As Slouch noted a few weeks back, one of the critical issues facing Aleheads today is beer freshness. My local package/grocery stores have Founders Red’s Rye IPA from last May still sitting on shelves. Yesterday I saw a dusty six-pack of an apparently unloved domestic IPA dated March 2011.
Like Slouch, I’ve become obsessive about checking dates. I’ll skip over beers I know I love if the bottling date isn’t clearly marked because it’s become such a crapshoot. More importantly, I’ll intentionally buy a beer I’m not 100% sold on if I can guarantee that it’s fresh. Read the rest of this entry »
I was making the same face as the guy on the right the morning after drinking a half-gallon of this beer.
Sure, I COULD do a standard tasting note on the Founders’ Better Half, but really, how interesting is that going to be? It was rich, complex, delicious…blah blah blah. I mean, it’s a goddamn old ale aged in goddamn bourbon-barrels which were used to store goddamn maple syrup and it’s made by goddamn Founders. What would you expect? It’s amazing.
So instead, I’m going to do a tasting note on my hangover the next day. It was epic. It was surreal. It felt, as Muhammad Ali once said about fighting Joe Frazier, like the “closest thing to dying that I know of.” Let’s set the scene shall we… Read the rest of this entry »
For quite some time now, I’ve been curious as to why I can buy Founders’ Centennial IPA, Breakfast Stout and Double Trouble in Alabama but can NOT purchase their best-in-class Scotch Ale, the Dirty Bastard.
Thanks to Free the Hops, we now know why. Apparently a bureaucrat (and I say that with all the freighted baggage the word implies) from the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Board has decided that the word “bastard” is too offensive to the delicate sensibilities of everyday Alabamans to allow such a beverage to be sold here. Of course, this could conceivably make sense in a “won’t someone think of the children” vein…if children could actually BUY alcoholic beverages. Which, last I checked, they can not. Read the rest of this entry »
When Aleheads was but a mewling, week-old newborn, I made my first attempt at hamhandedly marrying my loves of statistical analysis and beer. Many similar follies followed. In that first stat-based post, I struggled to determine the best breweries in America based on a cumulative GPA. I used BeerAdvocate data and obtained an average GPA for all beers produced by a single brewery (as long as they had over 10 ratings a piece). It was an amusing exercise but the data wasn’t particularly useful. It gave a very “rough” indication of the quality of individual breweries, but the overall results were flawed. First, it gave every beer in a brewery’s lineup the same weight. So if you had a highly-regarded DIPA with 1,000 ratings and a novelty one-off with 10 ratings, they counted the same. Second, I somewhat haphazardly picked the breweries by simply asking the other Aleheads (just Doc and the Baron at the time) to name their favorite breweries (or at least breweries they had heard good things about). The results were a messy gathering of 46 ale factories (later expanded quite a bit). That list included small brewpubs like Minneapolis Town Hall and massive factories like the Boston Beer Company. That’s not even apples and oranges…that’s apples and oven-mitts. Read the rest of this entry »
Can a beer really be an “India Pale Ale” when it weighs in at 4.7% abv? I think this is a pretty fair question, and despite a love of Founders Brewing, I can’t help but lean toward “no.” I had been looking forward to trying this new “session IPA” since it was announced, and although it’s a fine, tasty beer, I do think the labeling is rather inaccurate and a little misleading.
The problem is that it’s easy to see why a brewery like Founders would want to label a brew like this a “session IPA” rather than just calling it an American Pale Ale. IPAs get more attention from we aleheads, and the idea of one that weighs in at only 4.7% is a novelty. With session craft beer becoming one of the hotter trends in the brewing world, breweries are faced with the question of “How do we make new beers that are sessionable that will also capture some attention and generate a little hype?” Releasing this beer as a “session APA” with exactly the same recipe simply wouldn’t have gotten Founders as much attention as this brew has received from beer geeks and fellow bloggers like us. Would we accept it in exactly the same way if Founders brewed ”All Day Stout,” a 5% abv “session imperial stout”? Would the resulting beer not simply be a regular American-style stout?
The one other gripe that I must mention is a price point issue. I am a very cheap, very thrifty craft beer drinker. Because of this, the IDEA of session brews is often one that I find appealing, but a lot of that optimism goes away when these brews are priced exactly the same as their burlier cousins. Case in point: At the local package store where I picked up some All Day IPA, all year-round Founders six packs are $9.99. This includes the brewery’s regular IPA, Centennial, which clocks in at 7.2% and maintains the stronger beeradvocate rating, if you care about that sort of thing. Quite simply, because I am cheap, when I go out beer shopping, I am looking for the best “taste bargains”—the most flavor for my buck, as it were. If the brewery were able to produce and sell a beer like All Day IPA for even $1 less than the other six packs to denote its “session status,” it would make me purchasing it more likely on a regular basis. With all the people out there who are trying to stretch their beer budget, I can’t be the only one who thinks that way.
