Beer in the new era

Phase Three, one of the best local breweries, has not only started selling a 5% hard seltzer, not only started doing so in a smoothie style "jammed full" of fruit, not only started selling it for $21.99 a 4-pack, but had the absolutely audacity to actually call the line Lulz.

https://www.phasethreebrewingshop.com/uploads/1/3/3/1/133164180/s743319809657808125_p326_i1_w800.png

I would mail order from Russian River and de Garde if they shipped out of state to WA. Sad face.

Metropolitan

i'm about to have one of their kolsch-ish beers

I dug into my cellar tonight, having kinda forgotten about it for a good long time.

2006 Thomas Hardy’s Ale:
Gone a bit sour, not totally unpleasant but not super desirable either. Mostly tastes like I imagine fermented prune juice would, with a hint of aspirin astringency. Not great. Finished most of the small bottle before dumping the dregs.

2009 Cantillon Lou Pepe Framboise
Bit of suspicious mould on the cork as I open it. Smells like .... olives? Wtf. Tastes also like olives, with some lambic flavour back. Fuck that, this one’s to clean the drains with.

2009 Cantillon organic Kriek
Much more like it. Still a difficult customer, very very sour and aggressive. After the initial shock there’s a fun jolly rancher kind of sweet/sour play on the palate and a nice firm bitterness to close off the mouthful. I don’t think anyone was meant to get through a whole 750ml bottle on their own. We’ll see if tomorrow the whole thing has gone funky with the introduction of some oxygen, but tonight the one glass will do me fine.

It's surprisingly hard to find beer that's not past its sell-by date at some local beer stores around where I live. At one store near me, I would say more than 50% of the beers that have a sell-by date that I checked on a recent visit were past the date. That doesn't inspire me with a lot of confidence to buy the beers that don't have a sell-by date either. You usually have to look pretty closely to find the sell-by (or "best by" date), it's often stamped faintly on the bottle or can itself, so you have to remove it from the box to check. I guess most people don't know or care enough to check.

― o. nate, Saturday, January 23, 2021 4:55 PM (three weeks ago)

Wish I'd read this earlier because I recently got burned by buying a 6-pack that turned out to be over a month past its "best by" date (>1 year since it was canned). This was completely unexpected since a. I bought it in a grocery that's very beer-oriented where I assumed turnover was rapid, and b. this was a microbrew produced in my own gd borough! In fact I went to another store one block away and found a 6-pack of the same brand that was 11 months fresher.

The brand is Sixpoint Alpen-Flo Lager. It's supposed to be like a German Helles. It's quite all right, though somehow I can still tell it's a microbrew.

yikes, pretend that was a block quote

walked into my local tiny liquor store as they were getting a delivery of Heady and Focal. that would have been unheard of not long ago.

Last week I had a chocolate-banana imperial stout. It was really quite good, exactly as promised, but came in a 16oz. can and it was just *too much.* I mean, I finished it, but the next morning I woke up and immediately thought, ugh, I never want that again. I gave one of my extra cans to a friend, who had the exact same reaction (he thought it might taste good mixed with a dark rum). I'm giving another one (it was a 4-pack) to another friend tonight, I'm curious to hear what he thinks.

I saw on fb that this year's F-W Parabolas are out (three varieties) but my local Total Wine and Whole Foods doesn't have them. I'll be damned if I mail order beer.

there are a few very local, new microbreweries that i want to be enthusiastic about further out in jersey near where i grew up. but their beer is just sadly not as good as the more established microbreweries. don't want to call them out, but what is the deal with that? is it really that hard to make a solid new england-style ipa?

yes?

yeah, i guess it is. makes me appreciate my favorite spots a lot more.

Parabola is in supermarkets in SF, no variants though. They do have that absurdly priced club you can join if you are really ISO lol

how far out in Jersey?

Carton and Kane are both kinda near the Jersey Shore/Asbury Park (and are both super good imho).

there are great breweries along the shore. i'm talking further out, mercer and hunterdon counties.

i don't want to insult them. both are good for the communities, great spots for people to gather outside.

there's a lot of breweries that are well-meaning and good for their communities whose beer i would never buy again. i don't think that's a bad thing per se. and i wouldn't hesitate to name them. they may not work for me but they seem to be working for a lot of other people.

I'm in South Dakota, so I bought some Remedy bc according to the internet it's the best in the state… not bad! About what you'd expect from a run of the mill big city product.

I see the appeal of a local beer garden that sell their own brew but a lot of these beers should not be distributed imo

Speaking of NE IPAs I had the VT IPA from Long Trail recently and thought it was a pretty good example of the style.

long trail always solid

i'm having an ipa called 'sexual jams' now, a collaboration between brix city brewing (from nearby in little ferry -- i live in fort lee, nj) and district 96, which i'd never heard of before. really good but the can is meant to look to a pixelated frame from a pornographic movie and it's kind of grossing me out.

yeah that's an eyeroll

i didn't want to get it. i asked the guy at my local beer shop what was the closest they had to threes' logical conclusion and he said this, which i don't think is that accurate. there is a lingering sweetness to this beer that is really different. it's not bad though.

I see the appeal of a local beer garden that sell their own brew but a lot of these beers should not be distributed imo

This is so otm.

Yeah, I live in the mid-burbs (65 blocks from the edge of what you’d call downtown life here). A brewpub recently opened up within walking distance of my place. I’m bending over backwards to support them; the beer is fine but nobody needs to make this place a destination, nor do they need to can and sell it. It’s just great to have a local that makes local beer for locals.

I think it would be pretty cool if the American beer scene ended up similar to the German/English model where every small city/large town has their own brewery (or two) that doesn't distribute and you drink it because it is good/decent and you can't get that exact beer/scene anywhere else.

