Beer recipes #231 & #232 - Compleat Breakfast Oatmeal Stout and Dooper Hopper Double IPA

Although the holiday season is the busiest here at Barbary Coast Brewing, with ~300 bottles to brew, ferment, age, bottle, and distribute, the fun never really stops--because, of course, the drinking never really stops (except briefly, after a bad weekend or ill-considered just-one-more pint of something a wee bit strong). The last bottle of Old Titan or Pink Nightmare usually gets capped around December 11th, and after that I take a couple of weeks off. But usually, round about new years, the supply of drinkin' beer (as opposed to giftin' beer) is running out. Not only that, by that point aikido camp is only 6 or 7 weeks away, barely enough time to get a good ale ready for the thirsty martial artists. As I like to say, I am a river to my people, and here's what flowed up to Sonoma this past President's Day weekend:

Compleat Breakfast Oatmeal Stout

The man who organizes our winter camp loves a good, strong, dark beer, and this year I thought to please him with a variation of a beer I've often brewed as my first beer of the new year. Rather than just oatmeal (which adds body and some residual sweetness), I also decided to include lactose, a la a milk stout, which adds a sugar indigestible by yeast, and so adding a subtle sweetness. And then, hitting on the "breakfast" theme of milk and oats, I added some orange extract and cinnamon to "compleat" it. (I considered adding coffee too, but since I haven't worked with that before and didn't want to risk it, that will have to wait for another time).

Mash:
7 lbs British 2-row
1 lb 120L crystal malt
1.5 lb steel-cut, rolled oats
0.5 lb rice hulls
0.5 lb carafa malt
0.25 lb black patent malt
0.25 lb roast barley
0.5 lb lactose

Hops:
1 oz Challenger @ 8.2% AA 60 min.
0.5 oz Willamette@ 7.5% AA 20 min.
0.5 oz " 5 min

Yeast: White Labs Irish Ale Yeast WLP 004

Extra: In 4 oz house vodka (180°), soak for 3 weeks 0.25 oz curaçao orange peel, 1 cinnamon stick cracked. Add prior to bottling

Dooper Hopper Double IPA

Although I'm a big hop-head, I've refrained from making a really hoppy beer, just because I wasn't sure anyone else would drink it and a) didn't want to get stuck drinking 2 cases of the same beer by myself, and b) didn't want production of that beer to mean I didn't have other beer for other people. Having gauged that there'd be sufficient drinkers at aikido camp, however, I decided to make a glorious double IPA, and to my pleasure, they drank almost every last bottle. The malt bill is a variant of my dooper cooper double-oak-aged pale ale, with a super-charged hops bill:

Malt:
8 lbs domestic 2-row
4 lbs domestic Munich
0.5 lb 120L crystal malt
0.5 lb Belgian biscuit malt
0.5 lb wheat malt

Hops:
2 oz Columbus @ 13.9% AA + 1 oz Chinook @ 14.2% AA in wort during spage
1 oz Centennial @ 9.5% AA 60 min
2 oz Amarillo @ 7.8 % AA 5 min
1 oz Centennial + 1 oz Columbus dry-hop in primary
2 oz Amarillo dry-hop in secondary

Yeast: White Labs California Ale Yeast WLP 001

Know your enemy: Shocktop, or, the rise of the fake microbrews

A few months back, as I was walking around the neighborhood, I passed by Coit Liquor, a venerable (1961) North Beach institution that has a pretty good selection of craft and foreign beers. In the window was a big, glossy display, with posters and banners, for a beer I'd never heard of, "Shock Top Belgian White." It had a mascot, an orange slice sporting a face, sunglasses, and a mohawk of grain stalks.

Behold, the banal face of evil.

Now, it's one thing to come across a beer you've never seen before. That happens all the time, even at your local supermarket, if you're lucky enough to have a good buyer or a liberal-minded distributor, at least in parts of the country where distributors have access to a range of craft beers.

But when you go by your local bottle shop, and there's not just a new beer, but a new beer with copious marketing materials featuring a cheezy mascot, well, there's something skunky in Denmark.

