The Craft Beer Thread....

madtowndave

I came into work this morning, and a buddy picked me up a bottle of Goose Island Juliet! Nice surprise to start the day!

shep

Was at one of my local's last night, and I was surprised to see a couple of newbies on tap:

512 - ALT
Live Oak - Big Bark Amber Lager
Live Oak - Schwarzbier

Apparently the place is getting into the Austin beer scene

Both the ALT and Big Bark were ambers and were great... been a while since I've had any ambers, and I've forgotten ow easy drinking and enjoyable they can be when done right... will definitely have another glass soon... It's funny that when I see 512 places, most bars have the pecan porter (which is great) and IPA... this place being patio-orientated, I guess they stock the easier drinking stuff...

That was my first schwarzbier... not crazy about it... I'd prefer a porter or a stout....

Horos

Been a while since I've posted a list. For 4-5 months I've rarely drank the same thing twice. Getting addicted to craft brews and it's putting a dent in my wallet.

Sierra Nevada Hoptimum (had 3 or 4 and really like it)
Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Ale
Sierra Nebada Summerfest
Upright Brewing Four
Brother Thelonious
New Belgium Triple
New Belgium Belgo
New Belgium/Elysian Trip Farmouse
Full Sail ALT
DFH Aprihop
Moylan'sHopsickle
Cascade Lakes Project X NWPA
Terminal Gravity/Double Mountain Gravity Mountain Collaboration IPA
Bridgeport Hop Harvest
Avery Brewing White Rascal
Deschutes Chainbreaker White IPA
Boulevard Double-Wide IPA
Caldera Hop-Hash
Left Coast Hopjuice
Left Coast Asylum Triple
Rogue Portland State IPA
Kona Koko Brown

Sitting on a Widmer 2012 Raspberry Imperial Stout and Shmaltz Funky Jewbelation for my next meeting.

JK_Livin

Hoptimum is delicious. I'm not saying it's the best I've had but it's up there. I don't know if it's me or not, but when I opened the bottle I thought it smelled like weed.

MotoDC

JK_Livin wrote:

Hoptimum is delicious. I'm not saying it's the best I've had but it's up there. I don't know if it's me or not, but when I opened the bottle I thought it smelled like weed.

Those hoppy DIPAs often have a dank quality to their nose. Dankity-dank! Nice job picking it out!

SVRDhand13

JK_Livin wrote:

Hoptimum is delicious. I'm not saying it's the best I've had but it's up there. I don't know if it's me or not, but when I opened the bottle I thought it smelled like weed.

The West Coast IPAs tend to do that. Some purposefully try for that effect.

FenwayFaithful

2 Guinness Extra Stout
2 Ithaca Apricot Wheat

Nice little Wednesday

Yellow Ledbelly

madtowndave wrote:

Yellow Ledbelly wrote:

Memphis Tuesday night for Social Distortion...Wednesday morning visited the beer store and made a nice haul
Probably can't remember all of them off the top of my head...

Old Rasputin
Brother Thelonius
Bigfoot Barleywine
Torpedo
Ruthless Rye
Stone Ruination
Cali-Belgique
Anchor Old Foghorn
RJ Rocker Bell Ringer and Rockhopper
Abita Jockamo
Laughing Dog Dogfather (had to have that one just for the bottle if nothing else)
Rogue Double Chocolate Stout
well...that's 12 of them anyways...we can try a different beer every night for the next 3 weeks though.
I was somewhat disappointed to learn that Dogfish Head pulled out of Tennessee about a year ago. I was planning on snagging several of theirs

Nice haul. I'd plan on splitting the Rogue Double Chocolate with someone. It is damn tasty, but sweet. There is no way I could have finished it by myself. I really like the Ruthless Rye and Ruination as well. I think you'll enjoy the brews you picked up from Victory, too bad you weren't able to grab a bottle of Storm King.

Sadly that's the rule I must abide by....my buddy (cousin actually) and I share evenly whatever we purchase and we had set aside around $250 for that trip. We usually drink four and keep two.

We've had the Bigfoot Ale..first barleywine for either of us...and we loved it
Hopefully soon we'll be getting torpedo around here regularly since law is changing but we had it and threw the drink four rule out and finished them off....very good
I wasn't wild about the Golden Monkey...the spiciness was a bit much I thought
The Dogfather was very disappointing.
Absolutely loved the RJ Rockers Bell Ringer...I highly recommend it if you can find it. The Rockhopper was pretty damned good IPA.
Last night we had the La Trappe Quad....very good
But the gem of the haul has so far been Old Rasputin...hands down...fantastic...it has been very hard for me to have them in the fridge and to not finish the other two off while he's not around

We're doing a beer a day but I'll be swinging by my store on saturday for some more treats so we're gonna see how long we can keep this beer a day thing going...at least two more weeks for sure

MotoDC

Yellow Ledbelly wrote:

Sadly that's the rule I must abide by....my buddy (cousin actually) and I share evenly whatever we purchase and we had set aside around $250 for that trip. We usually drink four and keep two.

