yanaminicus – Page 9 – What I Learned Tomorrow

Oskar Blues Pinner IPA

Tasty, almost salty, canned IPA in the wry-humor Oskar tradition. 4.9% alk here and not terribly hoppy. Can’s outside claims this as a “throwback” IPA, so perhaps that means “before people went goofy about hops” and “before nutsos started trying to out-do each other in alcohol content.” So this is a mildly hopped IPA, in modern comparison, just more hoppy than regular beer so you can tell it’s an IPA.

But there is that saltiness. Had a few IPA’s where the citrus and evergreen nearly combined into a salt flavor, nudged right up against that border. But this one falls over the line. It’s not distracting enough to make the beer wretched, but salt does some weird things to other tastes. It makes a beer’s natural bready taste cross over into crackery. Makes pine taste like resin and makes citrus taste like blood.

No kidding, drinking this i thought a couple times “hey, that kinda tastes like blood.” So no, i won’t buy this again. Will enjoy the other five cans, but will think twice about spending $10 on another sixer of a different variety of Oskar Blues beer. This one rates a 4.9 in my book.

Samuel Adams Rebel Rouser Double IPA

Sam Adams' Rebel Rouser 2X IPA — Sam Adams’ Rebel Rouser 2X IPA

There’s an eye-opener. 85 IBU’s, 8.4% alk, and the outside of the can has all kinds of other descriptors like “West Coast Style” and “unapologetically hoppy.” Speaking of the can, this is the fourth Sam Adams “Rebel” IPA i’ve tried, and it should get mentioned that all the cans themselves are top-of-the-line hunks of aluminum. Much more solid and sturdy than most cans these days, and it sounds like a small matter, and it is really, but it’s just a subtle indication that this is a high-class beer operation.

But the horror of that Grapefruit IPA still clouds my opinion of Sam Adams as a whole, and it will for years to come. Apologize, Sam, or i can’t buy any of your stuff anymore. I still shudder when no one’s watching.

Now on to this Double IPA… High alcohol, absurdly hoppy, like giving your mouth a hop bath even though it insisted it was clean already. There’s no slinking around the corners with this one, either you face the hops head-on or they’ll slap your face like you just pinched their sister. Not for dilletantes, this one.

Pine and orange, according to the label, but also pine-bark and rhododendron roots, green berries and scored kafir leaves, this is so hoppy that it nudges right up against the boundary into salty. Drinking this, even your burps come out like Pine-Sol. Drink too much, and i’m sure that you won’t have to buy Lysol… your upchuck will surely leave the toidy sparkling clean.

The beer-body side of the equation is very nice, someone at SA has learned a thing or three about which malts you want if you’re going for the halo of Hoppier Than Thou. Nearly a German body to it, but instead of the sour they’ve brought in the tart. It’s a pretty good beer, and would have an 8.1, but there is the now-automatic deduction for all Sam Adams beers, until they apologize publicly for making that grapefruit IPA. So this one gets a 7.1.

Genesee Brew House Pilsner

Another crafty brew from the enormous and otherwise uncrafty Genny Brewery. To lift a wet finger to the beerworld winds, it seems like the craze for IPAs is dwindling down, and the next craze, though uncertain at this date, might just be Pilseners. Crisp light-body beers, lower in strength than IPA, lighter in hops, and all that makes the brewer’s art stand out in higher relief.

This here is a good example, though i admit that i have not been jumping all over the Pilsener wagon, but this is indeed crisp, lightly hopped and low-alk at 5.0%. As said before, i prefer a lager, so in the dark ages before crafts, i’d usually go for the lager Bud over the pilsener Miller. The pils heartland in America was always the Upper Midwest, where North Germans settled heavily… think Milwaukee and Detroit.

So with my limited comparison skills, this brew blows the doors off of the Miller i know and remember. This is hoppier, likely a nod to the current fashion in overall brewing, and it’s got real beer taste, which an 80s megabrewer had to forego in the rush to get as much beer as possible out onto the loading dock.

I like this, but at $9 for a sixer, and being neither a lager nor IPA, i probably won’t buy it again. Plenty of things i totally adore are only a buck more per 6. All considered, i can give this a hearty 7.0 for quality and for killing the preconceived notion of a pilsener, even though they spell it “Pilsner” on the label, heh.

Samuel Adams Rebel Cascade IPA

OK, i have to deduct one full point from my rating here, because of the horror of SA’s Grapefruit IPA which refuses to leave me, even after a couple weeks. And i’m sticking to my promise: i will never buy any Samuel Adams product again, until they publicly apologize for putting grapefruit juice into beer.

This is a good IPA, however. At a strong 7.3% alk, with 76 IBU’s, and i now know what an IBU is, thanks to an article in a local weekly about local craft breweries. It’s a real beer, with fully malted barley and finished with darn heavy hops, but it does go a little overboard on the hops, a problem which SA’s exquisite 48º Latitude IPA does not suffer from.

