Archives : 2010 : January
Liquid Solutions is closing
January 31st, 2010I saw this news last week but hadn’t really had time to fully process or address it: online beer retailer Liquid Solutions is closings its doors.
It is with a heavy heart that I am closing the business down after nine years of operation. We are shutting down the website and liquidating our entire inventory out of the warehouse. We are selling all beer, mead and ciders at 10-30% below cost. Hundreds of great beers are available. For a list of products see the post below. Come to the warehouse early for the best selection.
There is also a list of beers available for liquidation, but if you’re able to go there’s no guarantee that any of these will be still available.
Beyond that, of course, is a deeper regret on seeing the site shuttered; while the site itself was a little rough around the edges, it was still incomparable as far as online beer stores go, both in selection and with their vintage auctions. Not to mention that they offered an affiliate program—as regular visitors here have undoubtedly noticed. That alone put them ahead of other online stores I’ve come across.
Definitely a loss to the internet beer community, and they will be missed.
Hop Press: To Age or Not To Age
January 31st, 2010In case you missed it yesterday, my Hop Press articles is a meditation on the aging of beer.
When does the aging end and the drinking begin? Do you follow the Pliny school of thought, or the Reserve Series? Lately I’ve been drifting a bit from the Reserve Series column to the Pliny column: beer is meant to be drank. But there are some styles of beer that are worth aging; it’s not an absolute either way for me.
Cream Ale Week: Terrapin Golden Ale
January 29th, 2010
Even though they call it “Golden Ale,” Terrapin Beer‘s Golden Ale does in fact fit the Cream Ale style bill—and the ratings sites both classify it as such. Intrigued, I contacted Terrapin to find out if they would provide a sample for review; they generously sent two bottles to me. (They in fact arrived just this week—in the nick of time!)
Terrapin is based in Atlanta Athens, Georgia (updated—see comments, and you’d think I’d do my homework more diligently), and this may well be my first Georgia craft beer. So far it’s a nice introduction.
The spec sheet they included with the package indicates an alcohol content of 5.3% by volume (the website says 5%), and has an interesting grain bill: 2-Row Pale, Munich, Vienna, Malted Wheat, Flaked Barley. (The site indicates Carapils as well, but it’s not on the sheet.) The wheat is what caught my eye; it’s not a component of Cream Ales I’ve seen much in commercial beers (though I’ve used in it my own recipe), though it would help to lighten the body and aid head retention.
Appearance: Hazy honey-gold in color with one finger of ivory head.
Smell: Nice malty nose, toasty and a touch floral. A mild fruitiness as well… mango or something tropical?
Taste: It’s got a tart bite punctuated by a wheaty bread crust flavor and a touch of green apple. Tart enough to be dry but not off-putting—a nice thirst-quenching quality to it.
Mouthfeel: Light, slightly puckery, effervescent with a tart, dry finish.
Overall: Definitely grabs you, in a good way—lots of character for a light beer.
On BeerAdvocate, it scores an overall grade of B-. On RateBeer, it scores 2.75 out of 5, and is in their 24th percentile.
Cream Ale Week: New Glarus Spotted Cow
January 29th, 2010The most-rated beer for the Cream Ale category on both BeerAdvocate and RateBeer comes from Wisconsin, specifically the town of New Glarus: Spotted Cow, from (fittingly enough) New Glarus Brewing. As it happens, it may also be Wisconsin’s best-known beer—it’s certainly the flagship beer for the brewery.
At 4.8% alcohol by volume it’s a true session ale. Here’s their description:
Cask conditioned ale has been the popular choice among brews since long before prohibition. We continue this pioneer spirit with our Wisconsin farmhouse ale. Brewed with flaked barley and the finest Wisconsin malts. We even give a nod to our farmers with a little hint of corn.
Naturally cloudy we allow the yeast to remain in the bottle to enhance fullness of flavors, which cannot be duplicated otherwise.
Normally only available in Wisconsin, I was able to acquire some just to be able to review it for Cream Ale Week.