Similarly, a few years ago, I happened to be in Las Vegas for some work function, and I went down to the bar, looking for a beer. All they had was Big Yellow, in its various incarnations ("lite," "dry," whatever), and something called "Blue Moon Belgian White," which I didn't recognize, and sounded like the closest thing to a craft beer I was going to get. So I ordered it. They served it in a logo glass, with a slice of orange. It was pale. It was bland.

It was Coors.

Shock Top is Bud.

Welcome to the world of fake microbrews.

The fact is that, all the craft brew in America represents a mere drop in the bucket - 6% of the volume and 9% of the dollar value. America's largest craft brewer, Sam Adams, sells 2.5 million barrels and has a revenue of $512 million. (Yeungling is roughly the same size; the two are essentially tied for the title of largest American brewer.) By contrast, Anheuser-Busch (AKA Bud), the formerly American company that's now owned by multinational AB InBev, sells 121 million barrels, has an annual revenue of over $15 billion, and controls 48% of US market share. The second largest brewer in America, MillerCoors (owned by multinationals SABMiller and Molson Coors), controls 30% of the US market.

Imported beer--most of it produced by companies owned by InBev (which owns Bass, Beck's, Boddington's, Corona, Franziskaner, Goose Island, Hoegaarden, Labatt, Leffe, Lowenbrau, Modello, Oranjeboom, Pacifico, Schooner, Spaten, St. Pauli Girl, Stella Artois, Whitbread, and many others), SABMiller (which owns Peroni, Pilsner Urquell, and many others), Heineken (which owns Moretti, Affligem, Amstel, Beamish, Murphy's, Dos Equis, Tecate, Sol, Bohemia, and many others), and Carlsberg (which owns Kronenbourg and many others)--constitutes the remainder of the US market. In fact, those 4 produce over half the world's beer.

But, you say, what about all of the other big ol' US brands?

Michelob, Rolling Rock, Natural Light? Anheuser-Busch.

Hamm's, Milwaukee's Best, Icehouse, Killian's Irish Red, Keystone, Henry Weinhard? MillerCoors.

Pabst? (Yes, I'm looking at you, you hipsters swilling your "ironic" PBRs...) Pabst hasn't actually brewed its own beer since 1996, when it contracted all its brewing, first to Stroh (which Pabst bough 3 years later), and then in 2001 to Miller. Today it's little more than a marketing and real estate company, holding the Schlitz, Old Milwaukee, Stroh's, Colt 45, St. Ides, Lone Star, Olympia, Rainier, Schaefer, and other brands.

Consolidation in the American brewing industry can be traced back to the 1950s, when TV advertising allowed for the creation of national identities for breweries. By the early 80s, the number of breweries in the US had fallen from 407 to 83, controlled by 44 companies, the top 6 of which (Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Heilman, Stroh, Coors, and Pabst) controlled 92% of US beer production. It didn't help, of course, that they were all producing more-or-less indistinguishable products on an industrial scale. Control over advertising and distribution channels was really the only determinant of success.

The influence of the Great Imperialist Brewing Satan warped the resurgence of regional microbreweries that began in the mid-80s. A prime example can be found in Portland's Widmer Brothers (founded in 1984), the brewery that introduced hefeweizen to America; and Seattle's Redhook (founded in 1981), with its signature ESB. To compete nationally, these two merged in 2007 to form the Craft Brew Alliance (which later bought Kona Brewing); but because of the GIBS's stranglehold on distribution, they had to sell a third stake to AB InBev to get access.

And now, perhaps most insidious of all, aside from the microbreweries owned or part-owned by Big Yellow, are the fake micros like Blue Moon and Shock Top. The beer case in your local grocery or liquor store is already a battleground, where legitimate microbrewers must fight for shelf space against Bud, Bud Light, Miller, Miller Lite, Coors, Coors Light, in bottles, cans, six-packs, twelve packs, and suitcases; not to mention the "black crown," "chelada," "chill," "draft," "dry," "high life," "ice," "lime," "private reserve," "premium," "red," "select," and "wheat" permutations they can think of to force sellers to put on the shelves and try to convince you it's not Yellow. But now they have to compete for the tiny sliver of "microbrew" shelf space against the fake microbrews (or "nostalgia" brands), because the market is essentially saturated with a commodity product, and the macrobrewing dinosaurs are reduced to trying to stamp out the craft brewer mammals underfoot to try to squeeze out the last pips of profit, in the process crushing all innovation, diversity, and regional character.

