I love Stone Brewing's beers. I don't believe I've ever had a bad one; I only wish I could get more of them around here. Even so, I get by.

The thing with Stone is they make big, strong beers, and their 9th Anniversary Ale is no exception. This was a limited edition brew, released in September of 2005, and clocks in at 7.8% alcohol. It was an excellent beer, one I enjoyed quite a bit.

And I don't quite know why, but the labeling reminds me of billiards.

Appearance: Nice light golden straw colored... a good two fingers of off-white head. Slightly murky.

Smell: Light, but pungent with the fruity/citrusy aroma reminiscent of Cascade hops. Malty and sweet, kind of flossy like Belgian candi sugar.

Taste: Bitter/hoppy with light malt—biscuity—with strong alcohol notes all rolled into one. Kind of fruity, maybe from the hops, but also its strength? Belgian-y for sure, but with that Northwest American hop profile.

Mouthfeel: Light but with a kick. Dry and hoppy bitter, but body from alcohol.

Being a limited edition "retired" ale, its BeerAdvocate score is no longer tallied and overall score (the out-of-100 figure) is unavailable. Reviews are still coming in, though; it averages 3.87 out of 5 and has a 94% thumbs-up rate. On RateBeer it has a strong showing with 3.66 out of 5 and landing in their 91st percentile.

I don't know if you'll be able to find this anymore, since it was released a year ago. If by some chance you do, I recommend stocking up.

Bison Brewing's Chocolate Stout is one of the better such stouts I've had, recently and maybe ever. I admit, I was a bit leery at first; with the exception of Rogue's Chocolate Stout, I've not really found a chocolate-flavored beer that holds up. Bison definitely does.

Appearance: Black-brown, opaque. Leather-tan head, nice.

Smell: Coffee, dark chocolate/cocoa—mocha. Rich roasted malt/grain.

Taste: Roasty, stout-bitter but not astringently so. Coffee, chocolate—what you smell is what you taste. Very rich. Earthy dark. Bittersweet.

Mouthfeel: Nice and full. Kind of oily. A little astringent/dry. Smooth.

Yes, my notes are a bit sparse but trust me, this was a well-done chocolate beer. Very rich, very chocolatey; the oily feel in the mouth comes from the real chocolate used in the brewing.

On BeerAdvocate, it scores a respectable 84 (out of 100) with 96% of Advocates approving. On RateBeer it scores 3.59 out of 5, in their 88th percentile.

Last year I blogged a few Beers for Halloween; my first pick? Rogue's Dead Guy Ale. This year, Belmont Station blogged a whole bunch more. They pick out Dead Guy too, and mention Maudite, Reaper Ale (among others, they brew Mortality Stout, Deathly Pale and Sleighor), and Bodysnatcher.

Of course, you can't go wrong with a pumpkin beer for Halloween (we all know I've been blogging those like crazy lately).

Go with the obvious? Gritty McDuff's Halloween Ale, if you can get it. Sounds tasty!

One of these years I'll brew up a Halloween ale (beyond my usual pumpkin)...

A big trend this year seems to be the fresh hop beers—brewing with just-picked hops that are still "wet" (as opposed to dried hops, which is the norm). I first encountered this last year with Deschutes Brewery's Hop Trip, which I wrote a bit about. I liked it quite a lot, so I picked up this year's batch and did the review thing.

Overall, it's not as hoppy as I remember from last year, nor is the green hop character as pronounced. Did they use a different variety of hops this year? I know they brewed with Crystal... perhaps last year's was different.

Appearance: Clear amber with brownish-red hues. Fluffy off-white head, two fingers worth.

Smell: Grassy, resiny (pine?) hops... smells "green" but not as hoppy as I expected. Herbal and floral.

Taste: It's not as hoppy bitter like I remember last year... not as intense. Twiggy, resin, grassy, a "green" character. Malt is light and subtle, appropriate because you want to let the hops do the talking.

