Spaten Optimator Doppelbock

Spaten-OptimatorDoublebock-9.7
Spaten’s Optimator Doppelbock

Caramel in the heaviest way, a true German beer with soul built in by law. It has that backmouth sour as it goes down like many German beers, and a squeaky feel on the tongue. Don’t know why, but many German beers remind me of shoelaces. But in a good way. Even i don’t know what that means.

Being a doppelbock (double bock), this is brewed from the leavings of other Spaten bocks, which were themselves brewed from the leavings from Spaten’s regular beers. The silt and scum from a brewing run is high in unconverted sugars, locked away in the dead bodies of little yeast bugs who gave their lives and fortunes for alcohol. Thus, a scoop of double-brewed silt has even more sugars. Enter more unwitting yeasties, and there’s a lot of sugar… they can’t help but turn it all into alcohol, making this double-bock beer a serious 7.6% alcohol.

Worlds of taste from the multifarious malts which went into the constituent beers, and they were all compliant with the strict German Beer Purity Law. German beer is what beer really is, and this third-level brewing is not cheap, but it is the pinnacle of what German brewers are allowed to do under the Rheinheitsgebot of 1516 Anno Domini.

Still mostly in effect after an even 500 years, the Rheinheitsgebot law is constantly under attack by, simply put, jackasses. Both within and outside Germany, people keep trying to claim that gluten-free beer is real beer (it is not), and self-important Euro-zone bureaucrats keep trying to chip away at Germany’s Beer Purity Law on the grounds that it’s “protectionist”. What a bunch of turds.

Five centuries of pure beer have developed German brewers into the world’s experts at making real beer, using only: water, yeast, hops and barley. Nothing else. This forces Germans to make the best of it, and they’ve done just that… they make the best. Some inside Germany want to repeal the Purity Law so they can make all sorts of abominations, like cherry flavors and adding sugars and colorings. Jackasses. All the Rheinheitsgebot says is that they can’t do that and still label it “beer (bier)”. Doesn’t prevent them from making all sorts of abominations, they just can’t call it beer. Because cherry beer isn’t real German beer, it is, in fact, an abomination.

I hereby call on American brewers to support the Rheinheitsgebot, and to abide by it voluntarily. There should be a little ‘R’ inside a square, a small and unobtrusive mark on the label, to alert knowing consumers that the beer inside is absolutely real beer. Water, barley, hops and yeast. Only those ingredients. If you do that, put the (R) mark on the label. If you can’t abide, then no problem. But if you do, then let us know. I would whole-heartedly gear my purchases towards beers that bear an (R) mark. We don’t need a law to enforce beer purity, but we sure as hell need a way to tell what’s real beer and what is carrying additives.

But off the rant for now, back to Spaten’s Optimator…

Knowing what it took to make this beer, and acknowledging the unqualified success in flavor, the rating has to be 9.7 for excellence. A great “last beer of the night” to send you off with that toasty roasty flavor lingering for a long time, and the high proof lending an extra depth to your sleep and extra oddness to your dreams. I dreamt that there was a girl who slept on her ceiling every night. She’d start out in bed but over the course of tossing and turning she ended up on the ceiling, so her folks wouldn’t let her move out on her own even though she was in her 20s, for fear a strange bedroom would end up with her falling 10 feet onto the floor in the morning.

Wow, what a weird/awesome dream. And it came after drinking real German doppel-bock. Thanks, Spaten!

Full Sail IPA

FullSail-IPA-9.2
Full Sail’s awesome IPA

Good start to the experience with some humor on the outside of the bottle (non-twist cap says “Tools Required”), and when opened, the insides smell promising. And i was not misled. This is a mighty fine IPA. Rounded beer body gives a rich creamy dimension to the hops side of the equation, without tamping down the tartness. In fact, there’s nothing getting in the way of these hops. They don’t brag about species or blends of hops on the packaging, Full Sail just does it. It does claim that the IPA is “Ridiculously Tasty” but it’s not bragging if it’s true.