Grrrrrr... </rant>

Beer review - November! (slightly late...)

The latest rogue's gallery... plus one you've seen before...

Welcome back! Or rather, welcome me back, since you haven't gone anywhere, but I've been absent from the BCBB. I started working on this review just before the holidays hit, and never quite finished it, or several others. I'm going to try to knock them all down in short order. I apologize if this means that the reviews are somewhat abbreviated.

Sierra Nevada Kellerweis

Sierra Nevada, founded in 1979, was one of the first microbreweries, and they were pioneers in "West Coast" style beers (very hoppy, particularly in their use of Cascade hops). For a while, their line of bottled offerings was pretty small - their flagship pale ale, porter, stout, and Celebration holiday IPA. But in more recent years, they became leaders in things like growing their own ingredients and sustainable power, and they've expanded their lines of beers as well.

The Kellerweis is one of their more recent beers. It's a hefeweizen, meaning a wheat beer with the yeast residue left in. And it's open-fermented, meaning that rather than being fermented in a closed tank, its fermenter is open to the air - not in the funky way that, say, Belgian saisons are, allowing wild yeasts and whatever else is born on the wind to fall in and influence the fermentation - but it does make it more of a living, breathing thing than a closed-up science experiment.

I'm not a great fan of wheat beers, but of the ones I've had, this is a pretty good specimen - spicy and fruity, with a nice body. If you like a good wheat beer - or if you're looking for a gateway beer that's not too heavy and doesn't look to dark - I'd recommend it.

4.8% ABV, 15 IBU.

Brasserie Trois Dames Sauvageonne

Oops! Turns out I've already reviewed it! :-) Moving on...

Bear Republic Racer X Double IPA

Bear Republic's Racer V IPA is a classic California (they're in Healdsburg, just north of Santa Rosa in the Sonoma Valley, a place full of great beer, even though it's wine country) IPA - full bodied (7.0% ABV) and hoppy (75 IBUs, with the Big C's - Cascade, Chinook, Centennial, and Columbus. Every October, though, they do a special release that's a real treat for the hop-heads, their Racer X Double IPA (available only in 20 oz "bombers").

"Double" is a bit of a misnomer, since you'd literally expect it to be 14% ABV and 150 IBUs. The former would make it damned near impossible to get through a glass and still be able to stand up off your barstool; the latter would overload the palate. "Double IPAs" are stronger (7-9% ABV, vs. 5-7%), and usually max out on the IBUs (100+), with a strong malt "backbone" to counter the bitterness of the hops. Whether they emphasize the bitter or floral characteristics of the hops varies.

Racer X (8.3% ABV, 100+ IBU) is pretty middle of the road on the bitterness v. aroma, with a slight emphasis on the bitter. If you're looking for that double IPA experience, and don't have anywhere to be for a couple of hours, and it's October, go get some.

Gordon Biersch Weizen Eisbock

I'm no great fan of Gordon Biersch or their beers. They're pretty venerable (1988), but for the longest time their line was pretty small and consisted mostly of lagers (with the exceptions of their hefeweizen and Sommerbrau Kölsch), and not particularly memorable ones, although I have to give them credit for their amber Marzen--a lager that's not yellow, wow!--which I like. But then, their brewpub chain became a fixture of upscale yuppie strip malls--35 locations, in AZ, CA (the one in SF recently closed), CO, DC, FL, GA, HI, IN, KS, LA, MD, MO, NV, NY (yes, Dr. P, Syracuse and Buffalo!), OH, SC, TX, VA, and WA--and that doesn't sit well with me, since I'm a fan of local food and local beer.

On a recent trip to the grocery store, however, I spotted something that intrigued me: two big swing-top bombers labelled "Braumeister Select," Weizen Eisbock and Zwickel Bock. I'm a sucker for "experimental" and "limited-release" beers, so I picked them up. I was particularly intrigued by the eisbock, since I'd never seen an eisbier before. These are beers that are fortified by bringing them down to a temperature where the water freezes, but the alcohol does not, and removing said water ice. So, what you have is basically a concentrated hefeweizen.