Mouthfeel: Thinner than I'd expect... thinner in body than Mirror Pond? Nice and smooth... a little bit of bite from hops.

On the whole, even though it's different from what I remember last year, this is still a very good beer. The hops aren't overwhelming or too pitchy or sharp, and it's a great pale ale.

On BeerAdvocate, it scores 86, with 96% approval... take that with a grain of salt though, since most of the reviews are from last year. Same caveat with its RateBeer review too—it scores 3.79 out of 5 and lands in the 95th percentile.

Not that it doesn't earn those scores. Just don't be surprised if you read one of those reviews and it's not quite what you expect.

Today's Rocketboom follows people around at Brewtopia ("Great World Beer Festival") this past weekend. This was a totally random find—I don't normally watch Rocketboom—but you have to love the humor here. Especially when Joanne reveals she doesn't even like beer!

And yes, this is pretty typical of most beer festivals I've seen...

Otherwise, I'd never heard of this Brewtopia festival. No wonder: tickets are something like $60! Not something I could afford to go to, even if it were local.

Seattle's Elysian Brewing is going the next step with the pumpkin beer trend: their Second Annual Great Pumpkin Beer Festival. On three separate days at three of their locations, they'll be holding festivities and serving ten different pumpkin beers:

• Night Owl Pumpkin Ale
• The Great Pumpkin
• Dark O' the Moon Pumpkin Stout
• Purple Pumpkineater Lavender Saison
• Kürbitinus (dunkelweizen-ish)
  
• Portergeist (smoked porter)
  
• Steamy Hollow California Common Pumpkin Beer
• 3 guest beers

And:

At 4pm the tapping of the Pumpkin Conditioned Ale! An extremely large pumpkin filled with Portergeist smoked pumpkin porter, spiced in the pumpkin and allowed to go through a secondary fermentation in the pumpkin and tapped with traditional English cask taps.

That sounds like a lot of fun; I wish I lived closer to the Seattle area.

The event days are:

• October 21st at Elysian: Capitol Hill
  Noon - 10pm
• October 23rd through 27th at Elysian: TangleTown
• October 28th at Elysian Fields
  Noon - 10pm

Via Brookston Beer Bulletin.

ARRIVES SEVERAL WEEKS EARLIER TO MEET CONSUMER DEMAND

Leinie’s Apple Spice craft beer features hot and cold serving options

CHIPPEWA FALLS, Wis. (Oct. 16, 2006) – Roll out the bushels.  The Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Company, the leading craft brewer in the upper Midwest, is spicing up the fall season and upcoming holidays with the return of Leinenkugel’s Apple Spice.  Available now through Dec. 31, the seasonal brew is hitting shelves a few weeks earlier than its November debut last year due to consumer demand.

Lightly hopped and well-balanced, Leinie’s brewmasters blend fresh apples and a hint of cinnamon spice to deliver a beer that is refreshingly drinkable cold or heated up and served warm.

“Last year Leinenkugel’s entered exciting new territory with the launch of Apple Spice and consumers responded,” said Jake Leinenkugel, president of the Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Company. “Due to its hot and cold serving options, unique combination flavors, and limited seasonal supply, Apple Spice is perfect for fall gatherings and holiday parties.”

Leinenkugel’s Apple Spice features more than 2,000 pounds of real apples per batch (one batch equivalent to 165 barrels). Other Apple Spice facts:

- 50 pounds of cinnamon per batch, used as a spice
- 60 pounds of real Wisconsin honey per batch
- Malted wheat in addition to malted barley

Let Leinie’s help with the holiday cooking this year. Jake Leinenkugel’s wife, Peg, shares her signature holiday dessert:

Leinie’s Apple Spice Pie

As can probably be guessed from its name, Reinaert Flemish Wild Ale is an unusual beer. It was recommended to me at Newport Market when I mentioned that I really liked Saison Dupont, so of course I had to try. Plus, it has a really great bottle and label design.