Appearance: Golden yellow with a bit of haze; two fingers of fine white head.
Smell: Crisp wheat and a touch of sweet corn. Bread yeast, slightly grassy.
Taste: French bread crust, wheat and a bit of sweet green grass. Fairly clean and crisp, tiny notes of hops and a little mineral-y.
Mouthfeel: Light and crisp with a pleasing mineral-sweetish afterbite.
Overall: I think this is pretty prototypical of the Cream Ale style, light and sweet and grassy but very clean. It would be a good go-to session beer and I can see how it’s a big seller.
On BeerAdvocate, it scores an overall grade of B. On RateBeer, it scores 3.03 out of 5 and is in their 49th percentile.
Cream Ale Week: Summer Solstice Cerveza Crema
January 28th, 2010It would be hard to talk about Cream Ales on the West Coast and not mention Anderson Valley’s Summer Solstice Cerveza Crema. It’s a Cream Ale that actually achieves a creamy flavor (and aroma)—though it’s through the addition of a mystery spice. So it’s sort of a hybrid of a hybrid style…
No matter—this is still one very tasty beer that I find enjoyable to drink.
It’s 5.6% alcohol by volume and only 4 IBUs (according to Anderson Valley’s website).
Appearance: Substantially darker than the other cream ales—amber honey-colored. Generous off-white head.
Smell: Spiciness that’s a bit coriander and a bit… nutmeg? Has kind of a creamy aroma that makes me think so. Clean malty notes.
Taste: Real nice creamy-spice character that’s nutmeg-y and something else I can’t identify (cardamom?). Mild hops and tasty honey malts move into a nice toasty-biscuit aftertaste.
Mouthfeel: Light-to-medium-bodied with a tangy-spicy bite on the tongue.
Overall: Tasty and rich; I’d like to know what spice(s) they incorporate and what gives it the creamy flavors. A little heavy for a traditional Cream Ale but very enjoyable.
On BeerAdvocate, it scores an overall grade of B. On RateBeer, it scores 3.1 out of 5 and is in their 55th percentile.
Cream Ale Week: Laughing Dog Cream Ale
January 27th, 2010Laughing Dog Brewing is one of those Pacific Northwest microbreweries you may or may not have heard of; located in the Idaho panhandle (way up north) in the town of Ponderay, the brewery has been making something of a splash in the PNW for their Alpha Dog Imperial IPA. This week, however, I’m interested in their Laughing Dog Cream Ale.
Here’s their process:
Laughing Dog Brewing’s Cream Ale is a traditional cream ale fermented with both ale and lager yeast, this gives us the creamy smoothness of an ale with a nice dry crisp finish.
We start with premium American grown 2 row pale malted barley, add a touch of German pils malt then Australian malt for color and flavor. Finally only choice Northwest grown Hops are added. After carefully fermenting for 2 weeks, we quickly chill the beer and filter.
It’s all-malt, and they don’t mention what variety of hops or yeast is used. No mention of alcohol content either, but around 5% by volume is probably a good guess.
Appearance: Pale, bright yellow and very clear—very lively with a huge head of beaten egg white building up, thick and rocky.
Smell: Grainy with a bit of wheat, light with a fruity note. A touch of earthy hops.
Taste: Earthy and fruity at first, brings to mind a green apple or a not-quite-ripe apricot, maybe. Nice depth of character, curious as to the hops (and the yeast) used… a bit of a bite. I keep coming back to “earthy”.
Mouthfeel: Light and crisp and just a hint puckery.
Overall: Crisp, light, gassy, and it reminds me of a homebrewed apricot ale I made way back when (in the mid-90s)—it has the same kind of earthy apricot character that I remember from that.
On BeerAdvocate, it scores an overall grade of B-. On RateBeer, it scores 3.26 out of 5 and is in their 69th percentile.