Not a sipper’s IPA, i felt zero guilt about greedily gulping this one down, and it was not even a hot day. Luckily, at a reasonable 6.0% alk, there’s nothing for a gulper to fear. Very well balanced taste sockets: low sweetness, high hops, real wort flavor survives the brewing. Highly recommend this one even though i don’t want to, it’s an East-West thing. Full Sail is from Oregon and i’m in New York, so naturally i’ll root for my peeps. Not as bad as a Biggie/Tupac feud, but this Oregonian winner evens the battle for tops in hops.

The previous 3 were Smuttynose Finestkind from Maine and Sam Adams’s 48ยบ from Boston, and Sierra Nevada’s Hop Hunter IPA out of Cali. Now with another West Coaster in the elevated echelon, we’re all even, Steven.

Thank god they don’t brew good beer in Missouri, ahem, or we’d be headed towards another messy Compromise, and we all know how the first one turned out. Full Sail’s IPA rates a 9.2 on my tastebuds, and those buds may not be for you.

Southern Tier 2X IPA

SouthernTier-2XIPA-5.6
Southern Tier’s 2X IPA

Billed on the bottle as using 4 types of hops and 3 kinds of malts, and in teeny tiny print, a warning of sorts: this IPA is packing a sweltering 8.2% alcohol. That must be the 2X they’re talking about, because the taste is neither extremely hoppy nor whole-beer malty. Good balance of sweet and pointy hops, even if the latter is not really sharply hopped, is it a little pointy. Can taste the alk underneath the beer, not as dire as some malt liquors on the market, but certainly there.

So with this alk it’s not a great hot-day refreshment, but not bad for a cooler Spring evening when there’s nothing attractive to drive to. Sedate hops, not bright and burning, a slight citrusy hint but more like pine than lemon. OK as a beer, but no reason to buy this as long as Smuttynose is still making Finestkind. My rating of 5.6 takes into account the lower hops and higher brainwreck potential.

Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA

DogfishHead-60MinIPA-5.2
Dogfish Head’s 60-Minute IPA

Billed as “continuously hopped” and i’m not sure what that’s supposed to do for the beer, but i’ve had hoppier. A little tangy on the beer side of the equation, almost like you can taste the stainless steel it was brewed in. The hop side of the formula is bright but blunt, gets citrus on you and grasps at the tart ring but that’s just out of its clutches.

A sweet lemony flavor, think Lemonheads not Sour Patches. Halfway through the pint, the sweetness grows up and leaves the hops behind. At 6% alk this won’t brew your brain, but still strong enough to respect. By no means a terrible thing, but nothing here really stands out. Aftertaste fades too quickly and the body is light. Tastes like it would make a great pairing with white fish for dinner, but not a beer adventure on its own. I’ll call this one at 5.2, for being unremarkable yet $10 bux a six, and that’s on sale.

Southern Tier Right O Way IPA

SouthernTier-RightOWayIPA-8.1
Southern Tier’s Right O Way IPA

Yet another IPA from the prolific people at Southern Tier, not too bad an attempt at the balance which Smuttynose has discovered. A darker aspect tells about heavier grains seared longer, the hops are clear and solid, and the sugars are also the lower notes on the scale, from a darker malt allowed to cook a deeper brown.

The heavier malts give this one a meatier taste in the mouth, and there’s some hints of toast playing off the sour hops, a nice touch. At 4.5% alcohol, this one is not going to toast your brain, and it’s refreshing in the way that old-tyme beer was refreshing, by being a meal where the water is bad and the workday is long. Have to give it an 8.1 for yumminess.

Smuttynose Finestkind IPA

Smuttynose-FinestkindIPA-9.7
Smuttynose’s Finestkind IPA

Make mine slutty! Ooops, the slogan is “Make mine a Smutty”. Same difference, really. Kidding aside, don’t be put off by two lounging geezers on the label, this here IPA is a true winner. Perfect balance of beeriness and hoppiness, a body that makes you want to make a sealskin coat out of it and a flavor that makes you wish your own nose was as smutty as the brewery’s pinnipedal mascot.

Almost a creamy top note to the flavor, like you’re scooping it right out of a barrel freshly arrived in India. The beer side of it has barely enough sweetness to make the hop side of the palette truly “citrusy” in a way that others only claim to. And Smuttynose doesn’t claim to, they actually do it, and without crowing about it, which is also great.