We've had the Bigfoot Ale..first barleywine for either of us...and we loved it
Hopefully soon we'll be getting torpedo around here regularly since law is changing but we had it and threw the drink four rule out and finished them off....very good
I wasn't wild about the Golden Monkey...the spiciness was a bit much I thought
The Dogfather was very disappointing.
Absolutely loved the RJ Rockers Bell Ringer...I highly recommend it if you can find it. The Rockhopper was pretty damned good IPA.
Last night we had the La Trappe Quad....very good
But the gem of the haul has so far been Old Rasputin...hands down...fantastic...it has been very hard for me to have them in the fridge and to not finish the other two off while he's not around

We're doing a beer a day but I'll be swinging by my store on saturday for some more treats so we're gonna see how long we can keep this beer a day thing going...at least two more weeks for sure

Bigfoot was my first BW as well and I've been obsessed with them every since. Much love for Old Rasputin as well. If you enjoy those two, I would highly recommend getting your hands on some barrel-aged action. Old Rasputin releases theirs once a year (I think), each year incremented up one roman numeral. I tried XIV this year and was instantly in love. I haven't many barrel-aged barleywines, but Weyerbacher's Insanity is...insane. So much banana bread, toasted marshmellow, woody goodness. Slightly sweet for a barleywine but it's mostly flavor rather than cloying and the bourbon burn at the end cuts it nicely.

Ugh, talking about it is making it VERY hard not to head to the kitchen...how many hours 'til 5pm again???

Yellow Ledbelly

I'm anxious to try the Old Foghorn as well after enjoying Bigfoot so much. Hopefully we'll be getting more and more stuff throughout the year as the state ABV increases to 10.2% July 1. Since Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama all get lots of stuff we currently can't here I'm expecting new breweries to be added regularly in the months to come....at least I hope so. The good thing is that we should immediately begin receiving the higher ABV selections from the breweries that already distribute here...Sierra Nevada being one


I live close enough to my home that I go home for lunch and some days...like today...it's hard for me to open the fridge at lunch and not grab one or two or three...I'm with you.

Yellow Ledbelly

Beer of the Day yesterday was the Victory HopDevil...after not liking the Golden Monkey much at all this was awesome....love the hoppy goodness...god I hope Victory brings their stuff to Mizzip just so I can indulge in this one at will.

My store has growler fills of Rogue Mom Hefeweizen and Lazy Magnolia Southern Hops'pitality which i'll be picking up tomorrow. Hopefully the newest edition of the Yazoo Hop Project (#65) will arrive today as well

SVRDhand13

Yellow Ledbelly wrote:

Beer of the Day yesterday was the Victory HopDevil...after not liking the Golden Monkey much at all this was awesome....love the hoppy goodness...god I hope Victory brings their stuff to Mizzip just so I can indulge in this one at will.

My store has growler fills of Rogue Mom Hefeweizen and Lazy Magnolia Southern Hops'pitality which i'll be picking up tomorrow. Hopefully the newest edition of the Yazoo Hop Project (#65) will arrive today as well

Victory is a great brewery. You should try Hop Wallop too. I also love their pilsner and Golden Monkey (but I can see how others wouldn't).

Yellow Ledbelly

SVRDhand13 wrote:

Yellow Ledbelly wrote:

Beer of the Day yesterday was the Victory HopDevil...after not liking the Golden Monkey much at all this was awesome....love the hoppy goodness...god I hope Victory brings their stuff to Mizzip just so I can indulge in this one at will.

My store has growler fills of Rogue Mom Hefeweizen and Lazy Magnolia Southern Hops'pitality which i'll be picking up tomorrow. Hopefully the newest edition of the Yazoo Hop Project (#65) will arrive today as well

Victory is a great brewery. You should try Hop Wallop too. I also love their pilsner and Golden Monkey (but I can see how others wouldn't).

The store in memphis had hop wallop as well but in the interest of getting as much variety as possible I went with HopDevil between the two. Hopefully i'll have a reason to get back to memphis before long.
I know a lot goes into breweries opening up new distribution areas but i kinda feel like a kid waiting on Christmas waiting for announcements of what we will start getting this summer and the months to come. I would think that the breweries already available in neighboring states would be among the most likely to expand here but I'm guessing not all of them will....I can definitely say I hope for Stone and Victory even though Monkey wasn't my favorite...it was ok just a bit too much with the spices as I said.