Like I said in the first paragraph, however, not to be lost in all this is the fact that All Day IPA actually is a good beer. Here’s your tasting note. Read the rest of this entry »
For reasons discussed in previous posts, I haven’t been quite as prolific with my Tasting Note writing as I once was. Still, when a special beer dances its way across my palate, I’m not about to let the experience go unreported. Last night, I was finally able to sample the nigh-mythical Founders Canadian Breakfast Stout. It was very good. Not life-changing. Not awe-inspiring. But certainly worthy of a Tasting Note… Read the rest of this entry »
As weird as I’m sure this sounds to the other Aleheads, the first time I can remember having Founders Harvest Ale, I wasn’t particularly impressed with it. Maybe it was a little old, and the freshness was past its prime, but for whatever reason I recall the the draft I had came off as muted and kind of confusingly generic.
This is Founders, though–makers of some of the most regularly awesome beers in the world. They’re one of the very few ale factories where if I have a brew from them that is somehow not up to snuff, I make a natural assumption that it’s a bad bottle or a bad day for my taste buds, and not a bad recipe. They’ve earned that level of good faith by making kick-ass beers, year round. And so when I popped the top on this bottle of Harvest Ale, I still had high hopes, despite not thinking it was great before.
I was right to be optimistic.
Founders Harvest Ale, 2011:
NOTES: 12 oz bottle, poured into a tulip glass, from a bottle shop in Champaign.
APPEARANCE: Very light, brilliantly clear, straw gold in color. One of the lighter-colored IPAs around (I think they call it an APA, but it’s 6.5% and 70 IBUs. That’s totally IPA country). About half a finger of white, persistent foam.
NOSE: In a word, “heady.” So much going on here. Very complex, green, grassy aromas. A bit of lemon in there? It smells quite literally like “fresh hops,” which is appropriate. It reminds me of the odor of a baggie of amarillo or cascade hop pellets when I’ve just cut them open before pouring them into the homebrew kettle. Read the rest of this entry »
What’s the best IPA in America? Good God, has there ever been a question posed more often by beer geeks than this one? The answer of course is as simple as the question: There is no THE best IPA in America. Does that mean we can’t debate the merits of any single IPA and trash each others’ opinions, and in essence, others’ personal palates? Hell no. When we put up our original “Best IPA In America” post last August, it quickly became our most viewed article and still has legs some 10 months later. Apparently we Aleheads aren’t the only ones debating the issue and certainly not the only ones looking to others for an opinion. Back then I chose Founders Centennial IPA as the best in the land. In my opinion, at that point in my life, there was no better American IPA to be had. Now that we have a wider audience though we thought that a more democratic approach would be appropriate this time around. We polled every Alehead in our ranks and came out with a definitive, be-all-end-all Top 10 list of American IPAs including a concisive “new” Best IPA in America. Seriously, forget everything you read above, we’ve finally found THE best IPA in America! Huzzah! Read the rest of this entry »
This place is the bomb. I usually write jokes in these photo captions, but not in this one. This place is the bomb.
I awake with a start, matted in cold sweat, unsure of my surroundings. Around me–a dirty, no doubt fluid-soaked motel room, filled with cobwebs and garish multicolored furniture, relics of the 1970s. “Who am I, and where am I?” I wonder dully, craning my head to take in the room, which appears to have been trashed by a passing vagrant, who in his haste, has done a sub-par job. ”Why am I here? Am I on the run from the law?”
“…have I killed again?”
And then it all comes flooding back. I’m sprawled in a dingy Super 8 motel bed because I’m travelling through Michigan. Federal marshals, as far as I’m aware, are not in pursuit. I’m on a craft beer roadtrip. This is Day II. Read the rest of this entry »
Back in January, I posted a tasting note about North Coast’s 2010 Old Stock Ale that I jotted down during Chanukah–December 2010. Back then, the 2010 Old Stock Ale was new, and damn, was it raw (or “hot” in Alehead-speak). You might have been able to get a buzz just by breathing in the vapors. I wrote that I would try to age the remaining 3 bottles in the 4-pack and let you know what I found.
To my own genuine astonishment, I actually left those beers alone for the past 6 months. Read the rest of this entry »
“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.” -Edna St. Vincent Millay
BEERFORD MCBREWIN’
Breweries these days make a ton of one-off or or experimental beers. Sometimes these are an experiment with an eye toward establishing a new full-year or seasonal offering; occasionally to commemorate a special occasion (especially brewery anniversaries [brewniversaries?]); and sometimes just to entertain the brewers who are tired of brewing the same half-dozen beers time and again and want to challenge themselves (or show off their brewing chops). Often these beers show up at a brewfest or two, or maybe in the brewery’s home pub on tap. Sadly, many great one-offs disappear into the mist after a single batch, never to be seen again.