Nicely drinkable here, smooth texture in the mouth and rich beer body underneath the cloak of hops. But that 7.3% keeps it from being a “kickin back” beer. There’s really no point in running that race anymore, the Hoppier Than Thou race is over and Sierra Nevada has won. But this one got a mention on the final leaderboard, and that’s something to cheer up someone’s Grandma.

After deducting the Sam Adams Grapefruit Penalty, this Cascade IPA rates a 7.2 for quality brewing and attention to ingredients.

Kona Fire Rock Pale Ale

Kona's Fire Rock Pale Ale — Kona’s Fire Rock Pale Ale

Now the fourth and final Kona beer to try. A 5.8% alk pale ale, the label says it has a coppery color, though i’d call it more dark yellow than coppery. They still win for great bottles, it’s just that whatever’s inside them is, to be charitable, less than awesome. This one’s probably the best of the four, at least in this one the distasteful additive to Kona beers is masked better by a fuller beer body.

But it’s still there. That bitter ingredient that tastes like rat poison, a much different bitter than normal beer-flavor bitterness. They’re adding something to all the Kona beers, assumedly to make them stand out in the crowd, but whatever it is, it tastes terrible. Someone at Kona made a bad decision, and a side effect of that bad decision is having their beer made in Memphis, Tennessee while the label talks about catching waves and watching awesome volcanoes.

Where, exactly, does one surf in Memphis? How many volcanoes are an hour’s drive from Tennessee? My last Kona beer to taste and review, and definitely my last Kona beer to ever taste at all. Maybe beer brewed in their home shop on Hawai’i is better, but the foul thing they’ve got licensees making in their name in New Hampshire, Tennessee, Washington and Oregon is just an embarrassment.

Rating for this one is 2.9 and i advise every person to avoid all Kona Brewing beers.

Kona Castaway IPA

Kona's Castaway IPA — Kona’s Castaway IPA

Another swing and a miss from Kona. Not bat-piss, but again there’s that unexplained un-beer-ish bitterness. There’s something going into Kona beers as a flavoring additive which is inconsistent with beer. Whatever, i’ll never buy a Kona beer again. In the meanwhile, light body and muddled hops in this 6% alk IPA, it would rate a 5-something, if it wasn’t for that distasteful additive, whatever it is. As it stands, this can only be rated at 2.8 for a disastrous choice of unnatural flavoring.

On the other hand, the bottles and labels are just gorgeous, and i chose this one as a keeper, now and forever proudly displayed on a perch atop my plates cupboard, right between a Sapporo Reserve can and a Fiedler’s Bock Im Stein earthenware swingtop.

Kona Big Wave Golden Ale

Better than the terrifyingly poor Longboard Lager, the golden ale offering from Kona is not as bad, a very light brew at a light 4.4% alk, and light in color. Tart hops and the thin body make this a good one for a Summer day, and that’s every day in Hawai’i. There’s a little bitterness on the backend, for god knows what reason, but it’s not beer bitterness, it’s like contamination bitterness.

It can’t be a mistake, all four of the Kona beers in the sampler 12 have this same nasty chemical taste to them. Have to assume that they’re adding something to the beer to give it some sort of “stand out” taste to set Kona apart from a crowded field of new beers, but whatever that additive is, it does not belong in beer.

This preparation rates at 2.7 but i can’t recommend it for anyone to drink.

Kona Longboard Lager

Kona's Longboard Lager — Kona’s Longboard Lager

Not much to it. Light for a lager, a savory taste, slightly spicy, a hint of sweetness. Decent beer, but not much to write home about. This one is my first taste of a Kona beer, and though they win an award for very nice bottles, the label makes me suspicious. It lists 5 towns where they brew this beer, 4 of them not in Hawai’i, so we don’t know if this qualifies as a craft beer or if it’s one of those zombie brews which was bought out by a major player, only to be simplified, bastardized, and mass produced by industrial drones in a commercial food production environment.

Can’t say i recommend this one, and not just because of the suspicious label. Mostly, this reminds me of the weak lagers prevalent in the 1980s. Almost a perfumy taste, like licking the wrong kind of toad. Can’t give this more than a 2.2 rating, for confusing natural sweetness with an incomplete fermentation.

WWSD: Keystone XL Pipeline

What Would Solomon Do about the Keystone XL pipeline?

What the hell is wrong with people? Left-leaners hate the Keystone XL pipeline because it has to do with oil, which they hate, even though a pipeline is always a far better way to move crude oil than trucks and trains, and we are just not going to stop using oil at this point in the game, now are we? Might as well do it the safest way possible, which means a pipe in the ground, not 310,000 railroad tankcars which all need refined oil to make their wheels move.

