Beer in the new era

sam adams makes $250 bottle of beer?

It’s almost more of a spirit. Uncarbonated, served ambient temperature, close to 30% abv, and it ages well- even after opening. When I have a bottle in the house, I keep it tucked away and bring it out for special occasions or sharing a nip with friends. It lasts for months or even years that way, and it’s a delight to the very end. But, full disclosure, I work for the company.

A lot of gossip flying around this weekend about The Bruery, essentially their equity partner couldn't make their loan payments to the bank, so the bank auctioned it off and it sold for $3M. The equity partner is out ~$40M, the bank is out ~$17M. Patrick Rue (founder) had the opportunity to outbid the $3M offer and he passed. In 2015 they were assessed at around $100M.

Reminds me of when Ballast Point was sold to PE in 2015 for $1B and then they bought back to a virtually unknown brewery in Chicago last year for $75M.

Personal interjection... I've got some The Bruery coming next week or the week after - bought a couple of their 'I’ve got Friends in the Music Business' barrel aged blends (collaboration with Brouwerij Frontaal). I haven't bought much/any US stuff before as the prices can be fierce here in the UK, certainly for the well renowned stuff, but these were ok and seem like they should suit winter drinking well.

fwiw those fruited beers I bought over the summer never exploded, but at the same time, they were kind of gross, so they're just sitting around in the fridge.

Some new info here plus some bits I've seen elsewhere

https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/ancient-beer/

Man I've really been slacking on beer this year, with brewery visits out and reduced shopping options. Still been supporting our locals, but since I haven't felt comfortable enough to actually go in any of them I've been limited to their (mostly) reduced offerings for to go and delivery.

Been really into Hop Butcher stuff that a store keeps getting in though.

You really can't wrong with Hop Butcher except when they go too far afield with some red flag brew (like, graham cracker blackberry banana apricot fruit punch milkshake double IPA, or some shit). Most of their stuff is variations on a really palatable NEIPA flavor profile. Been drinking some great stuff from Saint Errant, Pipeworks and Phase Three as well, locally, plus of course Revolution and Half Acre keep churning out great stuff. Rev's Deth's Tar has been popping up in stores, and for my money they've surpassed Goose Island on the barrel-aged front, plus selling it in four-packs of 12oz cans is a much better way to buy/drink that stuff. They have great curbside service, too.

Yeah I've had some awful milkshake stuff in the past, so I've been hesitant to try any of that from Hop Butcher.

If I lived in your fair city I would be supporting Off Color & Revolution as much as possible.

I do support Rev as much as possible and Josh reminds me that I def need to go pick up some Deth's Tar before things clamp down again. I gotta admit that I find Off Color to be really hit and miss for me.

plz support Metropolitan Brewing as well, a v good friend of mine works there and they (the business) are in a very precarious spot

(my opinion of Off Color is much the same, the price paid for being so experimental I guess)

I use untappd religiously to track every unique beer I consume; I've added only five or six since march.

Same here joygoat, I started 2020 needing only about 20 more beers to get to 1,000 unique beers and I'm still 6 or 7 away.

i'm at 989 right now and THIS WAS GONNA BE THE YEAR

Just checked and I'm closer than I thought, but still 996.

I have trouble getting excited about Bourbon County Stout, since the regular seems to stick around for months now, the rare stuff vanishes in advance, and the rest of them that I come across always seem a little gross or unappealing (especially for the price). Meanwhile, Revolution's barrel-aged program keeps, well, barreling along. I'm not sure if it's an annual thing, but Deth By Cherries made another appearance this year, and I just scored a 4-pack at the local store for a pittance, since it hadn't been priced yet. "The rest of them are around $25, is that OK?" Yes please.

i got my one annul bottle of regular bcbs today. the tea/honey variant was still hanging around but for 24 bucks and in my least favorite bottle format on earth i had to pass.

Someone said the tea one "kinda tasted like boba" which was intriguing but my interest in chasing stouts is long gone

I bought a couple reg BC, $13 ea at Total Wine & More, and one from 2019 for the same. They even had 2018 and 2017 bottles there. The only other variant they had was the Caramella, which didn't sound like something I'd like (cinnamon), and it was $15, I think.

