The staff at All About Beer magazine creates a new oxymoron for the world of Beer, the low-carb beer taste test.
Archive for the ‘Demon Liquor’ Category
Old Jubilation is one a class of assorted seasonal beer types called “Winter Warmers”. They tend to be richer, darker and spicier than beers brewed for sunnier times, and as a class are becoming more and more a part of the American beer drinkers winter.
Of course in other countries, England in particular, winter warmers have been around for ages.
Traditionally, winter warmers have been hearty, slow-sipping English-style ales; guzzling them would be a travesty.
They are released for a limited time during the winter months, primarily to celebrate the spirit of Christmas. But the style has expanded, and today lagers as well as ales qualify as winter warmers.
A Winter Warmer can range from a German double bock to an American barleywine and everything in between, but the most frequent distinguishing characteristics include a combination of the following: brown to deep copper to black opaque in color; increased alcohol content resulting in a more warming effect; and a myriad of fruits, spices or other ingredients added during production.
The recipes and flavor of some seasonal beers change from year to year but retain the same name, such as Anchor Brewing Co.’s trend-setting Our Special Ale. Adored by beer lovers since its introduction in 1975, Our Special Ale is released exclusively during the week of Thanksgiving and remains available only through mid-January.
Holiday beers are usually available during a narrow window of time because most beer drinkers, though not most connoisseurs, consider the style outdated after New Year’s, when holiday gift giving and celebrating wind down.
Nevertheless, these beers are often good candidates for laying down for future tastings because of their high alcohol content. Some veteran beer collectors lay down holiday beers for vertical tastings to compare, in one sitting, variations of the same beer from several years past.
It’s not unusual to find fruit flavors in winter warmers. Some popular fruits that brewers add are cranberries, oranges, raspberries and cherries. Adding to the warm glow of the Christmas spirit, some beers have one or two spices in them while others may include a wide array of holiday or pumpkin spices such as nutmeg, cinnamon, clove and even coriander.
Old Jubilation is produced by Boulder Colorado’s Avery Brewery, whose North Carolina legal (under 6% abv) beers have just started appearing in NC. There’s a fair variety available here, but any North Carolinian desiring a taste of the legendary Reverend or Hog Heaven brew will have to purchase them online.
The biggest seller of the Avery line in NC at the moment, and thus the place where you have the best chance of finding them at, is Brawley’s Beverage in Charlotte. Mike had at least 4 cases of the Jubilation available when I left yesterday–he’s planning on cellaring whatever doesn’t get sold during the season.
I don’t really have a cellaring capacity here at House Hraka, though I suppose I could stick a bottle or two into the crawlspace under the house. Then I could drive the wife nuts by offering to give visitors a tour of “the beer cellar”
“You’d love to see it? Great! Let me just go get the kneepads and miner’s light.”
According to what I’ve read, cellaring the Old Jubilation does go quite a ways towards mellowing the strong hop note found in a younger bottle. The hops do have a way of overpowering the more subtle flavors present in the beer, which included (for me) brown sugar and orange peel, with a little butter toffee thrown in for good measure.
As for the other qualities, the head is a whitish gray, while the body of the brew is mahogany in nature, as damn near every review of the Old Jubilation takes great pains to point out.
Clear dark mahogany body…
Dark ruby mahogany color….
Dark mahogany color….
Deep mahogany brew…
some mahogany highlights…
a gorgeous mahogany hue…
deep rich red mahogany hue…
with the kind of deep mahogany hues usually seen only in wood-paneled offices of top-dollar law firms…
Why, a man would have to be a fool to challenge that weight of opinion with a simple “Dark Brown.”
The Old Jube mouthfeel to me is somewhat on the thin side, though of all the qualities one is supposed to judge a beer by, I am most suspicious of the one called “mouthfeel.”* I’ve had many a beer with a supposedly “thick” mouthfeel, and they have yet to reproduce the consistency of Elmer’s glue.
Now there’s a thick mouthfeel.
