Beer

so I can finally post my pictures of the bottleshare I went to. Somehow, I'm still alive. This was among 40-50 of the best beer traders in SoCal. No, I did not try everything, but I did try a shitton of beer. Here are some pics and reviews:

The final boneyard
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This was, by far, the highlight for me
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I missed out on the Armand season beers, but I've had them before. When I got there, I was promptly handed a taster of Crianza Helena. This was only brewed once to honor a birth of someone's daughter. Cantillon took a lambic and aged it in cognac and bordeaux barrels. Fucking perfect. Dry, acidic, bright, lots of barnyard and horse blanket but not enamel peeling. I know I will never have that beer again, so I savored it.

Drie Fonteinen Zenne Frontera is the hot shit right now, and I was disappointed by it. Something in there gave the beer an "off" character. Hard to put my finger on. More pictures...

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Look at all that De Garde and a Veritas vertical
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De Garde is one of my favorite breweries to come out in the past year, especially if you like sour ales. L'Hiver Melange was a bourbon barrel sour that was downright intimidating. If I had just had that, it'd be fine, but it was way too much among everything else. It was boozy, sour, hulking...loved it. Their Passionfruit Bu, a passionfruit berlinner weisse, was another favorite. Super dry and fruity. Loved it

All dat Cantillon...
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Getting to try different vintages of Iris and Lou Pepe Kriek & Gueuze was another highlight. 2015 Fou Foune was fucking straight Dole juice. Loved it. The beers I brought were by OEC and Casey. OEC is this tiny brewery out of Connecticut that is putting out great shit. I brought one of their Experimentalis beers, brewed with peaches and herbs. Loved it. I also brought their Spontalis, which is a spontaneously fermented ale, and it was right up there with the Belgians. Casey is a small batch saison and wild ale maker out of Colorado. I brought their standard saison and East Bank, a honey saison. Both were fantastic.

What I love about this event is everybody knows everybody and is super friendly and generous with their pours. It's unreal. I always feel like a kid at the adults table every year when we do this.

Also the food was fucking killer. The host made homemade stromboli and pulled pork. Fucking killed it. I ate so much goddamn food I had to.
 
Assuming it gets the usual Boulevard distribution, there's a collaboration with Cigar City for all you guys who never get their beers in your area. It's called Collaboration No. 5 Tropical Pale Ale.
 
Damn, I'm really jealous. Wish I could participate!

Jenn, I can't wait to pick up some of that, but I haven't seen it around in MA yet. Sounds very good.
 
It has a very not flashy packaging of mostly plain white so it doesn't jump out at all. I almost missed it entirely.
 
I'm not really on board the whole white IPA train. They can be decent, but they lose a lot of what makes other types of IPAs great for me. I think that they're kinda trendy now since most of the bigger craft brewers and even things like Blue Moon are pushing them hard, but they just aren't doing it for me.
 
I agree. Saranac's version is one of the best, weirdly, however. They're not really known for good beer in general so that amuses me. Actually, speaking of Blue Moon, theirs wasn't bad either. Pretty enjoyable. Most of the ones made by better breweries tend to lose sight of the IPA characteristics for some reason, drowning the beer in unbalanced bitterness along with that chewy wheat malt thing going on and the sometimes weird, mismatched spicing. Black IPAs miss the mark for me a lot, as well.
 
I think a lot of it has to do, obviously, with the ingredients. It's easy for the bitter hops to clash with certain malts. I actually really liked Stones Sublimely Self Righteous, and thought their 15th anniversary coffee black IPA was fucking awesome. I like them when I can't decide between a stout or an IPA

But yeah it's easy to do a bad one
 
So, it's been a while since I updated on what's going on with homebrew stuff. I think last time I checked in here, we were putting together a bourbon barrel-fermented black gose. Despite having very little idea of what we were doing other than what we wanted it to end up being, it came out very good and is probably my personal favorite beer we've made yet. Perfectly sour, a little roasty with some light coffee notes and a slight salty aftertaste. A heavy body, mostly due to the wheat and a decently high final gravity (it only fermented to like 1.014 or so and started in the high 1.040s, but all of that fermentation was from lactic bacteria; I don't think any saccharomyces took hold even though we pitched a vial!) really rounds it out. Do I think it's a "gose"? No, but it's an awesome, weirdly-clean dark sour that drinks easy but packs a very flavorful and tart punch. Love it.