It’s also not uncommon for a brewery discontinue a regular offering, whether because they’ve concluded that consumer preferences have changed and it’s no longer selling well, or just to replace it with what they feel is a better beer. I know many a staple of my own fridge has quietly faded away, leaving a nostalgic hole where a beer that I associated with a particular time in my life used to be.
And so today we’re going to leave aside the forward-looking themes of past conundra and instead look fondly backward for a moment. Gentlemen, please tell us what discontinued beer you most wish would return to production. Read the rest of this entry »
Happy Craft Beer Week! Last night, Herr Direktor and I hit up the 2nd Annual Columbus (Ohio) Beer Fest. At 210 beers, it’s a microcosm of its bigger cousins. And there were plenty of breweries notably missing, some because they don’t distribute to Ohio, others for no apparent reason (DFH WTF?).
The atmosphere was… very Ohio. It was in a small ballroom at the convention center. The music was terrible. It was a 4-1/2 hour long beer festival, yet the band took at least an hour long break in the middle–giving way to a crappy radio station. Also, the band sucked. It was like Smashing Pumpkins but with no talent. The food was overpriced and downright bad. And why was the ceiling covered in red and blue neon lights? I don’t know.
Few events bring out the alegeek in us better than the launch of a BeerAdvocate top 10 beer that’s only available once a year. You need look no further than Dark Lord Day, a near-holy pilgrimage to the beertropolis of Munster, Indiana. Or Brother Barley’s semi-conscious stagger to the hallowed monastery of Westvleteret. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the gracious invitation that Beerford McBrewin’ made to us last month to join him for happy hour in Portland (a 4-1/2 hour flight) to try Pliny the Younger.
On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me – Beer. I’ll admit, I was just going to post my favorite Christmas song of all time, Bob & Doug McKenzie’s 12 Beers of Christmas, but I got all wrapped up in the giving spirit and felt compelled to create my own list of brews. Some of them make sense, some of them don’t, but who cares? It’s Christmas! Get crazy with your bad self. Read the rest of this entry »
When Doc crowned Founders Centennial IPA the best IPA in America, he invited the rest of us to do a full tasting note on it. As Commander of Aleheads Central Command, I feel the urge — nay, the duty — to take him up on that. While I would not call it the best IPA in America, it’s definitely close, and an outrageously good beer.
Living in New York City has many disadvantages. It’s crowded. It’s overpriced. It’s disgustingly hot in the summer. There is a vague smell about the place. Lots of little things that can drive a person crazy. However, there is one huge advantage to living here in the Big Apple. If you want to make splash, if you want to make it big, you gotta come here. After all, it’s a concrete jungle where dreams are made of.* Thus, last night, with the annual limited release of the Founders 2010 Nemesis wheatwine, I knew I would be able to track it down somewhere near the bright lights of Broadway. Trust me, I am glad that I did. Unlike my old nemesis Lord Mashtun Copperpot, this is a Nemesis you definitely want around.
*Yes, I am aware that this makes little to no sense. Blame Jay-Z.
NOSE: To me, the best Pale Ales smell like IPAs, but have a smoother, sweeter, maltier body. Sierra Nevada makes the classic example, but Founders does a nice Sierra impression with this Dry-Hopped version. The nose has big grapefruit and pine notes and a liiiiiitle bit of sweetness that’s actually more fruit (banana and pineapple) than malt.
TASTE: The aggressive, hoppy nose takes a back seat in the taste which is much sweeter and has a strong caramel presence. Sure, there’s plenty of citrus and bitterness in the finish, but it’s far less astringent than Founders other Pale Ale variants, the Centennial and Devil Dancer. Of course, I like those beers much better, but sometimes you just need a good ol’, garden variety Pale Ale.
MOUTHFEEL: The one major knock on the brew is the too-light body. Needs a lot more heft…it’s well-carbonated, but doesn’t have the creamy smooth body that most Founders ales have. Damn shame.
DRINKABILITY: Light body, subtle flavor, and reasonable ABV = highly drinkable. Again, it ain’t Founders finest work, but I would rate it a half-step above their rival brewery’s (Bell’s) standard Pale Ale.
I thought it might be interesting to do a personalized “Top 10 Breweries” list to see if I could whittle all of the incredible ale factories in the world down to just a handful. These are my “apocalypse” breweries. If civilization collapses, and only 10 breweries remain, these are the ones I would select. Determining this list was extremely difficult. My choices definitely aren’t the 10 “best” breweries in the world…just the 10 that mean the most to me. I left off some brilliant ale factories simply because I haven’t sampled enough of their products or because I don’t have enough of a relationship with their brews at this point in my life. Geography plays a major role in that since I have very little access to some of the fine West Coast offerings. Such is life…we take what we can get. Read the rest of this entry »
As Slouch noted a few weeks back, one of the critical issues facing Aleheads today is beer freshness. My local package/grocery stores have Founders Red’s Rye IPA from last May still sitting on shelves. Yesterday I saw a dusty six-pack of an apparently unloved domestic IPA dated March 2011.
Posted by Barley McHops 
