What Beers Did You Drink Today? Or Yesterday? (Part 2)

[Ashen]

Innis & Gunn Highland Cask along with a measure of 15 yo old Dalwhinnie in honour of Robbie Burns Day

[ChrisTaylor]

Nice choice. The dram and the brew both.

[FrogPrincesse]

Evil Twin/Stillwater/Stone 2012 collaboration.

The Perfect Crime : black smoked saison.

The flavor was quite muted and the smoked was subtle. Quite bitter for a saison.

[rod rock]

Stella Artois, i like it!!!

[CharlieHorse]

I'm currently drinking my home brewed Gingerbread Imperial Porter. I had a Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA with dinner.

[FrogPrincesse]

Avant-Garde Ale (Lost Abbey).

Beautiful golden orange color. Some citrus with a lot of complex flavors that keep coming and surprising you. I detected green apple, butter, bread, herbs and spice. Great texture. A very long and slightly bitter finish. I am a fan.

[LindaK]

A neighborhood pub is offering Ellie's Brown Ale from Avery Brewery on draft and it's become my beer of choice when I visit. Chocolate malt finish, lighter bodied than most brown ales, which is nice since it isn't so filling that I can't finish one, always sad. Had it with a burger yesterday, perfect.

[ChrisTaylor]

Revisiting Cooper's Vintage 2012 now that it's been aging for a few months. Subtle difference--altho' it's not like I can taste an unaged and aged specimen side-by-side, is it? I think I prefer the unaged version.

[FrogPrincesse]

Vieille Provision Saison Dupont. Yeasty with a lot of flavor and a crisp citrus finish. Delicious. Picked up a few bottles at $7 at Costco of all places.

[bobjad21]

I'm a simple man, so a simple beer does it for me, fosters all day.

[FrogPrincesse]

More beers that we tried in the past few weeks, all local except for the first one.

Trader Joe's 2012 Vintage Ale

Trader Joe typically makes a good job with their vintage ale (it's brewed by Unibroue in Quebec) and we grab a few bottles every year. This one is malty, a little sweet, with some winter spices (orange/clove).

Highway 78 scotch ale

Stone, Green Flash, Pizza Port collaboration 2011

Not much carbonation left. Malt, butterscotch. Good but a little thin.

Brown ale (Black Market Brewing)

Not bad, but not especially memorable. Malty with little complexity.

Mint Chocolate Imperial Stout

2012 Stone/Iron Fist/Ken Schmidt collaboration

A dry mint aroma that was not very pleasant. I did not like the idea of the beer (mint and chocolate in a beer?) but thought that somehow they would be able to pull a miracle. I did not like it in the end.
9.6% ABV

Lost Abbey's Red Barn

Spicy, hoppy

[FrogPrincesse]

Stone IPA with a fish taco at the Fish Shop (yes I do love all things bitter).

Sierra Nevada's Black IPA at URBN. Chocolate. Rich and creamy. Burnt flavors. I did not really care for it.

The Bruery's Rugbrod Danish brown ale (no photo).

This one I really loved. Spicy, malty, a little acidic. Layers of great flavors.

[ChrisTaylor]

Love the photography that comes with your posts, FrogPrincesse. If you're ever down here in Melbourne--altho' there's one in Sydney, too--you need to
go (ideally not passing 'go' or collecting $200) to The Local Taphouse. It's a pub that has, at any one time, 25-30 beers on tap. And for some fairly small fee you can try a 'paddle' (less the kind you'd use to move a boat through water and more the kind you'd use to discipline someone in a dodgy movie) of five sample sized glasses (something like 90mL, iirc). Though you'll get the odd lambic or whatever, the focus is very much on very small Australian breweries. Super cool.

[FrogPrincesse]

Love the photography that comes with your posts, FrogPrincesse. If you're ever down here in Melbourne--altho' there's one in Sydney, too--you need to

go (ideally not passing 'go' or collecting $200) to The Local Taphouse. It's a pub that has, at any one time, 25-30 beers on tap. And for some fairly small fee you can try a 'paddle' (less the kind you'd use to move a boat through water and more the kind you'd use to discipline someone in a dodgy movie) of five sample sized glasses (something like 90mL, iirc). Though you'll get the odd lambic or whatever, the focus is very much on very small Australian breweries. Super cool.

Thanks Chris.

The Local Taphouse sounds like a fun place. I definitely hope to visit Melbourne one day. I had a few great Australian beers last year in Sydney (fantastic trip btw); I will post my notes if I can find them...

[FrogPrincesse]

This one was just a meh - a little flat and not distinctive enough. Not great with steak, but it seemed to come to life with a dry jack cheese.