(This is actually, technically, a method of distilling, albeit not to a very strong ABV; I don't know of any other beers--or, perhaps, "beers"--that do this, which is reinforced by the fact that GB says it's "the first of its kind in the US." As a historical note, this is also how "apple jack," a brandy made from hard apple cider, was made in early America. Unfortunately, unlike distilling in a column still where the methanol comes out before the ethanol and the higher order alcohols come out later, can both be discarded, ice distilling concentrates methanol and higher alcohols in situ, and could lead to methanol poisoning, commonly called "apple palsy.") 

The results were... interesting. Gordon Biersch's hefeweizen isn't the funky cloudy banana/clove hefe that, say, the Kellerweis is. It's much cleaner (what's sometimes called an "American" hefeweizen), so concentrating it didn't make the esthers or phenols (what create the banana-y and clove-y flavors) overpowering. It was rich, a little sweet, slightly syrup, and 10% ABV packed quite a punch, like a doppelbock. At 30 IBUs it wasn't bitter at all; rather, I think any bitterness went into not making it too sweat, like banana bread made with too much sugar. I don't think I'd buy it again, but it was a novel experience. (FWIW, I still haven't drunk the Zwickel Bock.

Almanac Honey Saison

I've talked about both Almanac and saisons elsewhere. At the risk of giving them short shrift, this is an excellent example, with a rich honey sweetness that perfectly balances the slightly sour funk of the saison.

Ninkasi Total Domination IPA

Ninkasi is a fairly new (2006) brewery in Eugene OR that's already made a pretty good name for themselves on the West Coast. Their first and flagship beer is their Total Domination IPA (6.7% ABV, 65 IBUs). It's an examplary West Coast IPA, balanced, but on the bitter side. Not quite as aggressive as, say, Racer 5, but a good IPA to add to your staple rotation.

Beer store reviews - The Jug Shop and City Beer Store

Reading a review of a beer that whets your appetite leads only to torment if you can't get a glass or a bottle for yourself. So today, it's time for a different kind of review, namely, of my two favorite places to buy beer (at least, bottles) in San Francisco, whose names I've mentioned in a number of previous posts: City Beer Store and The Jug Shop.

The Jug Shop

The Jug Shop has sat a couple of blocks from the western end of the Broadway tunnel, at the foot of Russian Hill, since 1965--before your Humble Author was born, in fact. Short of a big box like BevMo, The Jug Shop carries one of the largest array of wines, spirits, and beers to be found in San Francisco. If you want it, chances are, The Jug Shop has it.

Not only that, the staff is very knowledgeable and helpful. They also host frequent beer tastings, usually on Friday nights, led by Eric Cripe, a certified cicerone (beer somalier) and his brother Evan, who resemble nothing so much as a pair of jolly Vikings. Be forewarned, however, that their tastings showcase anywhere from a dozen to fifty beers (or in one case, ciders and meads), so don't come on an empty stomach, or plan to drive home afterwards. (Tip: If you're hungry, stop off at Cheese Plus across the street beforehand, which has an excellent selection of artisan cheeses, a deli, and is no slouch in its beer selection either.)

1590 Pacific Ave, at Polk St.

City Beer Store

City Beer Store opened in May of 2006 in the South of Market (SoMa) district, a couple of blocks from the criminal courthouse, an area that had been mostly auto bodyshops and wholesale appliances, but was revitalized by the in-flood of the tech industry beginning in the mid-90s. The original space was not much bigger than a living room, with some shelves, a couple of reach-in refrigerators, a couple of taps, and a handful of seats. Yet even so, they managed to showcase an astounding range of craft and foreign beers, things that you couldn't find anywhere else. They also offered tastings, classes, batch release/tapping parties, even art openings.

A couple of years ago, they expanded the store to probably 3 times its original size, so that their beer selection became even more astoundinger, around 300 beers, quite possibly the widest I've seen anywhere. They also added a real bar with about a dozen rotating taps, with actual seating for maybe 20 or 30. In particular, they feature beers from local homebrewers who've made the jump to professional like Triple Voodoo and Pacific Brewing Labs, as well as craft brews from across the county, and rarities from across the sea. The only problem is that, like so many great and trendy things in San Francisco, they're somewhat victims of their own success, as I don't ever think I've seen an empty seat any time I've gone.