I also found a Russian River Supplicant sour for $13 in their back room.

Honestly I was more excited about the Schell's Oat Stout I had today than BCBS.

Huh, looks like they don't distribute in Illinois.

And on a related note I drank a couple bottles of 2014 Firestone Parabola (not on the same day), and I couldn't tell if they had improved with the aging. Still very good, but seemingly not any different character than fresh BA beer, not that I remember what it tasted like in 2014.

Yeah, I had a 2012 BCS the other night, and it tasted fine. Luck of the draw, I guess, but for all the talk of "fresh" or "gushers" or "infected," I've never had a beer (of any type) that has gone bad, afaict. Not yet at least. And those beers I bought over the summer that were destined to blow up? I still have a few of them, and they have not exploded. I wonder if, when it comes to taste, it could be genetic, like the way some people think cilantro tastes like soap? For example, I've never tasted rancid peanuts or peanut oil, or rather I've never had peanuts or tasted peanut oil that I thought have gone rancid, but my wife is obsessed with the notion. Likewise, I've never had vermouth that has gone bad, either, but apparently that is a thing?

Schell is a great brewery, second oldest family owned brewery in the U.S.

xp
I was hoping that the age would actually improve (or even alter in an interesting way) the flavor, but it doesn't seem to have.

And oddly enough I have a very old (> 10 yrs), opened bottle of sweet vermouth that I tasted (seemed OK) and then made a couple Manhattans with.

There's a funny conflation I see among beer nerds in particular that mixes up the properties of beer, whiskey and wine. Like, there will be a bourbon barrel aged beer that someone will say tastes like straight up bourbon (no it doesn't) and then other folks act like these big beers age like wine, but ... yeah, I dunno about that, either. For example, we had a coffee BCS a couple of weeks back that was I think 8 years old, and the coffee flavor was still strong and front and center, yet I've seen people complain of flavor profiles and properties fading after just a few months or whatever. Those might be the same folks that think beers taste best a few days after they're brewed, which ... maybe they do, but I can't tell. I think as with a lot of rarified things there's an element of magical thinking to it all.

I think the problem with stouts from the early 2010s and earlier is that the bottle closure is a simple crimped cap which is a semipermeable seal allowing oxygen to come in and "age" the beer over time. Nowadays the big time stout producers use a special cap that has a polyseal ring on the inside to minimize oxidization and then coated with several coats of molten wax.

Storage conditions (a legit cellar/fridge vs. *ahem* the back of my wife's shoe closet), provenance (how many times a bottle has switched hands), shipping exposure, etc. can factor in to how a bottle will age.

When I had a modest collection of coffee stouts, I would store them in my kitchen refrigerator out of fear of the coffee note fading, or developing a bell-pepper note which was a big turnoff.

Yeah, it's kind of a paradox, I guess: I've never had a bad beer, afaik, but at the same time, there aren't many people or places that collect and store beers, so I wouldn't have come across one stored improperly. Mine are just in unheated (but warm enough not to freeze) closet in the basement. Doesn't make my beer cool enough, but brings any red wine to the perfect temp!

I've never had a bad beer

A worrying lack of hiss on open, pouring dead flat and a dull flat stale cardboard off-flavor are my usual signs that a beer is much past its prime.

I did have a 1989 Bigfoot barleywine recently and it was much better than I thought it would be... OTOH I had a small taste of the 1994 Samuel Adams Triple Bock (small cobalt blue bottle) and that was like 25 year old soy sauce poured into a cigar ashtray.

I generally drink pilsner type beers that are supposed to be a bit fizzy and you can definitely tell when those are past their prime, because they start to get flat, and develop some off flavors.

just in general when it comes to booze and the effects of age i think a lot of things are in play:

- most people, and i certainly include myself, have very poor sense memory
- most people, due to scarcity and means and whatnot, will never consume enough aged vs. fresh versions of any given thing to give them an opinion on the effects of aging that i'd listen to
- the middle stage of beer advocacy imo had a lot of people falsely thinking that aging beer was a good thing to be doing. that was wrong and destructive and led to a lot of pretty dumb hoarding behavior because people were taking lessons from top of the line corked gueuzes and applying them to all kinds of stuff. my position now is that well-made spontaneously fermented beers can hang out for a while (though don't look for "improvement") and just about everything else should be cracked while reasonably fresh.
- to josh's point about alcohol confusion, people took all the wrong lessons from wine too! only a tiny amount of the wine produced worldwide actually needs/benefits from aging beyond a handful of years.
- to al's point, oxidation is maybe the one effect that is pretty easy to trace, and i do find that many of those metal-capped stouts of the early '10s are oxidized at this point (he says, have slogged through a handful of 2012-13 bcbs bottles in the past year).
- oxidation is the effect working on open vermouth as well. i think the characterization of old vermouth as "bad" is probably not useful, but taste a fresh bottle vs. one that's been sitting open for 3 months and you'll get the gist of oxidation in that venue.

booming post CAD.

I will add fino sherry is something that really benefits from experiments in oxidation (via solera/blending). Maybe oolong tea as well, but that's a different topic.

great post cad. One thing I would add is that

my position now is that well-made spontaneously fermented beers can hang out for a while (though don't look for "improvement")

only a tiny amount of the wine produced worldwide actually needs/benefits from aging beyond a handful of years

you can age all sorts of wine if what you are looking for is an interesting development and not some absolute improvement. I've had under $30 retail loire chenin blanc that has 10 years of age and had wonderful development. I've been told that muscadet, with its acidity, can also age (I have a few bottles going, we'll see). But I totally agree that beer seems ify for a number of reasons and being able to talk definitively about improvement between two bottles opened years apart is ridiculous.

That's why the true nerds assemble "vertical" tastings.

Well I just bought a bunch of BCBS. My local store suddenly put out 17, 18, and 19 regular, wheatwine, and moncheri at $13 a bottle. Totally weird but hey, getting variants for the price of regular is okay with me. Plus they're aged! Lol

Yeah, I'm still seeing those variants from last year on the shelves! I ended up getting one regular, one apple and one #4 from this year. Next week I think I can snag a Half Acre Benthic. Still think Revolution has the best barrel aged program here, though.

new holland/night tripper imperial stout - boooooooze. this is fantastic tbh, i like bitter boozey ashy imperial stouts and this one also nails the right mouthfeel.

― call all destroyer, Wednesday, April 23, 2014 10:01 PM (10 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a delightful byproduct of new holland distributing here is that 4-packs of this beer just showed up. best non-ba imperial stout i've had.

― call all destroyer, Sunday, March 1, 2015 8:23 PM (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Throwback to five or six years ago, I am visiting my parents home in Michigan while they are not home and found my dad has a bottle of 2014 Night Tripper. Well, had. It's very good!

oh man, great find. i should see if this is still around anywhere although the distribution landscape of 2015 feels like a million years ago.

Dear BitNE readers,

What is your favorite Winter Warmer?

(...or is that style too "old era"?)

Literally the only Christmasy winter beer I've ever wanted more than one of is Alpha Klaus, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't count.

Phase Three here is introducing a "winter IPA," which I guess is their take on a winter ale or "winter warmer," which I did not even know was a thing but

https://tbn.ethershaft.engineering/what-is-a-winter-ale/

man i don't even know if i could go to a store and buy a winter warmer these days

Fremont (Seattle) releases an absolute beast annually named Bourbon Abonimable (aka B-bomb) and I've had some killer vintage ones from Capt. Lawrence (Hudson Valley, NY) & Kuhnhenn (Detroit, MI) this winter.

One of my locals made a winter warmer that I reluctantly bought a 4-pack of and I'm really enjoying it. Feels like I'm going against the grain for reals lol.

i always get some of the boulevard nutcracker ale and really enjoy it, but i am not a winter warmer connoisseur.

My first was an Anchor Christmas ale maybe 20 years ago, and loved it that first time. But as I buy it nowadays, usually every year around this time, it is less and less a great thing.

Years ago a friend of mine brought an entire case of Mad Elf (Tröegs' holiday belgian-style ale that's 11-12%) to a holiday party that was going on for hours and kept wondering why no one wanted to go near the stuff.

Oof, 3 Floyds is permanently closing its Indiana taproom, though it doesn’t seem to affect their beer production.