*What I need to do is set up a tasting for myself, and compare a known thick beer with a known thin, and perhaps a known medium. Of course, to do it right, I’d really need two of each type.
And some peanuts, company and a pack of smokes. Which means that it would end like all my other taste tests, with me saying “The hell with it” three beers into the test.
Those of you who buy your wine based on how pretty the bottle is should try and local the 2002 Moselland ArsVitis Riesling. I cannot locate a .gif or .jpeg that does the picture credit, but essentially the vinter has painted a compressed image of the Mosel Valley on the rear of the bottle in such a way that it can only be viewed from the proper perspective when the bottle is full. I bought one for the Sainted Wife a day or so ago, and she absolutely fell in love with it–so much so that we filled then bottle back up wilth water after the wine within was consumed.
I’m a sucker for good packaging, which is why I bought the Moselland instead of her normal Riesling to begin with, but whoever thought of this is some sort of marketing savant.
As for the wine itself, it’s a typical Riesling, sweet and flowery. Those who prefer dry whites will be repelled by it–blush drinkers will probably go for the style in a big way. I don’t pretend to know anything about wine, beer being my area of expertise, but I downed two glasses without complaint.
Why yes, I will pimp out my personal information for cloth. Will you?
Immort Ale. Immortal.
Get it? Get it?
Now that the de rigueur recognition of the pun is over with, we can get down to business. And get down to business we will. I’ve already accidentally deleted this post once, so there will be no mucking about with non-business related items.
Not that the beer had anything to do with the fumble-fingeredness that caused the accidental deletion, I can assure you.
(Hic.)
First item on the agenda: What’s with the link above? Am I getting a cut of sales now? Have sold out to the man?
Don’t I wish. No, I gave Randalls the link rather than Dogfish Head for two reasons. One, Dogfish Head lists all their brews on one page rather than breaking them out into separate sections. I find this practice to be annoying, as the words “Scroll down” beside a link are to me tantamount to saying “Content difficult to locate. Don’t you have better things to do?”
Secondly, Randall’s bothers to put a picture of the bottle up for all to see, something that Dogfish also did not bother its pretty little head about. Randall’s is relatively cheap, at least for an online alcohol retailer, and a damned fast shipper, beating Liquid Solutions by two weeks in the head to head competition I ran prior to the fishing trip. I figure that deserves a link. Besides, something has to go up above. I get hives when I screw with my established patterns.
Second agenda item: Information dump.
The Immortal Ale is a type of beer that most people have not even heard of, much less sampled–the barleywine, so named because it is ostensibly beer brewed to the strength of wine. I’ve only tasted two that I recall–this one, and Avery’s Hog Heaven. Barleywines belong in the Ale family, at the (very) strong end of the spectrum.
Barleywines tend to start out at ten to eleven percent alcohol by volume and move up from there. Essentially, one bottle of Immortal Ale, at 11% abv, is the drinking equivalent of two normal beers. It’s the price equivalent of three or four, so you don’t have to worry about your teenagers getting their hands on them anytime soon.
There are two types of barleywines; English and American, classified by the national origin of the hops used to brew them. English barleywines use English hops, and American barleywines use, surprise, American hops.
Aside from the hops, there is not a great deal of difference between the two, as they are both …tawny copper to dark brown in color. They have full body and high residual malty sweetness. The complexity of alcohols and fruity-ester characters are often high…
American barleywines tend to be somewhat hoppier as well, reflecting the current American mania for tossing extra hops at anything that moves.
Tres Agendio Itemeles: The Tashte, er, Taste.
Note to self: One bottle is plenty when reviewing this beer. Two may be overkill. Also, check Spanish translation.
I can say this for the Immortal Ale. It goes really, really well with butter-fried poundcake.
Yes, butter-fried poundcake. It’s delicious. Melt, oh, about a half of a stick of butter in a saucepan. Soak both sides of a slice of poundcake in it, then fry until the yellow body of the cake is covered in a delicate brown lace. Serve immediately. Hell, eat it straight out of the pan. That way none of the butter goes to waste.
