At last, it’s time for the highly anticipated Sculpin. One ugly damned fish on the label, i think if i caught one i’d just lash my pole up and down on the deck until that nasty thing fell off the hook. Then i’d kick the squishy remains overboard. But the IPA named for the thing comes highly recommended. When i went looking for an answer to what a “session” IPA is, the Goog threw me to a website with small useful articles about all kinds of beer terms. And there, a short list of IPA’s, the ones that writer thought were top-notch.
Ballast Point’s Sculpin IPA was on that list. So here is me, with a sculpin in my glass, at long last. Damned expensive, $15 for a six-pack, so had to wait until i found one on a pick-a-six rack. COlor is a shade dimmer than golden, and the noseful of grapefruit in the glass portends well here. There’s bubbles, nozzled out of nowhere at a few points inside the glass, so we know it’s carbonated, which will be a nice change from those Uinta beers.
And a sip o’ sculp… ooo, that’s nice. Creamy, hoppy, balanced beer body is not overwhelmed. A smidge of piney hops, taste is less fruity than the smell was, and the fruit notes are a little more sweet than tart. At 7.0% alk, this is not a minnow, but not a whale either. That sweetness makes the hops more floral than zesty, and make no mistake, the hops are center stage. The beer body lurks in the wake, not obliterated but not jumping out in front of the bowsprit.
This one has the “balance.” Body just sturdy enough to support hi-hopping, alcohol is just high enough to keep volatile oils squeezed from the hops in solution. Near the end of the glass, the hops turn more piney and the body peeks out a touch more. Not a Top Fiver, but a very concentrated attempt at making a great IPA. Easy to drink despite 7.0% and the flavors don’t overwhelm the experience. Mighty fine beer, better than BP’s Big Eye IPA, i’ll give this a respectable 8.5 for high hops and good balance.
Continuing on the tour of crap beer, another light but this one’s from the maker of my beloved Black & Tan. And actually it’s not the terriblest. The color is nearly amber, but we can assume that this is caramel food coloring. Like most lights, this one’s about 100 calories per dose, or fashionably just under that, 99 in this instance.
And in this instance the taste is probably the best light i’ve had, but that’s like saying it’s the dumbest rock in the quarry. It’s a light beer so it’s watery, doesn’t smell like beer, rather some kind of pungent soap. The taste is beer-water so don’t be fooled by the color. A step above some lights, on its own this beer-like liquid rates 2.3.
Not for solo consumption, but i bought it for this anti-quest, and it works just fine for blending with YB&T. They are cousins, after all. And they kiss like it. Together they make a beer which is not sad to drink when you’re chilling, although Yuengling Light is also as sweet as Yuengling Black & Tan, so the combination is fairly darned sweet. I don’t think i could binge-watch some show with this as my only blended beer.
Mentioned this beer in an earlier review, so thought i’d better explain, expand, and expound on it. Made by J.W. Dundee, which is a sub-nameplate of Genesee Brewing that arose in the 1990’s. Dundee came out with a few other beers, but the Honey Brown Lager was the only one which really stuck, and AFAIK the only one still regularly sold today.
Name comes from the fact that they use honey in the brew, and you actually can taste it. Not so brown a beer, more amber-ish these days, i remember it being darker in the 90’s. But it still has that same taste, a rich and warm sweet, even when served cold, and though the label calls it “extra rich” i don’t know if i’d go that far, but it is definitely “regularly rich”.
Being a lager at heart, there’s a swarthy feel to the beer in the mouth, a meal beer, not a prancing dessert beer, even if it is sweet. And that’s the real rub here: Honey Brown is good because it’s honey-sweet, unexpected in a lager and pulled off well by Gen- err, Dundee. Something about being in beer makes the honey taste like dark honey, if that’s even a thing. This honey is to real honey as brown sugar is to plain sugar.
And that rub again: great taste and a fine way to shake up your beering once in a while, but just can’t drink two of these in a row. The first sip is refreshing and surprising, the rest of the gulps are heavy with a sweetness you’re glad to have. Your first Honey Brown is always great. But try and drink another one, and it suddenly tastes… less great.