Recently, we have a few things going on. Several months ago at work, I came up with the basic recipe idea for what would eventually become our imperial smoked maple coffee oatmeal stout, Appetite. For this, I wanted us to test the limits of what we could do, flavor-wise, in a big stout on a small, 5 gallon scale. Using ~10% each of smoked malt and flaked oats plus a hefty dose of regular malted barley and plenty of roasty, dark specialty grains, we eventually collected a good 4 gallons of 1.090 wort which has since fermented down to 1.019. Since we use the alternate ABV calculation for beers with higher (1.075+, usually) OGs, the beer should come out to be just over 10%! This weekend, we are going to be dosing a few small, measured samples of the pre-bottled version and dosing each with slightly different amounts of concentrated cold-brewed coffee from Pat's work (as he just so happens to be the coldbrew guru at a small coffee company around here) and picking the one we feel is most well-balanced to scale up and throw in to the beer before bottling. In terms of the maple addition, we've decided to forgo maple extract even though we've heard it's probably the best way to get "maple flavor", as we've had decent luck before by priming (carbonating in bottle) with reduced maple sap, which we still have some of from a previous beer, our maple rye robust porter from like 6 months ago.

On top of this, we collected some extra wort during the brewing process for Appetite in order to do a smaller beer which we've termed Cinnamon Rauch Brunch. As the name implies, this small, 1 gallon batch of beer contains an entire box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal, which was strained out pre-boil. It's hopped with Amarillo and East Kent Goldings, and a couple cinnamon sticks were also added towards the end of its separate boil. This has also finished fermenting, but the sample we took was very weird. Kinda dumb, because it smelled so good when it was just wort. We shall see how it comes out with some time off the yeast and in bottles, but we'll only get like 8-9 bottles anyway. It was a funny experiment even if it comes out dumb. :p

Since we'd done nothing with the barrel since removing the black gose mentioned earlier, we wanted to fill that up with something else as quickly as possible. For this particular usage of the barrel, we decided we wanted to just go ahead and fuck it up with Brett. Thus, we wanted to create a beer that would do well in a barrel with the now-ingrained microflora/bacteria from the gose, along with the intensely funky character that Brettanomyces-refermented/conditioned beers tend to have. To that effect, we created a grisette (multi-grain session saison) recipe which would be fully fermented with regular sacch. yeast, then transferred to the barrel and pitched with Brett. Since we're just going maximal and wrecking shit, we went with Omega Labs' All the Bretts yeast strain, a "specialty" strain containing something dumb like 12 varieties of Brett. Yeah, whatever. The beer came out too strong to really be a "grisette" (and I used El Dorado hops in addition to the traditional Saaz cuz reasons), but fuck it. I'm two years into brewing and already becoming a nihilist about it, so that's just par for the course, :lol:. Anyway, the base beer tastes fucking amazing, and hopefully it'll get sour and funky and weird, THEN we can finally use the barrel to make consistent sours. That is the real hope.

While typing this, btw, I have been drinking a bottle of our witbier. It was supposed to be a rhubarb wit, but we came drastically below the required amount of rhubarb to be able to notice it. So, while it DID technically age on rhubarb for a few weeks, it doesn't taste like it did at all. Hopped with Nelson Sauvin. Super Riesling like grape skin notes on top of the traditional lightly-fruity, slightly sulfuric, spicy and wheaty base beer. Love it. So good!
 
Call me old fashioned, but I like just a straightforward pale ale, IPA, Belgian, or stout. The wildest I'll get is additions of fruit, coffee, vanilla, lactose, or maple
 
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