The lighter malt wedded to good hops, might be an intentionally faster fermentation which leaves more sugars in it, the overall balance of components makes this one of the top IPA’s i have tried. It’s a buzzy one at 6.9% alcohol, but very refreshing. Now i know why the geezers on the label look so giddy. Fitting that they made up a new word for this one: “finestkind”. A great IPA, in my book it rates a lofty 9.7 for exquisite balance.

And to update this review, now more than 3 months later, this is still and truly the best IPA i have tasted and tested to date. Note that 9.7 rating above, and remember it. By now, have reviewed 60+ IPA’s and 9.7 is the highest rating i’ve given to anything. Smuttynose Finestkind is the tops!

Southern Tier IPA

Southern Tier Brewing's IPA
Southern Tier Brewing’s IPA

The standard India Pale Ale from Southern Tier Brewing, the nose is crisp but weak, the taste brings more malt flavor than their “Live” ale. Both ales mention 4 malts and 4 hops on the label, but this one favors the grains over the cones. Still nicely hopped, just not sour-face hoppy.

A good rounded feel in the mouth, overall a better ale than the “Live” one, with the balance more on being a beer than being hoppier-than-thou. 7.0% alcohol here, so prolly not the best drink to relax on a hot day, but in New York you’re not melting on the porch for 9 months, only three. So low on hops, but nice real-beer taste.

The longer you sip it, the more lingering the taste of hops is, and i think this means they used pretty fresh hops. I’d call this one a nice round 8.0 for, well, well-roundedness.

Southern Tier Live PA

SouthernTier-Live-7.7
Southern Tier’s Live Pale Ale

Pretty good, label calls it “citrusy” which i didn’t even know was a word, but does have those hints of tang from hops, which could mimic, on a good day, some soury fruit. Hey, if they can make up words like citrusy, then i can make up “soury”. Slightly cloudy in its quite-pale color, the nose is tangier than the taste, which is a little sweet. On the whole, a fine hoppy beer which the label also calls a “session ale” and i confess i haven’t the foggiest idea what that means. Good taste, nice refreshment with the sweetness, 5.6% alcohol in this bottle, i’d give this one a 7.7.

The course

The course of human society only goes in one direction, bucko. We’re going thataway. Evidence on every scale: evolution of life genetically, a progression of religion types across centuries, and ever increasing complexity in our political structures. Kinda obvious by now, that we’re getting more in tune with each other with every passing century. A crime in Europe could get you beheaded in the 1600’s, imprisoned in the 1800’s, and only sued in the 2000’s.

Once, we thought that spirits inhabited each lake, forest, mountain and stream. Then we thought gods who looked kinda like us divided the labor of running a world full of flatlands, uplands, skies and oceans. Next we thought that one god lorded over other gods, and finally we thought that there might only be that one god after all. It’s a progression, and we really can’t stop it.

That’s the reason i don’t believe in conspiracy theories. There are inexorable forces at work in our genes, in our history, in our brains, so any nefarious plot to steer the future is futile. The best any illuminatus can do is make a prediction, hold onto the board, and hope the riptide empties into the next lagoon over. Oh, and try not to look like a seal from below.

There’s the why of course, why is all human society moving in one direction? That’s a basket of complicated simplicity, it would be daft to spend eight paragraphs to fail describing, something that is a single sentence but not of words. The closest i can come is “life will do” and that’s damned inadequate.

The only useful thing now, is to learn from the future. Look at the way political structures have evolved over the centuries, and combine that with the Information Age. Obviously, the future is Tuesday Night Voting online every week, on a range of binding and non-binding resolutions from local to federal to global levels. Democracy will win out, it’s in our heads. Egalite will win, it’s in our genes. And eventually, Islam will stop producing more hotheads than Christianity.

It’s the progression, the course, and it is unstoppable. I feel bad for us now, knowing what is to come. Aggressive islam will wane only after many more deaths, a lot of innocent happy people dead because Allah apparently hates airplanes, god knows why. But we can count on a thinker arising in Islam, one who bends the roots of the discussion to a deeper level than any psychopath can go. How do i know this? Because i know the progression.