Fortunately, there's always an excellent selection of bottles to take and enjoy at home, away from the madding crowd.

1168 Folsom St, between 8th & 9th Streets

Recipe #229 - Brit-a-porter Belgian caramel porter

This one is a bit of a fanciful hybrid that I made for Dr. P about a year ago, combining aspects of a British porter and a Belgian dubbel.

Malt:
9 lbs British 2-row
1.5 lb 120L crystal malt
0.5 lb chocolate malt
0.5 lb carafa malt

Additional fermentables:
1 qt caramel syrup. In a saucepan, heat 2 cups sugar carefully over medium-low heat until liquid and dark brown. You can move the pan off the heat or swirl it around to keep it from burning, but do not stir, or you'll get rock candy instead. Carefully add 2 cups water (watch for splatters, this shit is like napalm if it hits you), and return to heat until all caramel re-dissolves.

Hops:
1 oz Fuggles @ 5.6% AA 60 min
0.5 oz East Kent Goldings @ 5.6% AA 20 min
0.5 oz East Kent Goldings @ 5.6% AA 5 min

Yeast: White Labs Belgian ale yeast.

Recipes #226, #227, and #228 - Pink Nightmare, Grandma Dot's Bock, and Old Titan

It's time now for the last of my holiday beer recipes: Pink Nightmare cranberry wheat, Grandma Dot's Bock, and Old Titan spiced honey porter.

Grandma Dot's Bock

GDB was my very first holiday beer, and the 11th beer I'd ever brewed. I brewed it because I'd recently found out from my mom that her grandmother, Leora "Dot" Blaine, had homebrewed bock beer, presumably during Prohibition. Sadly, I don't have her recipe.

Bock beers are German lagers, and actually cover a range of beers, that generally tend to be stronger, heavier, and less hoppy than pilsners: helles, light-colored bock; dunkel, dark-colored bock; doppel,  double-bock (which is what GDB is); and weiss, bock with wheat.

Lagers can be a nuisance for the homebrewer, since they're supposed to, well, lager, meaning, age for several weeks around 55F, which is a difficult temperature to achieve. Refrigerators top out at around 45F. Enterprising brewers will install an electrical cut-off attached to a thermometer that turns off the power to the fridge if they go below 55, but that generally makes the refrigerator useless for anything else (and very few of us have the luxury of a dedicated lagering fridge, much less a proper German lagering cave). After several years of bottles that were overcarbonated, or outright exploded, because I tried to lager them in the fridge and they were under-fermented when they went into the bottle (and therefore overfermented in the bottle), I decided just to rely on San Francisco's naturally cool temperatures to do my lagering, and let the yeast deal with it. So far, the results have been pretty good.

Malt:
5.5 lbs German Vienna
3 lbs German Munich
1 lb caramunich
0.5 lb carapils
0.5 lb wheat malt
0.5 lb English brown malt

Hops:
2 oz. Perle @ 7.1% AA 60 min
1 oz. Hallertauer Hersbrucker @ 4.0% AA 20 min
1 oz. Hallertauer Hersbrucker @ 4.0% AA 5 min

Yeast: White Labs German Bock Yeast WLP 833

Allow 4 weeks in secondary.

  
Old Titan
Old Titan spiced honey porter was my second holiday beer and the twelfth batch overall. The malt bill changes very little over the years, but I'm still trying to find just that right mix of spices for the infusion. 

The name "Old Titan" comes from a story that I used to tell to amuse and confuse my Latin students, back when I taught high school Latin, as follows. (Most of it is true; see if you can determine where it veers off the rails...)

In Roman mythology, Saturn was the king of the Titans, powerful giants who werethe parents of the gods. The Saturnalia, which began on 17 December andlasted for a nine-day Roman week until the winter solstice on 25 December, wasthe forerunner of the modern Christmas. The Romans celebrated Saturnaliaby feasting, exchanging gifts, and decorating their homes with lights andevergreen boughs. And Saturn himself, depicted as an old man with a long whitebeard, dressed in robes and pilus (the peaked freedman’s cap), andcarrying a cornucopia filled with the gifts of the earth, is the sourceof our modern “Santa Claus” (whose name comes from Saturnuculus, meaning“Little Saturn” or “Uncle Saturn”).

