I agree. Sometime all I can choose from if I'm not in the mood for hops is a stout or porter and then a wheat of some kind. And sometimes the wheat or porter is a flavored concoction that is poorly done. Pale ale, American pale ale, amber ale, IPA, black IPA, Imperial IPA, Imperial black IPA, Mecha-Hopzilla (I kid you not).

 

I found a source for isohumulone powder from china that they use for making herbal remedy pills. I kind of want to mix it with keystone till saturated, bottle it and send it out to a lab to get an IBU measurement, brag about my high score and sell it to hipsters for $20/6er.

 

I agree on the hops arms race. My local brewpub has only one perennial beer on top < 6% alcohol. I keep requesting at every brewpub I visit that they have at least a couple of nice, solid, tasty 5% beers that you can actually have several of and enjoy. 35-40 ibus, nice hoppy finish, 5%. Bam. But they all seem to insist on having 7.5% 80 IBU double IPAs. "Because baus" or something stupid.

Give me something I can drink 3 of over the course of a couple of hours with dinner without endangering the public, please.

Edit: and now they're moving to the 8%+ double imperials that they'll only serve to you in a 6oz glass. FFS.

 

When you get sick of the hops race, go get a nice tall pint of Flying Dog Amber Lager.

 

Glad to see I'm not alone in this.

This was the terrible selection at Whole Foods yesterday.

 

crooked heffy has a shot at being decent if the high gravity doesnt ruin the balance.

 

Had mediocre reviews online so I tried the Guard Your Heart instead. It's okay.

 

I'd have gone for the saison, but its also one of my favorite styles. By rights it shouldn't be a style unto itself, but I'll save that rant for another day.

I opened a bomber of Big Sur Golden last night. Very tasty and very local.

 

it's april 3. too early for hefe.

 

Well, as (good) fortune would have it, I traveled to both the St Louis and Champagne/Urbana areas recently and had a chance to sample some of the readily available barrel-aged brews that they just don't ship out here to the left coast.



Being short on time (and potentially on sobriety), I had to pass on a couple other variations of the Yetti, as well as a few from Bells and Founders that I've been coveting. Apparently, I just need to travel more.

 

My boss put me in a car and made me drive to Oxnard yesterday (4h20m each way) for an hours worth of work, so I stopped in Buelton on the way home. What the hell is in Buelton you might ask? Why, the Firestone Walker Barrelworks of course!



I want all these things but I only got to try the Bretta Weisse, Bretta Rosé and Stickee Monkee. The Sloambic was high on my list of lust but they had just blown the keg and refused to let me suck on the tap :(



Nothing currently being produced at the Barrelworks has any distribution and they have limited bottling and sales on site. The first one out the door later this year or early next year will be the Agrestic. At the far end of the above image the two 18' high oak keg things currently hold the entire volume for the first distribution release of Agrestic. I believe its something like 2,200g in each of the big wooden monoliths. From what I remember, Agrestic is a bugged out version of the Firestone DBA. The first time I had it was in a flight of DBA, Unfiltered DBA, DDBA and Agrestic. If you can find it I recommend you give it a try.

Firestone Walker Brewing Company - Barrelworks

 

^^ P A R A B O L A . . .

 

I've got a 2013 Parabola and a 2013 velvet merkin aging in my closet at the moment I'll probably pull one out when I finally get plates for the exocet.

Also my manager popped this open this afternoon for happy hour at work. Given the past few weeks the name is quite poignant and the beer was rather good as well.

 

Last night was ballast point grapefruit sculpin for me.
I have absolutely no intention of trying the habanero sculpin.
Pepper beers just don't do anything for me, Except this one time I had a beer called "love is evil". It was made by prism brewing company here in Pennsylvania and it was a strawberry jalapeno lager. The initial sip tasted like a heavy dark lager with a note of strawberries, but the finish was a burning sensation on your lips with very mild heat, simillar to what youd you'd get when eating hot wings. It was very well done IMO.

 

I tried this stuff called clownshoe white ale at the bar last night. It was meh, tasted like the yougling summer but slightly toned down and cleaner. It was drinkable where the yougling was not.

 

Yuengling Brewery is about 10 minutes from my house. Their beers are my ultimate go beers. You might say you get what you pay for, but I pay like $20 a case for anything that they make. I mean sure there are much better beers out there, but you cannot compare them for the quality you get at the cost you pay. I have already paid twice that price for a case from a microbrewer, and it sucked.

 

A case is 24 beers right? We only get 12 count cases here but it is only like $12. Regular old yuegling lauger is fine, the black and tan isnt bad either, but the summer is just undrinkable.

 

Try the porter. Do not try the chesterfield ale.

 

Are any of you homos in Chico at the Soroptimist Brewfest this weekend? Let me know and I'll "buy" you a beer.

 

I'll be honest, I am shocked at the number of places running cider taps at this event. I've always said the current boom in the cider industry is backlash against the flood of IPAs currently on the market. This is just further proves my theory about the hops fatigue in the beer market.

Shocker from this event was the 5.5% ABV traditional style root beer from, horror of horrors, the Pabst Brewery.