It's also a big beer; 9% alcohol by volume, so it's not one to take lightly! But if you're into the funky Belgian beers, this is definitely worth a try.

Appearance: Very clear, sparkling—like champagne. Honey yellow. Crisp fluffy two fingers of head on top.

Smell: Sour, yeasty, orange peel, apple, old leather.

Taste: Sour, complex—wow... kind of lambic-ish in character (but not flavor necessarily—and not like a fruit lambic a la Lindemans). Not super sour. It has a bite! Definitely reminded of a saison/farmhouse ale too... honey, spicy, herbal, musty. Very complex.

Mouthfeel: Medium-bodied, offset by the sparkling carbonation.

Noting the lambic character so strongly in this beer, I read on the label after the fact that it's brewed with the same wild strain of yeast that is used in lambic—Brettanomyces along with the regular Saccharomyces ("normal" beer yeast). So that's where the "wild" part of Wild Ale comes from.

On BeerAdvocate it's fairly well received, scoring 86 out of 100 with 91% overall approval. On RateBeer, it scores 3.56 out of 5 and is in their 87th percentile overall. Myself, I liked it, though it is pretty unusual. You gotta go with the funk on this one.

In my ramblings about pumpkin beer last month, I wrote:

I think it would be fun to do a pumpkin beer tasting; gather as many pumpkin ales as you can find (homebrewed included!), draw up some rating sheets, and go to town.

And a bunch of blogs have seemingly taken up the call.

• Lyke 2 Drink tastes six pumpkin beers: Saranac Pumpkin Ale, Cottonwood Pumpkin Ale, Dogfish Head Pumpkin Ale, Jack's Pumpkin Spice Ale, Wild Goose Pumpkin Patch Ale, and Edenton Brewing Pumpkin Head. All get good marks.
• Over on The Spirit World, they taste three beers: Shipyard Brewing Pumpkinhead Ale, PostRoad Pumpkin Ale, and Dogfish Head (again). They declare Dogfish Head the best of the lot "by far."
• The Roughneck's Take on Beer blog is just going to town on the pumpkin beer... I'm not even going to try to list or link them all, just go look at the front page.

This must be the year of the pumpkin or something. I picked up some Blue Moon Pumpkin Ale yesterday, but by and large I'm just not finding a good selection of them around here, which sucks. I guess I'll have to make some more.

This review is a little late for this year's Oktoberfest, but I did drink the beer during same: Paulaner Oktoberfest Märzen. Yum! Outside of Munich, this is the Oktoberfest beer by which all others are judged. Or so some people would tell you. (I'm one of them.)

That's not to say that other Oktoberfests out there aren't good; it's just if you want to try some of the best, get Paulaner. Anyway, let's hit my review notes.

Appearance: Perfectly clear amber-orange topped with smooth and creamy off-white head.

Smell: Caramel maltiness. The malt dominates the nose, not much in the way of hops.

Taste: Rich and malty... wheat/grain, grass; earthy. Light hops—very crisp and clean of the Noble variety. The "malty" has caramel, whole multi-grain bread, sweetness in a molasses kind of way (i.e., not too sweet, slightly bittersweet and thick).

Mouthfeel: Smooth, medium-bodied. Creamy rich.

On BeerAdvocate, it scores a nice 87 (out of 100) with 99% approval; it's on their Top 10 list for the style. On RateBeer, it scores 3.38 out of 5, and sits in the 75th percentile.

Ah, Widmer Hefeweizen, the quintessential Northwest craft beer... You know, Widmer's Hefe often gets a bad rap among beer snobs for not being a "proper" hefeweizen of the Bavarian style. Even its BeerAdvocate score isn't very good compared to other microbrews: it only scores 78 and has a dismal 66% approval rating.