Malt:
9 lbs British 2-row
1 lb 80L British crystal
0.5 lb Special B
0.5 lb English brown
0.5 lb carafa

Other fermentables: 2 lbs honey during boil.
Hops:
1 oz East Kent Goldings @ 5.6% AA 60 min
0.5 oz East Kent Goldings @ 5.6% AA 20 min
0.5 oz East Kent Goldings@ 5.6% AA 5 min

Yeast: White Labs Dry English Ale WLP 007

Infusion: To 4 oz house vodka, add 1 cinnamon stick, 6 cloves and 6 allspice berries (rushed), 1/4 tsp fresh nutmeg, 1/2 tsp fresh-grated ginger. Steep 1 week, then add to secondary.

Pink Nightmare

Fruit beers are always tricky, because the fruit will have some residual wild yeast in it, and you never know how that will behave. It's also hard to get rid of. If you try to freeze it, it will just go to sleep. Boil it, and the pectin in your fruit will set and you'll get jelly instead of beer. The second time that I made this (and the first year it was called "Pink Nightmare;" the original batch was "Solstice Celebration," the name that would ultimately go to my barleywine), it literally exploded out of the fermenter, spewing fist-sized globs of what looked like strawberry moose 4 feet up the walls of the "beer closet." Nowadays, I usually puree the cranberries, microwave them for about 5 minutes, pour partially chilled wort (~120F) over them, and then hope for the best (which usually means replacing the airlock with a blow-off tube and cleaning up a moderate-sized mess.

(The name comes from the movie A Christmas Story, when Ralphie's father, seeing him in the bunny jammies his aunt sent him, pronounced that he looked like "a pink nightmare.")

Malt:
5 lbs Weyerman pils
4.5 lbs white wheat malt
0.75 lb oats
0.5 lb carapils
0.25 lb  honey (asidulated) malt
0.5 lb rice hulls

Hops:
1 oz Styrian Goldings  @ 5.0% AA 60 min
0.5 oz Spaltz @ 3.2% AA 20 min
0.5 oz. Spaltz @ 3.2% AA 5 min

Yeast: Belgian Wit WLP 400

Fruit: 1.5 lbs fresh cranberries, blended 6 oz at a time with 1/3 cup of water each until pureed. Microwave 5 min. Add to 120F wort, let stand 10 min before topping fermenter with water and pitching yeast. Recommend using a blow-off tube.

Infusion: In 4 oz house vodka, soak 1/4 oz curcao orange peel, 1/2 tsp ground corriander, 8 cloves crushed, for 1 week, then add to secondary.

Beer review - Super deluxe and super fresh

October holds a special place in the brewing calendar, and not (just) because of Oktoberfest. October is also the time when brewers release their "fresh hop" or "wet hop" beers, something that's become increasingly popular the last few years.

Normally, hop flowers are dried to preserve them, and in the process lose some of their more volatile aromatic essences. Typically, brewers would capture as much of these as they could by dry-hopping their beer, which is basically adding hops to the fermented beer, to flavor it while it ages (as opposed to adding them to the boiling wort before the beer has been fermented, which is how hops are used for bittering).

Wet-hopping beer is the same as dry-hopping, but using freshly-picked hops that have even more of their volatile aromatics intact than dried hops do. The beer can pick up all sorts of interesting flavors this way, but of course you're limited in doing it to when hops can be picked fresh, typically September in the Northern Hemisphere.

 

Chasin' Freshies, Deschutes Brewing

All of this is by way of introducing our next review, Chasin' Freshies from Deschutes Brewery in Bend, OR. Deschutes has been the powerhouse of brewing in Oregon, starting up in 1988, and is currently the 5th-largest craft brewery, and 11th-largest brewery overall, in the US, probably most known for their Black Butte porter and Mirror Pond pale ale.