Don’t misunderstand that. If you’ve never had this beer, by all means try it. You’ll love it. There’s a reason why they still make it. But if you bring a 12-pack of it to a party, there had better be 12 people there. They will all love it. But make sure nobody has seconds. After one, they’re saying “hey that was fantastic, gimme another one!” Don’t let them do it.
A second Honey Brown in a row lets the sweetness take control and you no longer taste the lager, all you taste is the sweet. Same rule with wedding cake. After you’ve been working up a sweet-tooth at the reception with a few drinks and choice of haddock, chicken french, or spag bolo, a hunk of over-frosted cake is fantastic and gives you the energy to force Aunt Regina to do the Limbo. But your second piece will only have one bite missing, and might force the rest up backwards if Aunty Reggie forgot to wear her undies.
I found this in a 24-ounce can, and as i write, am now into the second half. Sure enough, i’m a little less eager to grab the next gulp. The first half was excellent, something new and different (haven’t had a HB in a few years). But now it’s getting more towards a cloying sweet, and it feels more like a duty than a joy to finish the last 10 ounces. It’s really an unusual beer, how the contrast between your first and your second is so glaring.
So you’ve been warned, one of these every week is just right, but more often and you won’t like it. Don’t hold that against it. I’ll rate the first Honey Brown at 6.8, just be circumspect about how often you drink it, since the rating plummets fast after one beer.
Goofy, that i haven’t reviewed this one yet. It’s a staple beer for me, always have some on hand. Usually, the beers i review are ‘spensive and high-alk so i only have a few at a time, at most. But for regular old sit-and-have-a-beer times, Yuengling’s Black & Tan is the most important beer in my house. So at long last, here’s some chatter about it…
A Black & Tan is normally understood as 1/2 lager and 1/2 stout, though there are other places which do it different. In any case, it’s blended beer. A good bartender can make you a B&T which actually stays separated in the glass before you drink it. once you drink it, of course, it mixes together. Or, you could buy it in a bottle (or can) pre-blended. This is what Yuengling does.
For years i avoided Yuengling because i’ve had some Chinese and Japanese beers and they just didn’t wow me. Lol, come to find out that “yuengling” is a German name, who would assume that? But the stuff is made in Pennsylvania, the brewery’s been independent since 1829, and they are one of the few true and blue independent family-owned breweries who never got gobbled up by a corporation.
That’s a big reason why i buy Yuengling, now that i know it’s not made in Shanghai, and now i know that my purchases help keep a major indy brewery going. For general consumption, their lager is darn good, and priced nice at $10 for a twelver. Their IPL is good, and they come out with seasonal things all the time, and i frequently try those, just because their B&T is so integral to me as a utility beer.
On its own, YB&T is a good beer. It’s got the attacking quality of stout with the friendly handshake of a lager, the oats and sour and pumpernickel of the stout blended with the barley and light hops of the lager. For those who remember the brief fashion of dark beers in the 1980’s, this is the culmination of that fad. Sweeter than most, damn near opaque in color, a heavy taste in the mouth which invites cheddar and rye crackers. Pretty sweet but pleasingly heavy, on its own i’d rate this at 6.7.
For just sitting around watching a game, you don’t want hi-alk and some people can’t afford to casually quaff craft beers at $11 per sixer. I can’t, anyway. That’s where Yuengling’s Black And Tan comes in. About 3 years ago i discovered something about YB&T, something amazing which no other beer can do. This beer can be used as an ingredient to make ANY other beer tasty. No lie, ANY other beer. Obviously, you don’t want to add this willy-nilly to a beer which outranks it… i’m not going to try mixing this into a Smuttynose, for god’s sake.
But for reals: i tried it with over a dozen beers and it works every time. Just pour a 12-oz beer into a 16-oz pint glass, then top off with Yuengling’s Black & Tan. The injection of YB&T takes over, you can see the dark brown cloud mixing in as you pour, and the taste is worlds beyond the original substrate beer. And further no lie: i went on a quest, or more accurately i went on an anti-quest, to find the crappiest, cheapest beer i could find. Works every time.