Here's the key thing about Widmer's version that they're missing, though: Widmer re-invented the style into what I like to think of as an "American hefeweizen," or even a "Northwest hefeweizen." And that made it accessible to the general beer-swilling masses; I like to think of Hefe as a "gateway" beer; people who have never tried craft beer and/or are intimidated by it are often introduced (in my experience, anyway) to Hefeweizen and they find it good. They realize that microbrew is not so off-putting after all.

(Whereas those same people, if they tried a traditional hefe with fruity flavors and clove and banana in the nose and such, would possibly be turned off by the strangeness of it to them. I've seen this happen, too.)

Is it obvious I'm fond of it? It was also one of the first microbrews that I tried, waaaay back in the day, and it was probably the best beer I had ever tasted up to that point. Widmer did something remarkable with this beer, and don't really get the credit for it they deserve.

And, since I received a six-pack of it in the press kit the other day, it's the perfect time to review it! (I didn't drink it with a lemon, though, even though that's traditional. Not that I'm against the lemon; I just didn't want to waste the whole lemon for one slice.)

Appearance: Orange-ish, yellow straw in color. Cloudy (as it should be). Nice thick creamy white head.

Smell: Very light. Yeasty (slightly bready). No hops.

Taste: Wheat; grainy. Yeast, but not so much. Like a good light wheaty bread; has that creamy wheaty flavor that (to me) marks it as the "American hefe." Not fruity (like a traditional hefe would be) but grainy. Hops are so mild as to blend into the background. Bitterish, but not; no aftertaste. Very clean tasting.

Mouthfeel: Thirst-quenching, nice body that rolls around the mouth. Creamy texture from the yeast.

What can I say? It's a classic.

I already mentioned its poor ranking on BeerAdvocate; on RateBeer it fares little better, scoring only 2.95 out of 5 and landing in the 39th percentile for the style. Don't let those numbers be off-putting, though. I won't beat the dead horse any more, but don't ever count Widmer out on this beer.

Recently I've run across a few more links to beer events, and I figured I'd dump them here for everybody to share.

• There's BeerAdvocate's events calendar, of course.
• The Beer Festival Calendar appears to be fairly comprehensive.
• Realbeer.com has a big one, too.
• All About Beer has theirs online.
• PubCrawler has one!
• And not a compilation of events, but a single one: the Holiday Ale Festival website. I just threw that in there because I wanted to point out that they're coming out with beer festivals for everything.

Yesterday I received a large package from the PR firm Edelman, the occasion being Widmer's rollout of their new packaging for their flagship Hefeweizen. I have to say, though, that I was just as impressed with the press kit package as anything; so I'm commenting on both.

The Press Kit

As impressed as I was with the Heineken press kit, I think this one takes it up a notch: not only did I get an entire six-pack of Hefeweizen, but also two of their "Perlsee" glasses, a lemon, the carrier (with the new design), and a bookmark with directions on how to pour Hefeweizen. Amusingly, there is also the PR letter with history and "craft beer-ese" about the beer and detailed step-by-step instructions on how to pour it (with a lemon wedge). Very well done. Check this out:

Nicely done. The only thing I would consider "missing" would be a CD-ROM with digital versions of the designs and appropriate graphics, as Heineken did, but I'm not going to quibble.

I think what impressed me the most were the addition of the glasses; if I were putting a press kit like this together, I'd probably only put one beer glass in; shows what I know, I guess. But these are some nice glasses:

I don't know if these are part of the new design rollout or not, but they sure are snazzy.

The New Packaging

And now the topic of the press kit: Widmer's new Hefeweizen packaging. Overall, I like it; I think it's a definite improvement over the old design. Generally, they've cleaned up the label, made it less busy, streamlined the fonts and have gone with a more subtle approach to the package—emphasizing the "Widmer" name while moving the logo to the background.

You can see the large swaths of color, yellow and black, in discrete blocks with more space—reducing clutter. It's catchier on the eye. The artwork, too, in the yellow background is subtler.