Fresh-hop ales are typically brewed as West Coast pale ales or IPAs, since these styles showcase the hops, and Chasin' Freshies is no exception. It's fairly light-bodied and colored, however, using pilsner malt and oats, which prevent it from overpowering the delicate floral notes of the wet hops, in this case Cascades, which have a citrusy-to-piney character. It's a nicely balanced beer, light and refreshing, with just a hint of alcohol strength, and not too much bitterness to turn off those who don't like bitter beer.

Chasin' Freshies: 7.4% ABV, 60 IBUs of yum!

Fruet, The Bruery

A few years ago, when I was down in the OC visiting family, I naturally thought to see if there was any good local craft beer available. I had my doubts, SoCal being the land of chains, strip-malls, and homogenized culture. But a Google search uncovered The Bruery, a craft brewery in Placentia, a small suburban town in inland OC known for, well, not much of anything really, but it happened to be on my way to visit my dad, so I decided I'd stop by. Turned out that it was in the back of an industrial park just off the 57 freeway, with a storefront virtually indistinguishable from the nearby storage unit, air conditioning repair, and autobody places.

Going inside, however, I was in for a shock. Their space was filled floor to ceiling with racks of barrels. Yes, almost everything they brew is barrel aged, mostly Belgian styles, and plenty of sours. They had a small bar with about 20 of their beers on tap, with a couple of empty barrels to serve as tables with a few stools. Their beers ranged from awesome to amazing.

The Fruet was their fourth anniversary beer, an English style Old Ale fermented with their house strain of Belgian yeast and aged in bourbon barrels. It's BIG, robust, dark, fruity, caramelly, toffeeey, oakey, bourboneyyyyy. Given that it's a limited release, good luck finding it, but Bruery beers are pretty widely distributed across the US, and I can't recommend them enough.

Fruet: 14.5% ABV, 45 IBUs.

Seduction, Brewery Ommegang 

Last summer, while we were visiting Dr. P's family, in central New York, we made a very special pilgrimage, to Cooperstown. Not, of course for that museum about that game with the sticks and the gloves and the leather ball. Instead, we visited one of the wonders of the craft brewing world, Brewery Ommegang.

Ommegang was purpose built in 1997 to make Belgian ales, beginning with their flagship abbey ale, and indeed they've probably done more than any other American craft brewery to popularize Belgian beers of all styles, including their Hennepin, the first American-brewed saison. 

Dr. P. spotted Ommegang's Seduction on a trip to City Beer Store (who'll be getting their own review soon, I promise!). It's a dark Belgian ale brewed with Callebaut chocolate, and with a touch of Liefmans kriek, sour beer aged on tart cherries and berries. Seduction is like drinking the world's most decadent candy, dark, silky, smooth, chewy. Much like coffee, chocolate is a difficult ingredient to work with in beer, due to its high oil and fat content (I haven't even attempted it). But this is just masterful. It's a Valentine in a beer bottle.

Seduction: 6.8% ABV, IBUs very low, want some candy little girl?

Meadowlark IPA, Pretty Things

Eric the cicerone at The Jug Shop (who'll be getting his own review soon, I promise!) first turned me on to the beers from the Pretty Things Beer & Ale Project in Cambridge, MA, at a tasting that featured not one, not two, but eight of their beers, as well as five from Jester King in Austin, TX. Needless to say, these are great events, but given the state I'm in when I stagger home afterwards... let's just say it's not conducive to writing a cogent review.

Pretty Things are a husband-and wife team gypsy brewers, he a dreamer and she a scientist (sound familiar?), who met at a beer festival, moved to Yorkshire (where she's from) then moved back to New England (where he's from). Their flagship Jack D'Or is a saison, and their beers tend to be a mix of Belgian, English, and, what might be best termed eclectic (such as the Lovely St. Winefride Brown Lager).

Meadowlark IPA, then, is an anomaly for them, an American style IPA. It's a good beer, gold-amber in color, well-balanced in hoppiness, with a little more to the bitter side than the floral. It's a very tasty beer, and I have to say that of the nine Pretty Things beers I've tried, I found four (Once Upon a Time X Ale, Lovely St. Winefride, Our Finest Regards barleywine, and Babayaga Sylvan Stout) were all exceptionally good, so I recommend them if you can find them. 

Meadowlark IPA: 7.0% ABV, 85 IBUs.