My local beer store is now stocking 3 Floyds beers. I decided to try the Gumballhead, which is billed as a hoppy wheat beer, but tbh I couldn't detect much of the wheat aspect, except perhaps in the lighter body. Tasted basically like an IPA to me.

i haven't revisited gumballhead since 3 floyds distro started. maybe when it gets warmer. i remember it having an oddly high abv for a wheat beer.

Gumbahallhead reminds me of an aggressively hoppy wheat beer from Lagunitas called Little Sumpin' Sumpin'. Should mention I've never had super fresh Gumballhead tho.

yeah those beers are pretty similar from what i remember

i have very strong and positive "visting friends in chicago before anyone had kids" associations with gumball head and daisy cutter to the point that I don't know and kind of don't care if they're objectively "good" or not

They're objectively better than, like, Bud or Miller or Coors or any other generic lager, so I am happy to have them everywhere. Like, if Daisy Cutter is your baseline, you're doing pretty good as far as beer goes.

Being one of the friends joygoat visited in chicago, I have to say this is accurate. I remember Gumballhead being sort of low key at first and then it was everywhere. The same thing happened with Zombie Dust, though much more slowly.

i remember getting gumballhead at least once at logan liquors with you, and i also remember walking out of the AC there into hot as shit chicago july with two six packs and feeling like a dirtbag walking by all the dressed up folks outside the spanish language 7th day adventist church on logan blvd

i'm indifferent to zombie dust becuase it was so elusive that I'd never actually had one until maybe two years ago and it was okay enough. i do love that, gumballhead, and daisy cutter are kind of weird outliers for the styles of beer they ostensibly are

Back then 3Floyds and Half Acre were hot shit, now they're some of the more established big players in the market. My beersnobbist friends have all moved on (to some extent) to Off Color and Metropolitan for their beer-stanning activities. It doesn't hurt that one of them got a job at Metro.

Building off my last post, my dude at Metro is at it again. A portion of this beer's sales goes to the Greater Chicago Food Depository:

Tomorrow Tuesday at 2p, we’re tapping a playful take on Heliostat Zwickel Lager, a 3-part blend of:

Early-pull Heliostat repitched with Champagne yeast.

Heliostat blended with Muscat juice concentrate.

The everyday Heliostat we know and love. pic.twitter.com/gWyrnzfPwg

— Metro Brewing (@MetroBrewing) March 15, 2021

The finished beer features bursting aromas of dried apricot, ripe mango, and peach skin; an effervescent yet malty sweet body; and a bone-dry finish with just the slightest touch of residual tannins. The proletariat sips this one between bites of the rich.

— Metro Brewing (@MetroBrewing) March 15, 2021

ISO

Russian River has a similar beer called Intinction and it is one of the best beers they've made in years.

So the only way to have it is to be there tomorrow afternoon and drink on site?

I think you can get growlers/crowlers?

Beer in the old era:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/women-used-dominate-beer-industry-until-witch-accusations-started-pouring-180977171/#.YEjLeAK6P5J.facebook

No idea why Facebook is in that link, fuck Facebook. Here's a clean link:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/women-used-dominate-beer-industry-until-witch-accusations-started-pouring-180977171/

https://www.thrillist.com/eat/los-angeles/crowns-and-hops-brewing-co-profile

minorities are way under represented in the beer community. This is a nice story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9DK5g8hrls

Seychelles?

If you play that at 2x speed the guitar riff turns into kind of a cool fuzz-punk sound for a while.

lol tbh

https://dragonsmilk.com/dragons-share-cherry/

eww

Clearly Melania's "Be Better" campaign fell on deaf ears.

hazy-o, dogfish's head's new england ipa brewed with oat milk -- pretty good. don't taste the oat milk at all

i have no place else to share some thoughts on this so i will share them here: https://www.goodbeerhunting.com/sightlines/2021/5/18/beer-industry-allegations-legal-vulnerability

https://vinepair.com/articles/sexism-assault-beer-industry-ratmagnet/

i guess what i would say is it is absolutely not surprising to see big shots from the heady times of the early 2010s being named here. my interest is mostly specific to shaun hill who is someone i have interacted with, and it's unsurprising that some of the accusations against him are related to fests and events. like i cannot underscore enough how big a shitshow beer fests were in the 2010-2015 era i can speak to. i was at hill farmstead's festival of farmhouse ales in 2013 and the camping/afterparty for that was "fun" but also aggressive and fratty and certainly a bad environment for women. lots of very drunk awkward dudes feeling themselves with weed and coke mixed in. and the brewers and industry people were stalking the patrons, incidentally the tired hands guy who is also accused was at that FoFA in 2013 and i remember thinking he was strikingly good-looking for a brewer and seemed much less socially awkward as well but apparently he too was capable of creating a terrible work environment for his employees.

shaun hill was by his own admission drunk for several of hill farmstead's big growth years, is not the easiest guy to talk to, and his statement related to this news is horseshit. the other thing i am seeing is randos with knives out because they are unsatisfied as consumers with how he has managed his business. it's depressing to see craft beer people co-opt legitimate complaints from women because they never liked the guy in the first place.

that said i'm a big fan of personal accountability and if you want to own and operate a business that sells intoxicants you should probably tread lightly, and afaict all of these guys spent time doing the exact opposite of that. so whatever happens happens.

the last time i went to a beer fest i wound up going solo due to some weird circumstances. i also had to get myself there and back safely with no place to crash, so i was actually doing 2 oz. tasters and being really careful. i made some line friends and ran around with these kids from connecticut for a bunch of the night until they offered me coke because they were driving back from mass to CT the next morning to go to another fest or something. it was always a pretty unhealthy scene.