Two Brothers Bare Tree 2012

Name:                   TwoBrothers Bare Tree 2012

Style:                    Wheatwine

Twist:                   None

Strength:               11%

Notes: 12.7oz corked bottle, served into a John’s goblet/snifter, the kind they don't make anymore  Bought in either January 2013 or March 2013.  The recipe for this changes every year, as does the artwork.

Let’s hope this is better than last year’s, which was very undercarbonated.  Pours a golden-copper with minimal white foam despite the carbonation, which was ample.  Bare Tree typically tastes like a hefeweizen; this is darker than your standard hefe but not by much.  

The aroma is appetizing.  Wheat cracker and wheat bread with some notable spicy esters and clove.  Mild on clove, but a bit stronger on spice.  The typical weizen flavor of banana is lighter this year than the two past years.  There is something that smells a bit like the aroma you get when cracking a peanut.  There is possibly a hint of corn husk, and a very very faint fusel alcohol note.

The wheat cracker continues.  Taste is very grainy…this is the most malt-forward, least yeast-driven of the three most recent batches.  I taste Ritz crackers (complete with salt, at least in my mind), some more spice, pears or light apples, a bit of hop bitterness on the finish.  Pale malt, slight honey, and peppery yeast.  The texture is thicker than the carbonation would imply, but at no time does it feel like an impediment to drinkability. 

This is quite tasty, and a noticeable improvement over the previous batch.  The 2011 was completely flat and just tasted like a run of the mill hefeweizen, which is not something I would pay $8 for.  It has been too long since I tasted the 2010 batch, so I can’t really say for sure if I like it more or less.  I would imagine this would place second in a side-by-side of two fresh batches, were such a thing possible.  It lacks the apricot flavors the 2010 year had.

I enjoyed this.

This was written on June 28, 2013.  It was typed on July 22, 2013.

Southern Tier Oat

Another stout from Southern Tier.  I believe they retired this one this year, meaning this is about a year old.  Not that it should matter much, it's nearly 11% and not particularly hoppy.  There wasn't a bottle date on it.

Name:                  SouthernTier Oat

Style:                    Oatmeal Stout

Twist:                   None, just really strong

Strength:              10.8%

Notes:  Poured into my Old Guardian goblet/snifter.

Vital stats, per bottle: 10.8% alcohol, 27 degrees Plato, hopped with Columbus and Willamette, malted with 2-row pale malt, oats, caramel malt, barley flakes, chocolate malt and black malt.  “Best at 48F” from a snifter.

Look: Pretty much pitch black.  Decent lacing and head retention.

Smell: a generous amount of black barley and oats.  Reminds me of a grain mill around harvest time.  Hops are not really detectable at all.

Taste:  similar to the aroma, though there are also some mildly spicy-bitter hops now in the background.  Oats steal the show though, this is easily the most oat-flavored oatmeal beer I have ever had.  As tasty as oats in beer can be, this is almost overkill here.  Needs more chocolate barley flavor too, as it seems the dominant barley flavors are derived from the black malt.  Bitter dark chocolate and subtle notes of coffee round out the flavor profile.  No alcohol flavor is noted.

Mouthfeel:  as is to be expected from an oatmeal stout, the texture is delectable.  It isn’t the smoothest or creamiest oatmeal stout I have had (that honor still goes to Samuel Smith’s), but it is luscious nonetheless.  Southern Tier’s signature thickness might be holding it back.

A pretty good beer overall.  Definitely tasty, even if the oats are overdone….but then, this wouldn’t be a Southern Tier “Blackwater” release if it wasn’t overdone.  Right?

Southern Tier Plum Noir

Some notes from a beer I tried a little over a month ago.  Was pretty good and surprisingly subtle, considering who made it.   Just not really a summer beer.

Name:                    Southern Tier Plum Noir

Style:                     Imperial Stout/Porter

Twist:                    Brewed with Italian plums

Strength:               8%

Notes: 22oz bottle, poured into an Old Guardian goblet/snifter.

Pours pitch black with a bit of foam on top. Head retention is pretty good.  When smelling this straight from the bottle, I get plums, blueberry, coco, and some peppery cayenne (which could be roasted barley maybe?).  When sniffing from the glass, it is a bit less fruity but more so than not.  This is beginning to weirdly but nicely remind me of Sierra Nevada Narwhal and Great Divide Chocolate Oak-aged Yeti, with less hops and roast and cayenne.  Plus subtle fruit.

Southern Tier used a surprisingly deft touch with plums here…pretty subtle.  I get a hint of fruit skin and tannins.  The malt flavors are more upfront, with plums serving as a light accessory to deliciousness.  Coco beans, mild hint of coffee from the roast, and even a hint of leather here and there.  Hops start to shine through on the finish for some balance. 

Woah…let it warm up a bit.  The plums start to stand out more.  The body is a solid medium, with good carbonation for the style. Southern Tier no doubt thinks this is light-bodied by their standards.

Overall, pretty tasty.  I never expected to say this, but Southern Tier cold have even used more plums.  I really figured it would be the plum equivalent of Pumking or Crème Brulee or Choklat, each of which tastes like a liquid version of their name.  I don’t mind at all though, who really wants a beer that thick when it is 90 degrees and humid out?

Epic Brainless on Cherries

Okay, so here goes my third beer from Epic Brewing Company.  It is called Brainless on Cherries, a Belgian pale aged in oak barrels with cherry puree (I don't know why Beer Advocate classes it as a dark ale).  Lots of cherry puree, I guess, judging by the beer’s color:

According to their website, this release (#16) was brewed on October 26, 2012; then aged in Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon French oak barrels with Champagne yeast and cherry puree before being released in March 2013.  Previous releases have had varying ratios of sweet cherry to tart cherry as well as different types of wine barrels.

My first thought upon taking a whiff of Brainless is that it smells a bit like cherry-flavored bubblegum.  A big blast of cherry coupled with an aroma of rock candy make this one intriguing.  Saccharine without being sickly, like a good candy.  There is a subtle hint of oak tannin.  The aroma is ultimately the highlight of this beer.

The wine barrel characteristics taste more potent than they smelled.  Definitely some wood tannins here which don’t mingle very well with the cherry flavor, which unfortunately takes on a cherry soda-level of fakeness here (still not as bad as cough syrup though).  Red wine flavors are here too, and they work sort of well.  Like a lot of Belgian beers, the base beer is pretty dry for the 10% alcohol content (which I can’t taste at all by the way), and it seems like most of the sweetness ultimately comes from the cherry puree.  Which might be why the cherry flavor starts to resemble a soda after a while, as it wears the palate down.

This strikes me as a beer that would work a lot better paired with food.  I eat to live, not live to eat, so I generally have no idea how to pair beer and food.  I imagine this would probably work well with chocolate though.  

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.