Cream Ale Week: The origins and style of Cream Ale
January 26th, 2010Cream Ale is classified by the BJCP as a “Hybrid Beer”: category 6A. It’s classified as a hybrid because it was originally developed as an ale version of the American light lager that was popular in the latter half of the nineteenth century:
An ale version of the American lager style. Produced by ale brewers to compete with lager brewers in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States. Originally known as sparkling or present use ales, lager strains were (and sometimes still are) used by some brewers, but were not historically mixed with ale strains. Many examples are kräusened to achieve carbonation. Cold conditioning isn’t traditional, although modern brewers sometimes use it.
There’s a bit of murkiness surrounding the issue; I’ve read that Cream Ales variously were:
- Brewed with ale yeasts but cold-conditioned like lagers;
- Brewed with lager yeast at ale temperatures;
- Brewed with a blend of ale and lager yeasts;
- A blend of ale and lager (finished products).
Randy Mosher in Radical Brewing offers some insight:
As the American brewing industry shifted into the hands of German immigrants familiar with the Altbiers (ales) of Cologne/Köln, brewers cast pale ales in a Continental mold rather than an English one. To my mind, there is little theoretical difference between Kölsch, cream ale, and blonde ale. (p. 80)
And:
The cream ale style is a kind of amalgam of the English-derived American ale style, as brewed by German brewmasters in American lager breweries. It’s my view that many of them simply applied their experience with German ales such as Kölschbier, and voilà, Cream Ale. (pp. 90-91)
From a style and recipe formulation perspective, we’re looking at a very light ale, yellow to gold in color, and generally of “session beer” alcohol levels—anywhere from 4% to 6% and possibly higher. It’s mild on the tongue, crisp and refreshing (often from cold-conditioning), a good lawnmower or summertime beer.
Brewing these beers with corn and/or sugar as an adjunct is acceptable, and even common—and keeping with the style’s historical roots. Understandably, it’s this fact that also gives people a bit of a hang-up when confronting the style: corn is considered to be less-than-desirable in beer—it’s the kind of cheap grain the megabreweries will use in their beers, for instance, and we all know what sort of stigma that carries.
Using corn sugar in a (homebrewed) recipe for Cream Ale is acceptable, up to 20% of the fermentables. When I was formulating my own Cream Ale recipe I settled on one pound of corn sugar and four pounds of dried malt extract, and that seems to work out well.
Of course, many brewers are brewing all-malt version of the style and are foregoing the corn altogether.
Finally, for the numbers-and-stats people, here are the BJCP’s guidelines for the style (you know, if you’re planning on brewing for competition or anything. If not, carry on):
| Vital Statistics: | OG: 1.042 – 1.055 |
| IBUs: 15 – 20 | FG: 1.006 – 1.012 |
| SRM: 2.5 – 5 | ABV: 4.2– 5.6% |
Cream Ale Week: Kiwanda Cream Ale
January 25th, 2010The first Cream Ale I picked up to review this week is an award-winning beer from (big surprise) Oregon: Pelican Pub & Brewery‘s Kiwanda Cream Ale. Pelican is one of the top brewers in Oregon right now, and it’s not much of a stretch to say Kiwanda Cream Ale is one of the best around for the style; it has won a number of medals at the Great American Beer Festival and Draft Magazine even named it one of their 25 best beers of 2008.
What’s amazing is how simple the recipe is (from Pelican’s site):
- Two-row malt
- Carapils malt
- Flaked barley
- Mt. Hood hops
Plus yeast and water and that’s it. But once you have a pint in front of you it’s obvious why it’s a top-rated Cream Ale.
It’s 5.1% alcohol by volume, just a tad over session strength (for certain values of “session”), and very easy drinking.
Appearance: Clear and golden yellow with thick fluffy white head. Effervescent beading of tiny bubbles off the bottom.
Smell: Mellow floral hop aromas, a touch citrus and fruity. Clean malty notes follow and a touch of raw wheat.
Taste: Flavorful and toasty—more than meets the eye! It’s got a luscious malt-forward blend of biscuit and granola and toasted wheat, and there’s a light but noticeable spicy hop presence backing it.
Mouthfeel: Clean with—yes—a creamy feel to it in the mouth, more medium-bodied than the eye would suggest.
