Barlow Brewing

I grabbed a Stone 13^th Anniversary Celebration Ale on draft at Timberwood Grill on the way home from the gym last night.  It is an Imperial Red ale and it clocks in at 9.5% ABV.  Stone says they used more hops per barrel in this brew than any beer that they’ve made before, which is impressive in and of itself.  The starting gravity is 22.5 Plato (about 1.094 by my messy math) which means they backed up those hops with a ton of malt, too.

This one came in a brandy snifter, and the color was that of a dark mahogany with sparing ruby highlights.  The head was creamy, beige and persistent.  The smell was what I was expecting: a nosegasm of simcoe pine and centennial grapefruit.  In the end was a bit of sweet melon.  Perhaps honeydew or cantaloupe.  The resins were tangible, and almost seemed to add a sort of texture.

The taste continues that theme, but the malt kicks in with some sweetness and noticeable alcohol warming.  In another beer, these two attributes would be overwhelming but they are keenly balanced with the landslide of hops in the 13^th.

As it warms, the malt blossoms a bit more and the hops settle down for the ride.  Amazingly, despite the size of this beast, it is very drinkable.  I could certainly have a few of these over the course of an evening.

As a side note, I thought the back label on the bottle (I have an unopened one at home) had an interesting line:

“No matter where you are, we are thankful and hugely flattered when you choose Stone.  However, if you’re outside of our region and you often choose a quality craft beer that is more local, we understand.”

This is a very cool sentiment that echoes Greg Koch’s mission to encourage locavores.  The label also alludes to Stone rolling through their teenage years, which is a departure from Arrogant Bastard-speak of the past.  I had heard that Greg mentioned needing to write the label for this brew during the SAVOR weekend in DC.  It is easy to see how the camaraderie of brewers of that event facilitated those words and beliefs.  It was strange for me to read at first, but it sounds like a company that is growing up and becoming a leader in the craft brewing industry that it deserves to be.

On the bottle, they tell you to drink the Stone 13^th Anniversary Celebration Ale now and to not age or cellar it. 

Good advice, I say.

I was pretty excited to hear about Victory Brewing Company’s  WildDevil Ale.  Victory makes a lot of great beers, and what they did with this one was brew up a batch of their HopDevil, a hophead’s dream of an IPA, and then ferment it out with 100% brettanomyces.  This sounded like a very interesting idea and a bold experiment.

I bought two big bottles of WildDevil and brought one to a party to share, and stowed one away for myself to review when I could give it my undivided attention.  When I tried it at the party, and shared it with friends, it was a letdown.  It was getting towards the end of the evening, after a good bit of Oberon and some of my homebrewed lambic, but it can across as strangely both dull and prickly.  I was hoping that tasting it under optimum conditions would change my opinion. 

No such luck. 

It was in a 750-ml bomber that was corked and caged.  The bottling date was April 22, 2009, and I poured it into a tulip glass.

The beer was a glossy, stained wood brown with bold orange highlights.  The head was thick, but wispy sea foam in composition (not the color).  Each bubble was apparent and separate, and did not meld together into a creamy top.

The nose of this was a perfumey sourness, with citrus and lemon zest.  A mild brett character slid through occasionally.

The taste was all over the place.  There was little of the barnyard character, but it was mired in an unfortunate amount of dryness that drags the off-flavors to the forefront.  There was a soapiness delivered on a dry aspirin platter than made this one hard to get through.  Sometimes a beer is undrinkable, or you just want to call it a day and walk away.  This one wasn’t quite that bad, but every time I put it down, it was easily forgotten.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to drink it, but rather than there was nothing in it to make me want more.  It was an absent-minded chore to get through this bottle.

I cannot recommend this one, and I’ve having a hard time believing that laying this one down for a few months will help improve it. 

The mouthfeel made the Victory WildDevil unsessionable (because I have to make up at least two or three words in every review).  It is nice experiment gone awry.  A potentially cute girl with lots of pointy elbows.  Spooning a porcupine.  But I digress.

I look forward to Victory’s next brett experiment.  I believe in you, but let’s put this one behind us.

“….the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, ready to remind us… the immense edifice of memory.” – Marcel Proust

Your senses trigger memories. We’ve all felt the power of a single smell or sound which can conjure up entire scenes from the past. And studies show that our odor memory seems to be the most resistant to being forgotten. Images often begin to fade in a matter of hours or days, but smells can trigger memories for as much as a year.

The brewer is an artist working in mouthfeel, flavors and aromas just like a painter works in colors, textures and forms. The most rewarding beers are the ones that offer up complexes and, sometimes, uncomplimentary components. This is part of the wonder of trying beers: seeing what experiences we bring to the glass.

I was set on down this path by tasting a Brooklyn Blast IPA the other day. I had had this beer at a Brooklyn Brewing Beer dinner that was hosted by Garrett Oliver a few years ago. As Oliver explained, it was born out of a drunken 3 am dare between him and the usual suspects of Pizza Port and Russian River Brewing. The west coast vs. east coast rivalry was alive and well, and Oliver delivered something I thought I’d never see: a hoppy Brooklyn beer. Apparently, the brewers loved it so much, that they never released it outside the bar in Brooklyn. It was insanely hoppy and citrus, but remarkably green. In homebrewing, one of the best parts of making a batch is breaking out the hops and smelling the grassy intoxication of the pellets. The aroma of this beer is the closest I ever smelled to hops straight from the sealed bag. This was humulus heaven. Oliver said it was dry hopped with eight different hops, half American and half European. I cannot believe I didn’t hit him up for the recipe later.

When I stopped by Beer Run, once of the beer shops in town with a bar, and saw this Brewmasters Reserve beer on tap, I had to order it again. But it was very different this time.

It was served in a brandy snifter and it was a murky amber color. It looked more like a cider than a beer. It had a meager head which quickly dissipated, but the lacing on the sides of the glass was very impressive as I drank.

There was an immediate hop bitterness that was full and expanding. It grabs your tongue and fills your mouth with some of the greenness I tasted before, but not to the same degree. This time the flavors was dominated a resinous earthy flavor.

The earth flavors ran the gamut of dirt, leaves and dryness, but not quite in the direction of the pine flavors I enjoy from a Great Divide Titan IPA or other beers that seem to have those Simcoe-like influence. And I hesitate to throw in the dirt reference because it is not a bad flavor, but one that I could only describe as such. The taste, and to a small degree the smell, were the heavy, musty smell of warm dirt.

The back note, and this is the one that trips memories, was that of a dry, leafy character. It was multi-colored brittle leaves spinning to the ground on a fall day.

There’s a moment each fall where all the pieces come together. The sky is full of dark, sedan blue clouds that emit just the right type of light that enhances the colors of everything underneath them. The garish leaves are that much brighter and the world seems to be a little clearer for a moment. A stern and searching stare into the coming winter. The air smells like fresh fragile leaves before they turn a wet nesting of decay. And the air tastes, because words are bigger than things, like football.

The Brooklyn Blast captures that moment for me. It is not a beer that I could have more than a few of at a time, but it was very interesting. I think it would be amazing paired with vichyssoise.

It is night and day different from the Blast I had had before, but it felt like Garrett Oliver had done away with the east vs. west thing and taken this back as his own. Another beer on his own terms. I look forward to seeing if, and when, this evolves again.