Take that, Garrett.
The Immort is, fittingly enough, like a Frankenstein’s monster version of a brown ale; sweet, cobbled together out of seemingly unmatched parts, strong as hell, and not something to leave alone with a little girl.
For all that, it is nevertheless a live one (It’s alive!), with a thin malty sweetness atop distinctly bitter, hoppy notes. There is an initial rush of maple, vanilla and nutmeg flavors fading to a tannic astringency, which is probably the oak note mentioned on the label.
After a couple of the Immort Ales, it’s very easy to see why the barleywines are classed as winter warmers. A couple of these, and joining the Polar Bear Club would be simplicity itself.
Update: Another beer of the night, The Double Bastard
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The collected Hraka beer posts may be seen here.
The Dogfish Head Worldwide Stout Blogger Beer Blast starts tonight at 10:00 pm EST. Join myself and the other hosts in the AIM chat room, “Triple B” or IM one of the following screen names for an invite; naturesid, dezcoisas, hokietryptophan, or philosoblog.
If you haven’t got a bottle of the Worldwide Stout, bring what you have, tell us about it.
People with lives……well, it’s doubtful you’re reading this to begin with.
Update: I considered posting the two and one-half hour transcript from the BBB, but figured it should remain private.
No, I won’t tell you why. And it has nothing to do with the warm glow Deb kept mentioning.
We wish you a Merry Christmas.
We wish you a Merry Christmas
We wish you a Merry Christmas
Cause we’re chock full of beer!
The Blogger Beer Bash has gained another host, Jim Ryan of the late, lamented Philosoblog. We’re still on for 10 pm EST Saturday night–surely most of you have nothing better planned, right?
I’ll post the name of chat room here just before 10 on Saturday, but unless AIM has some functionality I’ve not yet discovered attendees will need to be invited to the chat before they can join. Leave your AIM handle in the comments below, or IM “naturesid” for an invite come the night.
JOIN myself and Deb of Must Be Nice this coming Saturday night, December 6th at 10 o’clock for the very first “Blogger Beer Bash,” where we will be partaking of and reviewing one of the strongest beers in the world, Dogfish Worldwide Stout. The 2003 DW Stout comes in at a staggering 18.8% abv, and is considered by the brewer to be the best of the bunch so far.
GAZE in wonderment as our typing skills degrade with each sip, until we pass out face down on the keyboard!
SHUDDER in pained empathy as you think “There but for the Grace of God Go I!”
I’ll be opening a AIM chatroom for the event–details on how to join will be posted at Hraka. If you’d like to join the official review team, you’ll need your own bottle of Dogfish Worldwide Stout, a brew which is not only hard to find, as Deb can attest, but nigh impossible to ship. If you do happen to possess a bottle of the potent elixer and wish to, not only drink it in the company of Internet strangers, but talk about drinking it, let me know, and I’ll add you to the list.
Those without the magical stout are also welcome. Bring a beer of your choice and let us know what you think of it. If enough people participate, we may make this a regular event. If no one shows other than Deb and I, we’ll pretend a lot of people showed up, then never mention again.
Fair enough?
Yakima Brewing is selling 500,00 shares of stock in order to boost production of Grant’s Mandarin Hefeweizen.
The company has been unable to keep up with consumer demand but hopes raising capital will enable it to increase production.
Mandarin is available in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, Arizona and Florida in bottles and on draft.
Yakima Brewing also wants to expand the line to more of the 20 to 25 states where its beers are now sold.
“We felt like it was really important to us to not just get the product out into a few states, but to release it nationally so no one (scooped) us,” said Paul Brown, an officer and director of the company.
As a preferred stock, shares will sell for $1 each and pay a 7.75 percent semiannual dividend, Brown said. Investors in Yakima Brewing would have the option to convert their preferred shares to common stock shares in that company or its parent company.
At a dollar per, shares will cheaper than the beer.