ale – What I Learned Tomorrow

New Belgium Fat Tire

This here is the one that made New Belgium the 8th largest brewery in the USA, although they were 7th last year. The Fat Tire Amber Ale is their flagship beer, famous by now, to the point that the image of the bicycle on this label has become NB’s company logo. So i figured i’d better take the opportunity to try it off the pick-a-six rack, since New Belgium has recently invaded New York, which was once New Amsterdam, why’d they change it i can’t say, people just liked it better that waaaaaaay!

Label says it’s 5.2% alk so that’s about average for a crafty drafty. No other info about malts or hops, except to call the malts “biscuit-like” and i have no idea what that means. Although, now that i chew that over in my mind, a barley biscuit sounds like a damn good idea. As usual for a NB beer, there is an “Enjoy By” date, but it’s in a wobbly mangled font, printed so small that only the mice in your fridge will ever know.

Color is lighter than what normal people call “amber” and this is not an IPA so a nosefull out of the glass is not notable, just smells like beer, so onward to the tasting. Good solid flavor, light carbonation, i don’t taste any biscuits but on the other hand i don’t taste any sausage gravy either, so there’s that to be thankful for.

There are malts a-plenty to taste, certainly. Hops are a singular flavor note, not remarkable but then again this is normal beer, and i’ve gotten used to the hopblast of modern IPA’s, so i’m more apt to note what’s missing than what’s there in this regard. This is sweet, or maybe it’s just missing the sour, maybe i’m not qualified to taste-test an amber ale at this point?

The beer body is pretty good. There’s more than one malt, or perhaps the same malt in varying stages of roastedness all combined, there is a hint of lemony taste which does not seem to come from the hops themselves. Refreshing, low enough in alk to make it a casual friendly drinking beer, and quality taste. But can’t do that, since as noted in a previous NB review, their beers are pretty expensive.

Rating? Hmmm, a good beer but i prefer lagers for friendly drinking and there are some fine specimens of that which are lower in price. So i will likely not run up my tab for a full sixer of this, but glad to have tried it. If it were a few bux lesser then i would buy it now and then for a change-up. But it’s not cheap, so a 6.8 is about all i can raise this up to. And now i’m gonna have that Constantinople song playing in my head for hours.

Bells 2 Hearted Ale

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.

Saranac Brewer’s Blood Imperial Amber Ale

Here’s a neat one: an “imperial amber ale” with a hefty 90 IBU’s and a stiff 8.7% alcohol. Judging by the price and the packaging, this is the flagship of Saranac’s rebranding, but it’s made in Windsor Vermont, not in Utica, New York. Not sure which empire declares this stuff “imperial”, but it sure ain’t the Empire State.

So what we have is a great recipe that some crafty brewers came up with, and it must involve some high-end ingredients to command a luxury-good price. It certainly tastes like they used good stuff. The color is definitely amber, maybe even darker than a regular amber ale, and the smell is a fairly complex melange of hops and malts.

Nice intriguing body to this beer, and the hops are well done, though this one has a problem that you do see in high-alk brews sometimes: the taste of the alcohol itself raises it’s hand to be counted. Unfortunately, that detracts from the overall taste. Looking for a beer here, not a beer-flavored liqueur.

Malts are nice and meaty, they hopped the heck out of it, so it should be right up my alley. And it is good, but the strength is just a little shy of whiskey-face, and that’s not for me. Hate to do it, because someone poured a lot of sweat and tears into this bottle, but tallying all the pluses and minuses here leaves it with a 7.2 rating, low for a beer of this quality.

I don’t want to turn anyone off from trying this, i found it in the “pick your own six” section, where for $11 you can try 6 beers where you’d normally have to spend $70 to try ’em all. If you can find a single of this, try it. You may like it, well, in fact i’m sure you’ll like it, but try it and decide from there if it’s something you’ll spend the premium price on, for a full six or twelve.

Lagunitas Hop Stoopid

Well OK, there’s a slap to the back of your neck if you were in the race to be Hoppier Than Thou. Taking a different tack than their neighbors at Sierra Nevada, these folks at Lagunitas are messing around with hop extractives and adding that to the beer instead. And the result, in case you’re not puckered enough today, is an astounding 102 International Bitterness Units. One hundred and two. Yes. I didn’t even know the scale went over 100.

And just to keep all them IBU’s under control, the alk has to be high, in this case 8%. So now you know, why they call it Hop Stoopid. The blurb on the bottles says it’s “fermented on high” and yeah, that’s probably true too.

The beer itself? Good golden color with plenty of floaty things in there, which is a mystery, because the whole story (in tiny print on the side of the label) is about NOT using a mountain of actual leafy buddy hop cones so they don’t jam your equips when you get it out of the vat, like a sodden roof gutter in November.

The taste is pretty excellent, as i suspected it would be. Lagunitas is one of those breweries whose stuff is just too expensive for me, like $15 sixers and $24 12-packs, but i saw “102 IBU 4U” on the label and knew i had to splurge on a 22-oz jammer of this, lovingly known among the drinking class as a “double deuce”. But my regular glass is 18-oz so i can handle these things. Yes it’s a lager glass, that trapezoidal profile, but it’s fine for all beers and gives me an excuse to say trapezoidal once in a while.

The beer body is finely sturdy, this is an ale but not a pale ale, a good blend of malt-sweet and crunchy cereals. Professional head on this one, like Euro-style head on the beer, and then, of course, there’s all those devilish IBU’s. It’s hoppy, mi amigo. Like Jumpin’ Jesus on a Pogo Stick, it’s hoppy. Like a kangaroo on crack-a-roo, it’s hopping all over the goddamned place. I like it.

The hops are velvety brutal, carried on that big-beer taste and couched in a hi-alk delivery vehicle. A hammer of hops, truth told here for free. But nuttily enough this is not the Hoppiest of the Hopalongs on the range. Sierra Nevada’s Hop Hunter still reigns, even though i had prepared myself for the possibility that Hop Stoopid might dethrone the Hunter.

But it was not to be. The Double-H’s fresh-hop steam extraction turns out to be superior to whatever the Lagunitas Method is for making hop extract. I think the real difference might be Sierra Nevada’s HH uses the extract, and then makes hoppy beer as usual, only then they add the extract too. It seems like Lagunitas lets the extract do more of the work for them.

I think the Stoopid earns a rating of 8.8 for good tries at sooper hop, because the windmill is there, that’s why. But there are better hoppy beers at a lower price point than Lagunitas in this category, so that makes me less inclined to try another Lagunitas label in the future. Granted, what i had was likely brewed in Chicago, not in California, so maybe the quality stepped down at the contract brewery. Dunno, it’s not my job to know.

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 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.