Every crescendo seeds its own demise. For example, look what Trump is doing in 2016. He has succeeded in what decades of Democrats have failed: awakened the political power of Hispanic Americans. From now on it’s not going to go away, and they will long remember that it was the Republicans who threw up Trump. The KKK has not been as excited for a candidate since Goldwater, how can you possibly force more heavy Democratic turnout? Trump is a godsend for Hillary in 2016. Nothing like a sharp voice of xenophobism to alarm both the minorities and the college-grad suburbs.

But that’s only a sideshow. The real story is what people are going to do with the world that’s left over when the last remnants of 19th-century ideas are finally wiped away by the internet. Russia moves past neo-fascism, China outgrows it’s infatuation with emperors, the Roman church completes internal reforms and turns outwards with a new mission of tackling poverty in Africa. About then, America finally gets democracy.

There won’t be anywhere for despots to hide. In both scale and perception, war morphs into a police matter. Daesh is forcing that change as we speak. Once we at last leave the 1800’s behind, it will be clear as day: which politician or warrior has goals and which one has greeds. Luckily, there is a roadmap for us, already laid out in the 1990’s. The clattering crash of communism is a blueprint for what to do with despots. Once their bad ideas are bared, there really isn’t a way to stand against their own people. Used to be, that internal propaganda was enough to keep power. No mo.

The coming wave of connectivity ruins the effectiveness of propaganda. Watch North Korea in 2021. Mark it down, a red-letter year, when news of the opportunities ushered by new media penetrates to the level of regular folks. Korea town’s gonna pop like a mud bubble. Today it’s a herculean effort to keep North Koreans in the dark, and again, a crescendo can’t help but seed it’s own demise. This is a big flashing siren for Iran, and China will do the dumb thing: loosen information control without also loosening political control. 2021 is not just the end of the Kim dictatorship, it’s also when Iran and China start stumbling in the direction of the rest of the world.

And that’s it. When Bush II outlined an Axis Of Evil, his club had far fewer members than Reagan’s “evil empire” in the 1980’s. In Bush’s time, we were down to Syria, Iraq, Libya, Iran, and North Korea. Obama removed Libya, put Iran in stasis, and Syria is out of Assad’s hands, thanks to Obama inspiring the Arab Spring in North Africa. For better or worse. Even Burma is coming back from exile. The only one left is North Korea.

The only one left is North Korea. That bears repeating. The dying gasp of the Domino Theory will be its progression in reverse: as North Korea flowers back into the real world, they will choose the route of South Korea. And they’ll be pretty ticked off at Russia and China for propping up the Kim Dynasty for so long. This domino falls, this pen-penultimate domino, and it soon turns Iran upside down from within… long before the oft-bemoaned “15 year” limit of the current detente with Tehran runs out.

Clack, clack the dominoes march on. China, as noted, will try to go halfway. They’ve built a class of business mandarins who like the stability of an emperor but are fully aware of what an open system enables other countries to do, and how that lack hobbles China’s long-term economic growth. When the Koreas unite and look to North America, then Iran ditches theocracy, it is impossible to underestimate the pressures which will build within Chinese politics. I don’t know which faction will reach power first, but i do know that it ends up as the world’s largest democracy. An elephant easily crushes a gazelle, it’s just rare that they do so.

Clack, and Russia is alone on the Security Council. By 2021 Putin has no influence in Syria, loses relevance in Korea, Cuba is fully over that phase, and Iran looks like it’s about to churn over. Thus the demise of Putin. Not sure if they’ll hang him or let him retire to Sochi, but there is an even chance that Russia will split in two along the Urals. It depends on how hard it is to dislodge the current tsar, whether that strain tears open the old rivalries then or later.

On a side note, this is decades away, but Russia eventually will split in half and the Eastern half will become cozy with China, almost incestuously cozy. If there is ever going to be a World War III, it will start over ownership of Northeast Asia. WW3 seems unlikely in general when considered alongside other progressions of human culture, but NE Asia is something to watch in the 2040’s.

