Stillwater Cellar Door

Name:                Stillwater Cellar Door

Style:                  Belgian saison farmhouse ale

Twist:                 Brewed with white sage

Strength:            6.6%

Pours a bright, cloudy gold topped by a massive three fingers of white foam that settles very slowly.  The lacing is pretty decent for the style.  It looks quite nice in my Duvel tulip, what with all the bubbles floating up from the laser etchings.

This smells great!  I have no idea what white sage is or what it smells like, but my guess is spicy.  In any case, there is a mild spicy aroma here which couples nicely with a lemon fruitiness.  White pepper, bit of must (fitting for the name), and pears round out an outstanding aroma.

It does not taste quite as complex as it smells, but it tastes pretty damn good nonetheless.  The sage, white pepper, and lemongrass aromas blend together into a more generally indistinguishable spicy flavor.  I was surprised to find such a distinct pear flavor here; some farmhouse beers have a bare whisper of pear aroma that gets lost in the usual farmhouse quirks of white pepper, lemongrass, and lemon peel.  I can taste it here though, barely but pleasantly.  That bitter lemon peel sensation common to all saisons is more muted here, and Cellar Door is much better for it.

The mouthfeel is absolutely pitch-perfect for the saison style.  It is light without being airy, dry without being arid, and with just enough acidity to be thirst-quenching without any tartness.  

An excellent summertime sipper. The switch to four-packs was a smart move too.  I can't decide whether I like this one or Stateside Saison, but either way Stillwater has the farmhouse style down pat. 

Boulevard Imperial Stout

Boulevard makes two imperial stouts.  The regular year-round one, Dark Truth, is made with Belgian yeast, brown sugar, and a complicated grain bill of barley, wheat, rye, and oats.  For Boulevard Imperial Stout, they tweak Dark Truth's grain bill slightly (adding spelt) and then age a large portion of the beer in whiskey barrels.  The final beer is 40% fresh, 60% barrel-aged.  I like Dark Truth, so I've been looking forward to a chance to try this version.  I found the chance last December, though I forgot to post it here.

As you can see from the above video, this beer is crazy carbonated.  What's even more amazing is its head retention.  Note how it looked five minutes after the above video:

No change.

The aroma is a perfectly balanced blend of plums, coco, and licorice.  Faint underlying flavors include whiskey, bread, and very mild smoke.  The fruity-plum scent presumably comes from the Belgian yeast; as in Dark Truth, it adds a pleasantly fruity twist to a style normally known for intense roasted coco and coffee flavors.

The whiskey and whiskey barrel flavors are a little stronger here than they smelled, but their integration is nonetheless seamless.  A mild hint of ethanol (slowly growing stronger as the beer warms) is no match for the vanilla and burnt sugar flavors.  Nearly equal to those are the aforementioned Belgian flavors, chiefly plums and some cherries; an unexpected but welcome hop bitterness; bittersweet chocolate; and some rye malt.  Yes, they all exist together in harmony.  No one component overpowers the whole, which cannot be said for most barrel-aged stouts. There are vague suggestions of licorice and smoke.

I could have guessed this based on both the base beer and the amount of carbonation evident in the glass, but this Imperial Stout is dangerously drinkable.  I find it borderline fluffy, hardly the first choice of words most stouts bring to mind.  If you took away the subtle hint of alcohol flavor this beer might be fatally smooth.

Boulevard Imperial Stout might possess one of the most perfectly balanced flavor profiles I've seen in a barrel-aged stout.  Blending fresh and aged beer was a wise decision on Boulevard's part.  Rather than obliterating their Dark Truth stout, they added additional layers to it.  Quite impressive, and a fair bit better than Dark Truth.

Allagash Merveilleux

My first proper sour from Allagash brewing company is Merveilleux, "Marvelous" in French.  Per Allagash's website, it is a blend of five different beers aged in a mixture of wine and bourbon barrels.  Like their Midnight Brett ale I just reviewed, brettanomyces yeast was used, to which they added various souring bacteria.  It's sold in individual 12.7oz (375ml) bottles.


Merveilleux's appearance is a hazy mixture of amber, deep red, and brown.  It appears opaque unless held up to light.  The carbonation level looks great but as is common for sour beers there is very little head formation or retention.

The aroma is rather mild for a sour beer.  It vaguely reminds me of a gueuze lambic in that it somewhat resembles the aroma of apple cider, but not too much.  There is a hint of bread and some oak tannins.

Merveilleux is surprisingly malty for a sour beer with brett yeast, and not in the same way that Flemish sours are.  Quite bready with a hint of brown sugar, an excellent contrast to the usual sour flavors.  The tartness comes across as a mixture of tart cherries and sour candy here; sour rock candy especially comes to mind.  Oak makes itself more known here than the aroma hinted at.  I'm tempted to say wine barrel stands out a bit, but in truth the blending here is so balanced that trying to identify wine barrel vs bourbon barrel proves difficult.  There is a faint suggestion of butter, which is either the oak or the bacteria.