Horos

Sasquatch Brewfest tonight!!!

Horos

Horos wrote:

Sasquatch Brewfest tonight!!!

Here's a list of what I sampled last night:

Boneyard Beer Hop Venom Double IPA 60 IBU, 9% ABV
Bridgeport Brewing Kingpin 65 IBU, 7.5% ABV
Double Mountain Brewery Das Boot Alt 43 IBU, 5.1% ABV
Draper Brewing Draper IPA 70 IBU, 6% ABV
Goodlife Brewing Co. Mountain Rescue Pale Ale 40 IBU, 5.5% ABV
Hop Valley Brewing Co. Infinite Hoppiness 100 IBU, 9.3% ABV
Lagunitas Brewing Co. Waldo's Special Ale 65 IBU, 8.5% ABV
Ninkasi Brewing Co. Babylon English Style Double IPA 100 IBU, 9.1% ABV
Pelican/Ninkasi Collaboration Danny's Black Gold 50 IBU, 10.5% ABV
Rogue Ales Dad's Little Helper Black IPA 70 IBU, 7% ABV
Sasquatch Brewing Co. Healu Heights Pale Ale 46 IBU, 5.5% ABV
Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. Southern Hemisphere Harvest Ale 67 IBU, 6.7% ABV
Southern Oregon Brewing Holy Water Maibock 30 IBU, 7.1% ABV
Steelhead Brewery and Cafe Twisted Meniscus IPA 63 IBU, 7.3%
Wakonda Brewing Co. 7 Devils IPA 85 IBU, 7.8% ABV
Widmer Bros. Brewing Co. Smoke onthe Lager 25 IBU, 5% ABV

And lastly this was an anniversary brew by Ninkasi to honor the 10th year of the festival.

Saquatch Legacy 2012 Wheat Wine 80 IBU, 9% ABV

Usually they give us 4 oz glasses to sample from but being the 10th anniversary you were able to get a special pounder glass for $3 more and the larger glass resulted in larger pours.

Horos

Also forgot tonight is our Sunday Syndicate meeting and I'll be sampling another dozen beers.

I have 2 to offer:
Widmer Bros 2012 Imperial Raspberry Stout
He'Brew Jewbelation

BIGDaddyWil

Yellow Ledbelly wrote:

Beer of the Day yesterday was the Victory HopDevil...after not liking the Golden Monkey much at all this was awesome....love the hoppy goodness...god I hope Victory brings their stuff to Mizzip just so I can indulge in this one at will.

My store has growler fills of Rogue Mom Hefeweizen and Lazy Magnolia Southern Hops'pitality which i'll be picking up tomorrow. Hopefully the newest edition of the Yazoo Hop Project (#65) will arrive today as well

If you get a chance, try Victory's Prima Pils........fanastic!

shep

I went to a new craft beer specialty bar here in houston on friday... and it was beautiful...

Right as I walked in the front door I noticed that they sell growlers and 1/2 growlers for take out, and I was immediately in love.. this is the first place in Houston I've found that does that. I also met the curator of their belgan beer list, and a bunch of their staff... they had a TV on the NHL network (and there wasn't even a game on! - this is shocking to me, especially here in Houston), and dart boards... needless to say I'll be headed back soon...

Anyway recent tastings in the last weeks:

Draft:
Victory Prima Pils
512 IPA (Nitro)
512 Pecan Porter (Cask - which gives it a completely different mouthfeel)
Lazy Magnolia (who just recently got label approval in TX) Souther Pecan
Karabach Rodeo Clown - Merlot barrel aged (as opposed to the regular)
Sunner Kolsch

Bottles:
Sierra Nevada Hoptimum (fantastic)
Sam Adams Baltic IPA

And when I was at the beer store yesterday I picked up a 4 pack of Palate Wrecker (can't wait to try in) and Full Sail ALT (limited release)...

it's been a pretty good week!

strilo

Yesterday I had Weihenstephaner Kristall Weissbier, Kona Koko Brown and Anderson Valley Summer Solstice. Love all three of those beers.

Yellow Ledbelly

Friday evening I had the Abita Jockamo IPA...not super hoppy, good, but could've been a bit more hoppy for my taste
Got those growler fills Saturday and had the Rogue Mom's Hefeweizen that evening...very unique flavor with the rose petals...thought it was pretty damned good
Last night had the lazy magnolia Southern Hops'pitality, their first IPA...hopefully they'll bottle that one next year. Good and hoppy.

Still have a fridge full of new ones to try this week in honor of American Craft Beer Week