And right-wingnuts are so rabid to get this one particular pipeline built, that you’d think tar-sands oil was shining with a halo gifted from God The Father. Somehow, choosing to suck happily at one particular energy sector’s gnarled teat instead of some other random energy source has become a “conservative value” and anyone who doesn’t agree with that arbitrary choice must “not love America.” Trust your gut: Sarah “Drillbaby” Palin really was an idiot.

What the hell is wrong with people? The problem is not that there is no room for compromise, between the zero-tolerance Left and the liberty-or-death Right. The problem is that neither side has a player willing or able to concoct that compromise. What would Solomon do? I’ll tell ya what Solomon would do, he’d take a step back and ask: “Hmmm, what is being proposed, and how does that address my people’s needs?”

The Keystone XL proposal is to gather a workforce of about a hundred thousand guys (and girls too i’m sure) and train them in the art of building a very long pipeline. Welders, trenchers, architects, surveyors, roadbuilders, and a whole bunch of other people. After it’s built, about a hundred people will stay on to operate it. Solomon would ask: “How could we, as a nation, use a large workforce of trained pipeline people, located in the center of the continent?”

And there’s your answer: we use them to build another pipeline, to solve another one of the nation’s pressing problems. The drought in California has been going on for too many years, to be considered a ‘passing phase’ anymore. And snowfall from Minnesota to Maine is trending upwards. The Great Lakes region will have no shortage of water in the coming decades, and California’s Central Valley is one of the world’s most fertile patches of soil, as long as it gets watered.

The Solomonic answer to the impasse is simple. Greenlight the Keystone XL pipeline which will make the developers pretty good money. In return for tax breaks, the developers must also build a pipeline for water from Duluth in Minnesota (on Lake Superior) to Salt Lake City. The water pipeline would be a few hundred miles longer than the Keystone XL, but labor costs will be lower, since they already have a large trained workforce who just built a long pipeline.

Material costs will be lower, for piping water, something much less volatile than oil. Startup costs would be negligible, and you don’t need a battery of environmental studies for piping fresh water. So there’s no reason why a Duluth-to-Utah pipeline should cost more than half of the Keystone XL pipeline.

From Salt Lake City, California and the federal government would chip in the costs to get the pipeline the last 600 miles to Sacramento, California. And from Sacramento, we can water a world-class breadbasket. The gov’t just hires all the pipebuilders right there already in Salt Lake City, and again they are much, much cheaper when a trained workforce is already in place.

The lefties get safer oil transport and an agricultural boom in an area hard hit by global warming. The righties get their beloved oil, and the right to boast for a couple decades that “our compromise saved the food supply.”

And there’s more. Minnesota would give the water, but they’d get a huge boom in mining iron ore, right there in the mountains next to Duluth, to make all that pipe. All the states along the way would demand a faucet, and that’s completely a good idea. Water used for irrigation across 800 miles of heartland will boost the economy nationwide, and as a nice ecological side effect, that water will sink in and replenish the Oglala Aquifer, extending it’s lifespan by centuries. A big waystation bringing fresh water into Salt Lake City would do amazing things for the desert, not only in Utah but across northern Nevada as well.

A classic two-birds solution, solving two real national problems. Politically, both birds get to crow about something they already have a hardon for. Economically, solving water issues in both Utah and California in one swoop generates enough GDP growth to pay for the federal investment on this project in less than a decade. Environmentally, you get an explosion of plants and trees across an arid landscape, billions of tons of green plants which sit there all day and eat up carbon dioxide. Water at the bottom of Lake Superior does not eat up carbon dioxide. Don’t forget the national security angle, which is girded by securing native supplies of both food and energy.

Finally, if we do this now, as in right away, then the gov’t portion of the cost is payed back at today’s ridiculously low interest rates. Wait a couple years, and the interest costs would rise badly.

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale

Sierra Nevada's Pale Ale — Sierra Nevada’s Pale Ale

The label calls it a classic, and there you have it. It’s become almost pedestrian, as Sam Adams Boston Lager. SN has trotted out variations of this brew, catering to the recent hop madness of the USA, but this one is still a masterpiece of the craft beer movement. Light body, a touch darker than pale, a well-planned beer recipe executed with time-worn expertise, and they obey the Rheinheitsgebot even though they don’t have to.

Taste is medium in body, medium in alk at 5.6%, and hops well in attendance but not sphinct-puckeringly powerful. The single species of hops, Cascade, gives you fruits and the sweetness of the medium body makes those fruit notes into actual undertones. You can’t do that without knowing what the heck you’re doing, and by now SN does know. Rated at 9.0 because there are other exquisite strokes of luck from other breweries, but if my ratings were based on consistant quality barrel after barrel for 35 years, then naturally this one would be a 10.