By sour beer standards, Merveilleux's texture is firmly in semi-dry/semi-sweet territory.  It's definitely maltier and sweeter than the norm for sour beers.  Drinkers unfamiliar with sour beers will still likely find it rather dry.  The sourness is not overpowering.

All in all another excellent offering from Allagash.  Its acidity is up there but balanced pretty well by a surprisingly hefty malt bill.  Merveilleux stands on its own by sour beer standards but that sweeter profile almost makes it double as a decent introduction to the world of sour beers.  Allagash has only released this one time so far, but with any luck they'll make it again.

Once again, Allagash shows they probably couldn't make a bad beer if they tried.

Allagash Midnight Brett Ale

Allagash Midnight Brett Ale is essentially a stout fermented with brettanomyces yeast.  Though this isn't unheard of, it's a fairly uncommon combination.  Allagash further states they brewed this with malted wheat, unmalted (raw) wheat, and malted rye.

Though Midnight Brett looks opaque, a very careful examination reveals a barely perceptible transparency.  Quite black, this only has a slight reddish hue; neither that nor its clarity comes across very well in photos.  Foam is off-white, a finger in height, and retains very well.   The lacing presents excellently throughout.

Midnight smells fairly mild…and what is there is mostly brett.  Definite funk here, lemons and mild sweat.  There is an extremely subtle hint of roast.  I don't get any of the suggestions of berries Allagash mentions on their website.  This may be over 7% alcohol, but it doesn’t smell like big beer.

The flavor is sort of intriguing.  It tastes almost like a lite (5% or less) bretted and dry-hopped stout/porter with a dash of coffee.   The coffee flavor comes from roasted barley, I assume; if so, they used just the right amount.  This is not a sweet beer, and if they had used any more it could have descended into acridity.  The brett is milder than the aroma indicated, but still present; it takes on more of a leathery note here.  A hint of bread and a faint kiss of hop bitterness rounds out the flavor profile.  Once again, the tart berry flavors Allagash mentions prove themselves a ghost. 

As I said, Midnight Brett is not sweet.  It feels quite a bit lighter than the 7.3% listed on the label.  The brett must have done a thorough fermentation.  I could use more sweetness in such a dark beer, but I don’t expect sugar and a thick body from a beer fermented with brett.

Allagash crafted a fine beer here, though not one I will personally seek out again.  Not that it would matter if I did, as I don't expect to see this in bottles again.  In any event, I’ve had better and easier to find bretted stout/porters for less money (namely DrieFonteinen Zwet.be).  I suppose this could age well, but the brett has already dried it out so much that I don’t think there is much point.  Midnight Brett is still a tasty ale.  I'm not sure Allagash could brew a bad beer if they tried.

DuClaw Sweet Baby Jesus! Chocolate Peanut Porter

I like where craft beer is right now, a lot.  I like its (usually) reasonable pricing structure.  I like the variety of craft one can find within a single decent store---and increasingly, within a decent bar or restaurant, a trend I hope continues.  I like the relative ease with which one can find a big, burly, sucker punch of a strong beer like New Holland Dragon's Milk, Sierra Nevada Bigfoot, or North Coast Old Stock Ale; but I also like the recent trend of lighter "session beers" in IPA form.  And I like that I don't have to go to a boutique liquor store to find one or the other; most stores now carry at least a few of the heavy hitters alongside lighter fare.

That being said, some enthusiasts find reasons to believe that craft beer has jumped the shark, or will soon.  Between beers made with bits of real Moby Dick (so you know it's good, I guess?) and beers made with real moon dust (a sexier way of saying "space dirt"), craft brewers' penchant for experimentation seems to be getting a little out of hand.  Need I mention that beer bottled in a squirrel carcass?

Everything has to peak and then fade at some point.  If craft beer soon does too, I hope historians don't phrase it this way: "everyone understood craft beer jumped the shark when brewers started adding fake peanut butter to their beers."  Why?  Because that would mean we are about to see a lot more beers like Sweet Baby Jesus! Chocolate Peanut Butter Porter, which is the last thing craft needs right now.

Sweet Baby Jesus looks the part of a porter.  It is nearly pitch black; when held to the light, a reddened hint of transparency shows itself.  Head retention and formation are both minimal, though I'm pretty sure that is my fault (or rather, my dishwasher's fault).  At any rate, Baby Jesus appears to have adequate carbonation, perhaps verging on too much.

Many moons have passed since "curious" was the first word that popped into my mind upon first smelling a beer.  There is not a shred of (for lack of a better term) "beer flavor" in this ale.  No hops, not really any barley; just peanut butter, chocolate, and sugar.  DuClaw should have dropped "Sweet Baby Jesus" from the name and just called it Chocolate Peanut Butter Porter.  This aroma is a dead-ringer for peanut butter cups.  I must confess that although I have smelled a great many strange things in my beer----melted almonds, pizza, ice cream, garbage can, the color purple, Cutex, freeze-distilled agony---peanut butter is not one of them. 