Pabst, Old Swilltaukee, Genny, Busch, Rolling Cock, Swilltaukee’s Worst, Hamms, Coors, Budweezer, Swiller, and many more. I could not find a beer cheap enough to avoid YB&T’s civilizing influence. Most of them were undrinkable on their own, but with just a few ounces of Yuengling they’re actually delicious. This is the secret of YB&T, one 12er of this turns a 30er of crap beer into something you can drink and actually enjoy, and it doesn’t break your debit card in half.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Try it yourself. Obviously, don’t go to your regular beerstore and pick up some PBR. You don’t want them to think less of you from that moment on. But stop at a corner store and pick up the cheapest thing they have, the most nasty and crabshacky thing on the shelf. Try it naked first, spit it out of course, then add a few oz of YB&T. Voila! Sudden craft!
Well, it’s not craft beer, and it’s not great beer, no brainchild of any brewmaster here, but for just-havin-beers, this secret trick of YB&T transforms rote sipping into something you can enjoy tasting. Or at least drink without gagging.
The later part of the anti-quest has been to try YB&T mixed into light beers, known as the crappiest of the crap, and sure enough, this stuff makes a light beer tolerable.
Now, as you know i’ve long been searching for the crappiest beer known to mankind, because i have yet to find a beer which cannot be made into a tasty pint by adding a few ounces of Yuengling’s Black & Tan. I exhausted all the regular bland dribblers sold around here: the ones which come in a 30-pack for $13. Severe lightbulb moment, when i realized that light beers are, as a species, entirely crappier than cheap regular beers!
So the anti-quest continues. This time, it’s Budweiser’s “Select 55” light beer, named after the number of calories in a can. Most light beers have about 100 calories per 12 ounces, including Michelob’s Ultra, which you would assume they mean ultra-low-cal, but instead they mean it’s ultra yummy for a light beer… naturally that’s both a paradox and an oxymoron at the same time.
This here ultra-light is the lightest of the lightest, 55 calories is the lowest i’ve seen. That’s the kind of technology which a vast brewery-industrial complex can buy. Miller has a 64-cal one, but i have yet to gamble on it. And in the end, no matter how crappy this one is, it follows the other crappy sheep and is easily made tame and tasty by mixing in some Black & Tan.
So mission accomplished there, but what is Bud 55 Select like on it’s own? I took the plunge into icy waters so you don’t need to. Surprisingly, it nearly tastes like beer. Moreso than the Mich Ult, this one has a faint shadow of malted grain, even if it is rice. No hop character to speak of, but we already know it’s cheap, 67¢ a can. It’s thin, it’s watery, they don’t say but we know it’s low-alk, and it’s slightly carbonated. Sort of like a fizzy wet rice cake.
With YB&T mixed in, it’s fine as a base, and that’s the real shocker. I don’t believe a beer exists which can’t be juiced into semi-yum by Yuengling’s dark influence. But on its own, Bud 55 is only a situation beer, like when you head over to a buddy’s house for a bbq and his wife has decided that he needs to lose a few so she’s stocked the house with Bud Select 55. You have to tell her that it’s fine. In your mind, though, this beer rates a 1.6 flat.
This had damn well better be good. Went looking for what a “session” beer is (this is not one), and found some other reviews, and they raved and drooled all on, about Bell’s Two Hearted Ale. Around here it was a couple bucks off on sale last month, but i didn’t take the bait. I paid full price for a sixer of this, $10.99, so it had durn better be great.
Color is deeper than pale but not getting into amberland, heavy head and even effervescing. No mention what kind of hops, just that they “stuffed” them in, and it says “Ale” on the front but on the back label they call this an “IPA style” beer. Good enough for me. 7.0% alk so it’s far from sessionistic, and the smell is all good: orange blossoms, ferns and pine forest.