But that’s later. Both the empire and the axis are gone in the 2020’s, just as the nutzo jihadis peter out. Right soil for a wholesale reframing of the human story. Unfortunately, also the right mulch for sprouting new gods. Check the progression, and it’s always forward, but along the way there are plenty of new gods which are tried and failed, and left misery in the failure. So, expect that. Sucks, i know.

Don’t know what the first global religion will be, but might reasonably expect there to be 5 of them until one outlikes the others. The criteria are already in place, however. The next step of religion has its basis in the cracks of science: Heisenberg’s uncertainty, pre-Bang cosmology, spooky actions and event horizons. It will have to explain mankind’s place and purpose, complete with popes and saints, and spell out new and improved principles of P2P interaction.

And it’ll have to explain some sort of afterlife, though i can’t imagine how, since all the good ones have been taken already: forty virgins, placid cloudhouses, elysian fields. But i expect they’ll manage. Maybe the new afterlife will be an algorithm playing your fave gameapp just as you played it, for eternity. This stuff only goes in one direction, bucko.

4th of July 2016

Hey everyone, have a Happy July 4th, and a SAFE July 4th.

I’m not telling you to avoid large crowds or just watch fireworks on TV, but just stay safe and keep aware, OK? Just have a knotty feeling about the 4th this year. It coincides with the new moon, which means that July 4th is the end of Islam’s month of Ramadan. Add the fact that ISIS is getting beaten pretty bad in Syria and Iraq, and they might be feeling pressured to come up with some jackassery this 4th.

This past Thursday, we wiped out about a quarter of ISIS’s army in Iraq. They had a big convoy retreating from the neighborhood of Fallujah back into Syria to consolidate. We smashed that convoy, about 120 vehicles full of assholes and asshole weapons, to the point of obliteration.

The only way they can replace that loss is by international recruitment, and the way they do that is by advertising their hate, and they do that by committing horrible crimes and then just let the news media do the advertising.

Speaking of which, why isn’t there an effort among the news media to heap scorn on terrorists? It’s not as if the media don’t already make stuff up. Just start reporting false things, like saying that the asshole in Orlando had all kinds of gay porn stashed in his closet. The asshole couple in San Bernardino? Simply “report” that a routine physical exam of the daughter they abandoned revealed that the tot is not a virgin, and hint that it’s likely both parents were involved in sexual abuse.

That’s all you need to do, just belittle and discredit these assholes, and there won’t be any more to step down and take their place. The attack on the Bataclan Club in Paris? Just arrange a “leak” to the effect that autopsies on the perpetraitors [sic] revealed that every one of them had an abnormally small penis. Or one testicle. Or what the heck, “report” that they were all hermaphrodites!

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with hermaphrodites or one-ballers or secret gay porn. Normal people don’t care about that stuff. BUT the kind of islamist hotheads who do this kind of crime? Oh yeah, THEY care about that kind of stuff, and they care a whole lot… and what really gets under their skin is a challenge to their pitiful self-image of machismo.

Trump says we should kill their families. That guy’s an idiot. Perpetuating a cycle of revenge killings is idiotic. What really puts an end to it is painting the terrorist as a retard, a shame to his family, creating a caricature of a bucktoothed yokel who smells like urine and is just as likely to fuck an over-ripe melon as a nearby donkey. Not that either the donkey or the melon would notice, because his dick was so tiny. Bonus: the terrorist is dead now, so he can’t dispute any of this.

As for All-American terrorists, why do we know their middle names? I say we give them new middle names, all the same. Lee Fucktard Oswald. James Fucktard Ray. Timothy Fucktard McVeigh. Dylan Fucktard Root. John Fucktard Booth. Sirhan Fucktard Sirhan. Shoot a pope? Your new name is Ali Fucktard Agha. Lead Al Quaeda? Your new names are Khalid Fucktard Mohammed and Osama Bin Fucktard-Laden.

It is claimed that the most common male name in the world is Mohammed, but that’s only because most christians think it’s tacky to name your kid Jesus. The quickest way to get the Muslims to start weeding the assholes out of their own mosques is for the entire rest of the world to start associating the word “mohammed” with the word “fucktard”. Nothing puts the clamp on conversion drives better, than when your prospective converts all equate “mohammed” with “fucktard”. Think about it. How many people are naming their kids Adolph anymore?