Same, but different.

It tastes much more like a porter than it smells.  Some of the trademark porter flavors---coffee, molasses, chocolate, a hint of licorice---are there.  Of those, chocolate stands out the most.  Unfortunately, there is something else lurking under the base beer.  That peanut butter flavor...I don't know if there is such a thing as spoiled peanut butter, but that's what this tastes like.  It's very artificial.  Fake.  The bottle proclaims this to be made with artificial flavors and that shows up quite strongly on the taste buds.  Baby Jesus sort of reminds me of Millstream's Pumpkin Stout, in that the phoniness of the ingredients gives the impression something rotten was added to it.  The beer is definitely sweet but the carbonation is a bit too much for me.  It feels lighter and thinner than it should be.


This is one of those new experiences that sounded good on paper but turned out just really awkward in practice.  Equal parts fascinating, perplexing and unappetizing; I haven't quite decided what to do with the remainder of my six pack. 

Hey, careful man, there's a beverage here!

I was really looking forward to this Pipeworks release for a few reasons, not the least of which is the origin behind the name (if I have to explain that one to you, you're out of your element).  It is, as you can see below, a "White Russian imperial milk stout," which is to say an imperial stout based on the classic cocktail.  To that end it is brewed with lactose, coffee, chocolate and vanilla.  If I had known how loosely they used the term "stout" here I might have had a better opinion of it; as it is, while this beer is decent, it does not taste like either a stout or a White Russian, making this otherwise-worthy brew my first disappointment from Pipeworks.

You could be forgiven for thinking this was a stout just by looking at it, provided you consumed it in a very dimly lit room.  Once you see it back-lit, any pretense that this is actually a stout or a porter goes away.  It is, as Pipeworks says, a "white stout;" a bright stout, not the inky-black typically associated with stouts and porters.  On the plus side, the brighter color allows one to note the carbonation, which is finely-bubbled and generous for a "stout."

The last time I had a beer smell this strongly of coffee was Goose Island Bourbon County Coffee, but this beer actually most reminds me of Dark Horse Perkulator doppelbock.  It smells like cold-pressed coffee and not much else.  The vanilla, lactose, chocolate, and anything resembling beer are nowhere to be smelled.

The flavor follows a similar profile.  I taste a near-comical amount of cold coffee.  The malt bill comes across like a delicious blend of cherries and toffee---which is abruptly drowned in more coffee.  There is semblance of stout flavor here, and none of the other added ingredients (vanilla, chocolate, lactose) stand out in any way either.  I used to drink White Russians quite a lot, and I don't ever recall having one that tasted remotely like this.  The only aspect of this beer that resembles a proper White Russian is the sweetness and full texture.

While by no means a bad beer, it doesn't live up to its name.  I must give Pipeworks credit though, the bottle art really ties the room together.

Pipeworks Game of Jones

Pipeworks pretty much exploded in Illinois over the last year and the more Pipeworks beer I try the more I understand why (and the more I wish they distributed out east).  This particular beer is a big, beefed-up cream stout (a stout made with lactose) to which the brewers added coco and vanilla beans. I was excited to find this; compared to coffee and coco/chocolate beers, there aren't very many beers made with vanilla.  Pipeworks is a rare exception; by my count, they make six beers with vanilla beans.

True to form, it is as night black as a stout can be.  The slow, steady carbonation cannot muster more than a fingernail's worth of foam, probably from the fairly high alcohol content (10% is about twice the usual strength of a cream stout).

Game of Jones gets off to a great start with a rich nose of vanilla and dairy sugar.  With the exception of Southern Tier Creme Brulee, I have never smelled this much vanilla in a vanilla stout before.  It stands in complete contrast to the coco, which I don't smell at all.  Roasted barley (in the form of mild coffee-like acridity) makes its presence known as well.

The chocolate flavors come out much more in the flavor.  The coco takes on a dark chocolate flavor here, not the sweet milk chocolate most people enjoy.  That being said, Game of Jones has more than enough sweetness to go around without milk chocolate thrown into the mix.  That powerful aroma of vanilla transplants itself well to the taste buds, and there is a hefty dose of lactose as well.  While there aren't any hop flavors to speak of, the bitterness of the coco combined with the roasted barley---which again takes on a coffee bitterness, with a suggestion of licorice---provides enough balance to prevent this from being cloying. 

Per their batch log, this was bottled January 31, 2014.

This is the second stout I've had from Pipeworks and like the last one they pretty much knocked it out of the park.  This is much more balanced than that one was, and therefore I could see myself splitting a bottle of this at just about any time of the year.