So far, such good. The taste.. oh my. This has got the creamy flavor of the top IPA’s like Full Sail and Smuttynose, and that explains how the nasal appreciation nearly reminded me of a creamsicle. But it’s not a creamsicle, it’s a beer, and it’s really good.
This will take a while, a couple pints at least to consider the ramifications here. #5 on my Top Five IPA’s is Sam A’s 48º Latitude rated at 9.1 but this may be the fish who knocks Sam off. A Michigan product, and you know that’s where all the Germans and Poles settled in the USA, and somehow the brewing know-how of the old Country survived some depressions and a prohibition.
Oooh, this has the hops that turn into other things in your mouth. You ever had those squishy semi-circle lime candies, back in the days before gummi things were invented? They came in lemon, orange, and lime, and a red one which i’m not sure what it was supposed to be. They were the gummis of 2 generations ago. The hop side of this beer has the taste of those lime-wedge candies, minus the crust of sugar of course.
Oooof, nice sweetness to the beer body, and just balanced enough to not be sweet but tart-sweet in the final taste. But no escaping it: this is a sweeter IPA than most. Creamy, sweet, citrus… no wonder “creamsicle” sprung to mind. These Michiganders have got the right idea, except for the sweetness. I know that’s what the typical American palate leans toward, but in this case it’s a touch overdone.
So no, this one will not displace Sam Adams from the Top Five. It’s a very, very good IPA, the beer body has that astringent quality that makes German beer the best in the world, even before it gets the overlay of hops. I prefer heavier body, in beer if not in ladies, and this one is medium-heavy but extremely well done for its size. You can really tell that this is all barley, a “real beer” made the way that Opa Krauss made it in the root cellar a hundred years ago. It even got a burp out of me 1/3 the way through the second pint.
My pint is an 18-oz lager-style glass, heavy glass to hold its pre-chilling, and 18 so that you get a full pint after accounting for head. For this beer, i needed those extra two fl-oz’s because the head is so luxuriant. More evidence that this is a competently made beer from head to toe. It’s really hard to identify the taste that makes German beers the best. The closest i can come is comparing the almost tinny back-mouth taste to the dust that gathers on cuckoo clocks. Honestly, that’s the best i can do. It’s like the dry side of the pillow on a hot night. It’s like a heated icepick. It’s like the final few days of the Sahara Forest. I told you, the dusty cuckoo was the best i could do.
Well, this beer is about 60% of the way towards real German beer. And that’s a helluva lot further along than most American beers, crafty or uncrafty. At heart, that is the greatest compliment i can bestow on a beer: “it’s closer to German than most.” So very enjoyable, a treat to taste, but the sweetness is a subtraction here. I don’t have the most typical American palate, sue me or don’t.
Suspect that the sweetness is from a faster fermentation run, leaving some grain sugars uneaten by the yeast army. This is probably on purpose, because Michigan is in America. But i taste everything else in this beer, and more than “yum” i say “what if?” What if they ran the yeasts into their microscopic graves, and ate up half of the residual sugars which they now bottle? What if Bell’s Brewery made a Three Hearted Ale? Of course it would be stronger alk, but with the hops and malts they’ve got going, this contestant might be the first American brewery to duplicate real German beer.
Ah, what if. Meantime, Two Hearted Ale is pretty good. Could be better but would it be as popular if they made it better? Dunno, but do know that i’d rate this as 8.7 for good beer and balanced hops, with deductions for sweetness.
Don’t know what a bine climber is, but a busy little can here with plenty of info, and we like that. Geek humor is always great too, and according to the label i am holding 3.02 x 10^-3 barrels of IPA. To the math-fearers, that’s .00302 of a barrel, and to the truly thick, that’s 12 fluid ounces. A can of beer. Don’t worry, just drink it.
They list out the malts used (2Row, Pilsener, Munich and wheat), and the hops (Columbus, Citra, Falconer’s Flight, and Cascade). IBU’s are at a healthy 44. Also has a SRM number, which is a mystery to me but this IPA has 3.9 of those, whatever they are. The one piece of info missing on the can is one of the crits: the alk content! But since this is a “session” IPA we can infer that it’s at 4.5% or so.