The Lost Abbey's Serpent Stout

[FrogPrincesse]

Who else is drinking beer?

I went to a Monkish beer tasting this weekend at a local restaurant. Monkish is located in Torrance and, as their name indicate, they specialize in Belgian-style beers and I noticed that they use a lot of herbs/flowers.

Here was the menu from lightest to darkest.

They were out of the second one (Oblate) so we skipped and got a pour of AleSmith's Speedway stout instead (the darkest one in the series), an old favorite which is spectacular by the way. These were all on tap.

Crux, the lightest, was refreshing and the elderflowers were discreet but added something really nice.

Lumen with jasmine was very good as well although I think I preferred the first.

Feminist with hibiscus was ok but I was not completely convinced about the hibiscus in the beer.

Triplelist with rose hips and hibiscus - ditto.

Anomaly was good and the most interesting/complex of the bunch.

Also sampled Stone's 16th Anniversary IPA with green tea leaves (also on tap; not pictured). Glad it was only a sample because we did not care for it. It was sweet and weirdly herbal with the green tea (I love green tea, just not in this beer).

Edited April 16, 2013 by FrogPrincesse (log)

[ChrisTaylor]

A couple of locals:

Two Birds Sunset Ale. Label says something about biscuit notes. Yeah, reminds me a whole lot of Malt-o-Milk biscuits. A bit one dimensional. The sort of beer where you're glad you didn't, say, impulse buy a six-pack.

Bellarine Brewing Company's Queenscliff Ale. A honey wheat beer. One of the first of its kind I've liked.

[FrogPrincesse]

The Harlot, Belgian Extra (Societe).

Not earth-shattering but this was super pleasant with a fish taco and a cup of chowder.

Saison de Lente (The Bruery).

This is the Bruery's spring saison with a psychadelic label.

A lot of flavor (hay/grass, spices). Crisp/acidic and deep at the same time. Love.

I was going to grab a few more bottles but it seems very hard to find already...

As a side-note, Societe Brewing which is located in San Diego (about 15 min from where I live) was founded by a couple of ex-Bruery employees.

[FrogPrincesse]

Found a new cache of Saison de Lente at $9.99 so I feel much better...

I tried this saison by Le Merle a couple of nights ago. We did not care for it. First sip, it almost tastes like a light Breton cider with a lot of apple notes. Then as you go it's very fizzy, hoppy and feels thin. The finish is bitter and almost tinny. It's a bit high in alcohol for a Saison and you can feel it. Overall, it was unremarkable and did not have a lot of flavor. The label looks cool though...

[ChrisTaylor]

One that I think is maybe possibly probably new. Or at least has just started to be marketed by one of the larger booze retail chains. Steamrail 'Gold Digger' Golden Ale. Avaliable also in the range is an Amber Ale and something else. An IPA? A Pils? Can't recall. Was going to buy a single bottle of the others but that'd involve wrestling bottles from packaging and that didn't seem like a lot of fun given the week I've had--too much effort, like trekking to a pub in Inner Mongolia (from, say, Melbourne or LA--technically it's possible from the latter, so maybe LA is a better choice) just for a pint. But, yeah, it's okay. Not interesting or compelling or avant garde or anything but goes down easily enough.

[ChrisTaylor]

Harviestoun's Bitter & Twisted Blond Beer. Lovely beer, this one. Not as bitter as I want it to be, not as bitter as the name suggests it should be, but it's nonetheless very nice. I should stop trying to Sibiliarise everything.

[ChrisTaylor]

Bear Republic Red Rocket Ale. Very good. Easier drinking than the label suggests. Altho' given I spent this afternoon restraining from seven year old from kicking her friends in the face I suspect anything with alcohol qualifies as easy drinking.

[ChrisTaylor]

Nogne O Saison. Also good.

[Katie Meadow]

Two beers I've never heard of or tasted before and they were both really good. (Not that it's unusual for a beer to be new to me, since I'm not really much of a beer drinker, except in very hot weather.) One was Crown Valley Black Cabin Smoked Ale. As soon as you taste it you remember what it smelled like around a campfire. So yummy. The other was a draft Boulevard Coffee Ale from MO. Serious coffee flavor, loved it. Excellent with deep fried pickles. Some experiences you just can't replicate. Or explain!

[ChrisTaylor]

A couple of nice local-ish beers. Both from Hargreaves Hill. The Pale Ale and the Hefeweizen. Both, esp. the Hefe, are very good. Some of the best local beers I've had in a long time. Time to pick up a case, I think.