was done using teaspoons of literally dozens of spices, the food item no longer remotely tasted like whatever it started out as.  I imagine many others have a similar experience.

Warlock is pretty much the beer equivalent of that childish experience, except presumably the brewery doesn't employ child laborers at their production facility.  This was made by a professional brewery.  I am not sure what they were thinking.  The beer contains no semblance of any beer flavor of any type.  No barley flavors.  No hop flavors.  No yeast esters, phenols or any other byproducts of fermentation.  It tastes like a child secretly snuck his favorite spices into his mother's gingerbread cookies/pumpkin pie/apple pie/whatever---seriously, it doesn't matter at this point---while she wasn't looking, but having the mind of a child thought he could dump a jar of nutmeg and two jars of cinnamon into it to make it taste better.  No, it doesn't work that way. 

If Warlock was as sweet and sugary as the other stouts from this brewery, there might be some reason to drink this.  Unfortunately it is not to be, for Warlock possesses a bewildering dryness utterly at odds with both its cousins in the Southern Tier lineup and with what this style of beer always entails: the taste of pumpkin pie.  Has anyone ever consumed or created a pumpkin pie made without any sugar, honey, molasses, or any other sweetener?  Why would you commit such a crime?  IT'S PIE.  You aren't supposed to make a pumpkin beer this dry.  The spices, most egregiously the nutmeg, coat the mouth and parch the throat with no relief from maltose, sucrose, fructose or any other sugar.


Warlock is only available in 22oz bottles, or roughly 650ml.  Since I cannot stand the site of pouring even a bad beer down the drain, I decided to recap this after drinking half of it, buy a bottle of Southern Tier Creme Brulee (an imperial cream stout brewed with vanilla beans), and mix the two together the following night.  For those readers who have never tried Creme Brulee, you need to know three things: a) it tastes like a carbonated chocolate vanilla milkshake, b) it is so sweet that science has proven you can acquire every type of diabetes from drinking a case of it, and c) it contains so much lactose that instead of getting sick from drinking it, those with lactose intolerance simply die.  It is the sweetest beer you can get off the shelf.

Even my 50-50 mixture of Warlock and Creme Brulee tasted mostly like Warlock: stupid amounts of holiday spices with no beer.   Don't even try this beer to laugh at it.  Not unless someone gives it to you for free.  I want Southern Tier to lose money on this beer so they just brew more Pumking instead.

Victory Moonglow Weizenbock (doppelweizen)

It has been almost two years since I last saw Moonglow, one of the few all-American doppelweizens widely available in the U.S.  I think many American breweries don't want to even bother trying when everybody can find the real-deal German stuff easily, virtually all of them better than any American version.  Formerly available in six-packs, this 8%+ alcohol wheat beer is now a fall release in four-packs.

Like virtually all weissbier, Moonglow is cloudy.  Very cloudy; the pictures don't do it justice.  The pseudo-brown hue looks darker than many doppelweizens, but the light betrays its true red color when held alongside.  The head is large, fluffy and slightly off-white, with a bit of lacing.

Moonglow's aroma comes closer to classic Bavarian wheat beers than many American takes on the style.  Bananas, wheat bread, and banana bread all strike the nose first.  Caramel follows unexpectedly, with a hint of...cake?  Maybe.  The clove flavor so commonly present in Bavarian wheat beer is there but indistinctly so.  Just a faint spice sensation is all it is, really.  I could just as easily describe it as a pinch of ginger, allspice, or [insert X spice here].  A faint sensation of honey rounds the smell out.

Much of the aroma faithfully translates to the flavor.  As expected, bananas and wheat jump out at the taste buds from the start.  Here the wheat more closely resembles wheat thins or wheat crackers rather than bread.  A hint of warming from the alcohol briefly dukes it out with phenolic spice (and now I can more clearly appreciate clove flavors) before losing to an alliance of banana and clove.  Hops are not discernible, nor should they be expected.  The finish is lightly tangy and dripping with clove now.

Moonglow's largest deviation from German wheat beer is its texture, but even there it's not much of a problem.  It aims for the fluffy character of the best German wheat beers and falls short, but it's among the stars.  The cardinal sin here is a slightly over-thick body that is more filling than I want my weissbier.

This is an American doppelweizen, traditionally made, that you can let your German friends taste without a hint of shame.  It's no Vitus but frankly if that's your basis of comparison you will almost always be disappointed.


Prost! 

Goose Island The Muddy

Goose Island's latest release is called The Muddy, named after Big Muddy.  It is an imperial stout "featuring AMPLIFIED SWEETNESS with LICORICE NOTES," as the label puts it.  Their website elucidates what that exactly means: a stout brewed with molasses, dark Belgian invert sugar and licorice.  Measuring only 32 bitterness units, The Muddy is minimally hopped by stout standards.

Full disclosure: unless it is Finnish salmiakki (or alcoholic libations derived from it) I almost universally despise licorice and anise.  I went into this beer fairly biased against it.

The aroma is not by any means bitter, roasted, acrid or in some fashion suggestive of hops or roasted barley.  "Amplified sweetness" was a choice phrase on Goose's part.  Sweet plums dipped in milk chocolate come to mind, with an obvious bent of licorice.  Belgian sugar is evident.  In short, a fire of sweet chocolate-covered fruits doused with licorice.

The flavor is a little less refined but more than serviceable.  Sugar and chocolate start the day off, with the chocolate flavors now leaning more towards dark (bittersweet) chocolate than the milk chocolate portent presented by the smell.  Sugar is still there, although it no longer screams Belgian.  By mid-palate an unpleasant chalkiness steps forward, though it doesn't last long.  The finish is a strange amalgamation of fruit, roasted barley and ouzo.  Oddly, the licorice/anise/ouzo/rakı flavor gets weaker as the beer warms, bringing out more roasted barley.  Hops here have a presence comparable to the environmental impact penguin droppings have on the Sahara Desert (zero).  I cannot pick the molasses out either.


In the past I have tasted beers brewed with licorice that I absolutely hated with every fiber of my being.  Compared to those, the licorice flavor here is noted but restrained.  An altogether interesting experiment with moderate success that I will probably buy again.