Actually, now that i think about it, a bine climber might be a hop plant. Not sure, but there’s a maybe there. Anyway, the color is roundabout gold-ish, with plenty of floaty specks in there, which is usually a great sign for an IPA. The aroma is plenty hoppy, pine and sharp fruity, with a hint of schnozzberries.
Now down to it: the drinking of the drink. Catches in my throat a little bit, this one wears its 44 IBU’s well, and it had better because the malts are clearly overshadowed here. According to Keegan, there’s some wheat in here, but i can’t pick it out. The hops are hard and heavy, and i like this blend’s taste. It’s got my fave, Cascade, and truthfully here, this is one of the hoppiest IPA’s i’ve ever had. This one gives Hop Stoopid and Hop Hunter a run for their money.
Being “session” and thus low-ish alcohol, this would be an ‘easy drinking’ beer if it wasn’t hopped to the gills. I can declare it a good Summer beer, with the tart and foresty hops leaving your mouth dry and salivatey, this would be refreshing on the back deck on an 85º evening. But i can’t imagine drinking more than 2 or 3 of these in a row, the hopsy-turvy attitude would get absurd fast.
So if you buy this, prepare to share. As the glass went lower, and my mouth grew accustomed to the full-on hopslaught, the malts, the beer’s body, started to peek out from under the gtreen curtain. I can at last tell that there’s wheat in here, and the pils, and the other grainy tastes must be the other 2 malts, which i know nothing about. For that matter, i’d never heard of Falconer’s Flight hops, but there it is on the can.
The beer body is light, and the hops are all erect, so this one doesn’t have great balance. If you’re on The Quest for Hoppier-Than-Thou, then you owe yourself a tonguewash with this IPA. They really do hop the hell out of it. Other than that notable, there’s not much to shout about. I’ll rate it 7.0 for the hop madness, without that it’d be 5-something.
Label says it “offers a bold balance, not a smack in the head.” Well, they’re assuming that i don’t want a smack in the head but… i do. Why the hell else would i drink hoppy beer? Smack me, Daddy, beat me 8 to the bar. Hop my head off, that’s what it’s there for.
Deese guys from Bruklin make some fine beer, so hopefully they didn’t really mean it. After all, this IPA is 6.9% alk, so no foolish sessionism going on here. And there’s no reason to alk it up like that if you aren’t making a pocket to smuggle hops. A fine golden color to this, not a pale ale by any means, and the nose is promisingly hoppy.
The taste… and the nod of the head. My head it still attached, so we’re not into strato-hops here, and the label was not a lie. There’s that balance they’re on about. Domestic hops and famous East Kent Golding hops, which Sam Adams also includes in their impressive hop roundup in 48º Latitude IPA.
The beer body is nice, a little light to vie for my favor, but doesn’t raise my ire. The hops are stronger than advertised, but the balance is the key, and that is in place right where it should be. This one is slightly sweet, but the hops can’t turn it into other fruit notes since they are on the low side themselves.
This is well balanced, but the volume from both speakers is low. Fairly surprised that this is 6.9% alcohol… if they’re going high there, then there’s room for bigger body and bigger hops. So this beer is not a tragedy, it is a nice taste, but for the same money other beers are going to make me their bitch. Slap me, it’s what i came here for.
Rated at 6.4 for small dreams, Brooklyn makes another IPA and i may like that one better. We’ll see.
These New Belgium beers started showing up in force, massive force, in local stores early in 2016. Apparently there is a well-funded marketing campaign going on here, but i have held back for two reasons: first, NB prices are damned high. Second, the label says they’re made in Colorado and North Carolina, which immediately makes me think that New Belgium is a schill for the Coors Empire, and thus not a “craft” beer at all. Weird that they hit the shelves with conspicuous display space devoted on day-1, with a half-dozen varieties all at once.