And the carrier is more usable, too! Apparently they want people to be sure to know how to "properly" pour their Hefeweizen; I can't tell if they're being tongue-in-cheek about it, but in case you forget, they helpfully include the step-by-step directions on the end:

I got a kick out of that. No doubt there will be people out there who will say Widmer is being overly snobbish with this, but I'm coming down on the tongue-in-cheek side. It's not like they're putting the directions on the bottle. Now that would be snobbish.

Finally, I figured this would be helpful: a side-by-side of the old labelling with the new. The off-color cap on the old bottle is because it's filled with homebrew:

I definitely like the new packaging. It's cleaner and catches the eye better, I think. You see what I was talking about, with the logo being made smaller and moved into the background? That totally works. Nothing's lost since the logo is still there, but the label is much less busy than before and the eye is drawn to the "Widmer Hefeweizen" in the center, where you want it. And something else that occurs to me as I look at this photo again, is that the old label seems much more "megabrewery" or corporate than the new one... the new one seems more "craft beer," which is probably what they were aiming for.

I don't know if Widmer is planning on giving all their brews the new package treatment or not (though I suspect they'll wait and see the results of the Hefeweizen run), but I think it would work nicely.

And, since I now have Hefeweizen in my fridge, I'll be giving it the formal review treatment, as well.

The 2006 winners of the Great American Beer Festival were picked and announced Saturday, and Oregon breweries, along with California, Colorado, and Wisconsin, cleaned up. The Belmont Station blog handily posted just the Oregon winners in the various categories (saving me the trouble of weeding them out!). Here's a quick list of those winning brewers:

• Widmer Brothers Brewing, Portland (3 medals)
• Full Sail Brewing, Hood River (1 medal)
• Pelican Pub & Brewery, Pacific City (5 medals!)
• Barley Brown's Brewpub, Baker City (1 medal)
• Bend Brewing, Bend (I already posted about that here) (1 medal)
• Laurelwood Brewing, Portland (1 medal)
• Alameda Brewhouse, Portland (1 medal)
• BJ’s Restaurant & Brewery, Portland (1 medal)

In addition, Pelican Pub won "Large Brewpub and Large Brewpub Company Brewer of the Year"! The Pelican is definitely becoming a big presence in the Oregon brewing scene. Back in May I wrote that they were probably my favorite brewery (as well as giving them a glowing review).

And, a big congrats to Bend Brewing here locally, for the gold medal for their HopHead Imperial IPA. That rules!

Congrats to all the winners—Oregon's winners, especially.

I had to dump my batch of pumpkin ale that I brewed up last month. It had been sitting in the secondary fermenter for about two weeks, and I was going to bottle it today.

When I got the carboy of beer out of the pantry, it was all too obvious that it had become infected: large growths of pond-scummy tan chunky-looking... something. (See pictures below.) Definitely not what you want to see floating in your beer. Removing the airlock and taking a whiff confirmed the diagnosis: infection of some kind. It smelled kind of metallic, and simply "off." So, I poured it out.

Sucks to have to do that to five gallons of beer, but at least I hadn't bottled it yet. (I had sanitized my bottled today, though.)

So what went wrong? It's tough to say for sure. First off, the pumpkin was old—it had been in the freezer since last November or so. And when it thawed, it sat in the fridge for an extra day or so. Another possibility arises from when I was racking the beer from the primary to the secondary fermenter—I added the spices and vanilla at that time, to see how they would come across in the finished product. (My previous pumpkin beers had the spices added at the boil or at bottling time.) So something could have been introduced then.

Or perhaps it was just a random infection; sometimes they happen—the carboy isn't completely sanitized somehow, or something went wrong early on and didn't show up til the end. I've only had one other batch go bad like that and have to be poured out, and that infection didn't show up until a few weeks after bottling; it was a viscous infection like this one, only growing in the bottom half of the bottles (rather than floating at the top).

At any rate, sucks to lose a beer. Check out the pictures below (and maybe other brewers reading this will have some insight into just what type of infection this was from seeing it):