Overall: Excellent and satisfying. Eminently drinkable and flavorful enough that you just want to keep drinking. A standard?
On BeerAdvocate, it scores an overall grade of B+. On RateBeer, it scores 3.11 out of 5 and is in their 54th percentile.
Cream Ale Week
January 25th, 2010Welcome to Cream Ale Week! All this week I’ll be reviewing and writing about Cream Ales, the light “hybrid” style of American golden or blonde beers (why it’s considered something of a hybrid style is something I’ll cover this week as well).
Why Cream Ales in the middle of winter? Well, why not? I’m drinking strong beers as much as the next guy, but at the same time it seems like every other news item is “strongest beer this” and “barrel-aged that”—sometimes you just need a breather, and take time to celebrate a session beer.
Plus I’ve been interested in the style lately; simple and unassuming, many might turn up their nose at it because it’s similar to the “fizzy yellow beer” of the industrial macro lager—and if so, they’re missing out. A Cream Ale might be a fairly basic recipe to brew, but it’s unforgiving of mistakes (i.e., easy to screw up!). Getting it right is an accomplishment.
So read along this week, and seek out some Cream Ales to try yourself. You might be surprised.
Stone’s latest collaboration
January 22nd, 2010When I posted my interview with Greg Koch of Stone Brewing, mention was made of upcoming collaboration brews Stone was spearheading. This month it’s with 21st Amendment Brewing and Firestone Walker Brewing, and the Stone Blog has a good writeup of what was brewed and the overall process:
Shaun O’Sullivan of 21st Amendment and Matt Brynildson of Firestone Walker joined our very own Head Brewer Mitch Steele for one of our coolest collaborations yet. Since this was an all-California brewing team, they decided to expand upon that theme by using indigenous California ingredients in the beer, including chia seeds, pink peppercorns, fennel seeds, and 35 lbs. of Mission figs Shaun brought from a friends’ farm.
The result of this momentous collaboration will be a strong black ale of distinctly Californian pedigree. Named El Camino (un)Real Black Ale in honor of the historic Spanish mission trail connecting Northern and Southern California, this beer is going to be pitch-black monster loaded with roasty, spicy flavors.
15% of the batch will be fermented in oak barrels, and the beer should clock in at about 80 IBUs. No word yet on alcohol content.
Based on that ingredient list, though, this sounds like it will be a very interesting beer.
Hop Henge (2010)
January 21st, 2010
Tonight I opened up the bottle of Hop Henge that Deschutes sent me a week and a half ago; it’s been staring at me in the fridge as I’ve been contemplating it.
To my mind, Hop Henge is one of the best Imperial (or Double, or maybe to best use Deschutes’ own term, Experimental) IPAs out there: it’s intensely hoppy but not at the expense of the rest of the beer, and it’s not in-your-face with it’s alcohol content, either (8.75% worth). Each year they play around with the formulation a bit—as I understand it, it has as much to do with their processing of the hops (which is indeed “experimental” in nature) as it is with tweaking the recipe.
Hop Henge has been brewed annually beginning in 2006; for fun you might want to go back and read my 2006 review, 2008 review (I somehow missed 2007), and last year’s batch comparison review.
Appearance: Shiny-penny copper with a beige froth of head. Very nice lacing as the drinking progresses.
Smell: Signature Deschutes hopping (of late); green and resiny and a touch of citrus and a touch catty. Brightly and deeply hoppy with a hint of caramel.
Taste: Big and hoppy, full of juicy, fruity bitterness that’s lip-smacking and sticky. Caramel sweetness that reminds me of brown sugar but also the flossy-sugar note of alcohol, a touch cloying. Hop juice. Very tasty and mouth-watering.
Mouthfeel: Full and sticky with a coating, bitter aftertaste.
Overall: Very yummy and deliciously hoppy and really appetizing; perhaps more balanced than what I remember from last year.
(Though interestingly, I still have some Batch #1 bottles from last year that I should open for a mini-vertical, and test whether that’s true.)