OK… i stand entirely corrected and blushingly sheepish. Wiki tells me that NB is not only independent, but employee-owned by the nearly 600 people who work there. They’re just a huge indy: the 8th largest brewery in the US. Wow, well done, fat tire guys and girls! The location in NorCaro is an expansion, not a shadow arm of a megabrewery. But the prices, once the stuff gets here, are still quite high.
But i did find a pack-your-own display which has the NB IPA, so couldn’t pass up a chance to try just one bottle of the IPA, then since i’m getting good at tasting IPA’s, if this one pans out then maybe i’d try the other 7 flavors New Belgium has out.
According to the label they use Simcoe, Chinook and Cascade hops, and after this many IPA’s, i’m starting to get an inkling that Cascade is the one which matches my tastes the best. And on the label there’s a best-by date which is in a font so small that it is a moot point. Mostly, the label says 6.5% alk inside.
Color is not so pale, a tad past golden, and the smell holds up a flag of hops as a welcome/warning, depending on your inclination. The color doesn’t lie here, and there is a decent beer body underpinning everything. But it’s not so burly as to deter the hops from taking and shaking your tongue. Said of which, the combo of hops plays nicely together, and the strength is solid puckerboi.
It’s a little bit sweet too, which really helps the multihopping reach out into new flavors. I taste peach and some kind of berry, and celery, oddly enough. The after-aftertaste is almost tomato. On the beer side, it nearly tastes like rye, because of all the odd things the hops are doing with that bit-o-honey sweetness. Towards the end of the glass, it gathers the creamy element which so many top IPA’s have. Why couldn’t that aspect jump out at first? Perhaps that’s why my Top Five are who they are?
Applause to NB for going all renewablish at their brewery, they even catch escaping methane from the process and use that for more green energy. They’re spreading the love even to the grunts in Shipping, and growing fast. If the stuff wasn’t expensive, i’d buy it just to support what that company’s doing. Or if i was rich, i’d buy more.
Wrap it up, this is a high level IPA. It won’t break into the Five because the balance between beer and hops is a touch off, but let’s call it 8.8 for Effort. It does a good enough job that i’m open to trying their Fat Tire Amber, but naturally that’ll be a bottle or two from the pick-a-six rack, since i’m not rich.
An IPA from Utah! I didn’t think they were allowed to do sinful things like make beer in the nation of Deseret, home of the beehive, and last bastion of beehives on women’s heads. Actually, when that nutty ultra-Mormon guy, Jeffers or something, was being hunted by the FBI because god apparently told him to stockpile weapons and little girls, all his other wives had something on their heads that looked rather like a trilobite, not a beehive.
But the problems of Utah aside, here’s an actual Salt Lake beer, from Uinta Brewery, which is as difficult to pronounce as it looks. Not much info on the bottle other than it’s 7.3% alk, whew, but the picture on the label is great, like those old postcards before photoshop with captions like “Just another day on the farm in Calhoun County!” with a farmer standing next to an 8-foot tall tomato.
The color is a pleasing orange, halfway from pale and amber, and there’s no effervescing bubbles here at all, and a light head… and sure enough, this beer is virtually uncarbonated. Which kinda creeps me out. It’s like beer-ade, a hop flavored juice drink. The taste is all right, decent beer body and the hops be noshing their green teeth indeed in this pint.
Hops are strong, the beer body is solid below them, in fact the body is pretty sexy under there. Lemony notes, almost apricot if you concentrate on it. But it’s 99.9% flat, which ruins a whole lot of the good tastes here. If this was carbonated, like at all, it’d probably rate somewhere in the 7-8 range. But being flat as a jilted prom date, i have to rate this as highly unrecommended.
Maybe i got a defective bottle. The cap seemed sealed tight, i don’t know. Or maybe Utah doesn’t forbid brewing beer, only lawfully allowing beer so nasty to taste that Mormons won’t be tempted? All i can rate is what comes out of the bottle, and without carbonation, this is truly horrid. A 0.8 is all i can realistically give this beer. It’s a total shame, because i had my eye on this one on the grocery shelf for months and was really looking forward to finally trying it. Bleh.