On BeerAdvocate, it scores an impressive A-. On RateBeer, it scores an equally impressive 3.87 out of 5 and is in their 98th percentile.
There needs to be a Beer Bloggers Conference
January 19th, 2010It came to my attention that the 2010 Wine Bloggers Conference is coming to Walla Walla, Washington, this June, and it got me reflecting on that fact that there even is a Wine Bloggers Conference. I don’t read any wine blogs (I should probably start) but it seems to me that they’re probably not too much different from beer blogs, at least in concept; so the question that naturally comes to my mind is:
Where’s the Beer Bloggers Conference?
There needs to be one. In fact, it seems like a no-brainer! Now I don’t know jack about organizing such a thing, but I’d gladly participate if someone who knows these things did. I will suggest the location for the first Conference though: Portland, Oregon (of course).
Stan touched upon this topic back in November of 2008; and I just found this thread on the Beer Bloggers forum on Ning asking and discussing this very question from the middle of last year. (Interesting takeaway: it’s possible one may be organized for 2010, in Colorado.)
Abraxus Brewing news
January 19th, 2010You may remember I blogged back in August about Abraxus Brewing, the new microbrewery slated to open in The Dalles. Wondered what was going on with that? So was I, but it had frankly slipped my mind until I received an email from the founder, Ray Bustos:
Currently we on a hiatus because my brewer and partner relocated to northern Washington. I still have plans on opening a brew pub but it will be at least a few years down the road. I’m still brewing test batches, but until I can locate some funding the brewery is on hold.
It’s unfortunate news, but I’m glad to see that he hasn’t given up on it entirely.
Monday morning updates
January 18th, 2010I’ve decided to change up Theme Week a bit starting this month; instead of starting on the third Monday (third full week) of each month, instead it will be the last full week of each month. It’s a minor change, but gives me a bit more time to track down elusive beers (for instance).
The Hop Press is going strong, picking up steam even. I pretty well finished up my overview of the Bend Beer Scene on Saturday, and for a concise table of contents for that series, here it is:
- Part One: Deschutes & Bend Brewing
- Part Two: Cascade Lakes & Silver Moon
- Part Three: McMenamins & 10 Barrel
- Part Four: Three Creeks & The Brew Shop
- Part Five: Beer Bars
I’ll be getting back on the “Beer Hacker Brewing on the Cheap” series again very soon as well; first off will be re-examining some of the cost assumptions I laid out early on—hops are cheaper now, so that equals a nice reduction in brewing costs.
Very Noddy Lager
January 15th, 2010
The final of the four beers that Buckbean Brewing sent to me is their Very Noddy—or more properly, “Doug’s Very Noddy 40th Birthday Lager.”
Ostensibly they are calling this an “Imperial Schwarzbier”—10.5% alcohol and it’s basically a doubled-up version of their Black Noddy:
Brewed specially for owner Doug Booth’s 40th birthday, this Imperial Schwarzbier has twice the malt and hops of our Black Noddy Lager, creating a deep black color, rich, nutty malt flavors and a smooth hop bite. A symphony of balanced intensity!
Unless we see more of this showing up, I think it’s safe to say the Very Noddy is a “reserve” type beer with a limited run. I notice a number of bloggers have received and reviewed it, but there’s not much more about it online.
Appearance: Very black, red at the edges when held to the light, with a substantial head of tan foam.
Smell: Dark but clean; roasted notes and a whiff of dark chocolate.
Taste: Very similar to Black Noddy with a thicker presence of dark chocolate and a touch of alcohol burn. More sweetness to it. Creamy notes, cocoa powder.
Mouthfeel: Medium-full bodied, still relatively light, and finishes fairly clean—a bit lip-sticky and sweet.
Overall: Very tasty, different—they’ve pumped up the Schwarzbier to strength, but is there much difference with a Baltic Porter?
This beer is limited enough that it’s not on BeerAdvocate yet. And RateBeer only has 8 reviews, scoring 3.22 out of 5 but not enough for a percentile.
