Shipyard Brewing Imperial Porter

Tonight, I had the opportunity to sit down with Beersurfers Mark and Steve and sample two beers from Shipyard Brewing based out of Maine – the Imperial Porter and the XXXX IPA. Not being much of a porter fan myself, Steve dove right into the Imperial Porter delighted with its tastiness. He didn’t seem to mind the muddy brown appearance of the beer and was very happy with the strong odor and taste of coffee. I also enjoyed the coffee taste, along with subtles hints of alcohol and burnt wood.  This beer was similar to many of the winter lagers I’ve been drinking lately, particularly the Sam Adams and Sprecher winter lagers. Palate-wise, this beer is watery and foamy, and numbs your tongue as soon as it hits your mouth.  It’s very enjoyable to swallow, with the aftertaste reminiscent of an espresso shot. While I am not huge fan of porters, this beer really grew on me.  Steve was quite a bit more enthusiastic about it and loved the bitter, coffee-like aftertaste offered by this porter. Overall, this beer ranks well against other porters, and we both agreed that we would definitely drink this again.

Shipyard Brewing XXXX IPA

The XXXX IPA from Shipyard was, in short, incredible.  My initial reaction to this beer came from the aroma – the smell of hops emanating from the bottle made me salivate, and I did not hesitate to pour myself a large glass of it. It smells amazing! This beer is reddish-orange in color, and smells of candy, syrup, and an unbelievable amount of hops. While IPA’s are typically bitter, the XXXX is one of those rare exceptions – in addition to the hoppy aroma, this beer has subtle floral and fruity smells enticing you to drink it. The taste vastly differed from the smell – it is incredibly sweet, slightly bitter, and reminded us all of dry champagne. Like many of the high gravity IPA’s I’ve tried in the last few weeks, this beer has the consistency of syrup and is very enjoyable to swallow; it’s very similar to the Dogfish Head IPA’s and about as enjoyable.  Hopheads will absolutely love the XXXX IPA.  Overall, I really enjoyed this beer and am disheartened that I won’t be able to find more of it in Phoenix.  Excellent job on this one , Shipyard – I might finally have a reason to visit Maine!

Shipyard Brewing Imperial Porter and XXXX IPA

Justin J rocks out with some tasty beverages

Last week, I shared an evening with two fellow Beersurfers, Justin and Sean. We hit up a brewery in Scottsdale, Arizona then returned to my place with some cheap European beer Justin had found at a store near his house. He bought them specifically because he could not pronounce the names, which naturally meant this was going to be a great evening.

Orange Blossom at Papago Brewing Company

We started the festivities at 3PM, where we each had a glass of Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA from a keg at my house.  From there, we headed to the Papago Brewing Company in Scottsdale AZ.  The three of us ordered three beers and shared a glass of each – the Coconut Joe, the Belgian Ale, and the Orange Blossom. We all loved the Joe  – an imperial stout, it smelled of chocolate and tasted of coffee, and threw off the faint aroma of coconuts.  It tasted like a Starbuck frappuccino with a bite to it; this beer is unlike any other stout I’ve drank, and it’s an excellent beer all around! The Belgian was decent although nothing spectacular, and the Orange Blossom was like drinking a juice box.  It had practically no flavor at all and was, frankly, awful.  The clarity and orangey-ness of the beer made for an awesome picture at least (see right), so it wasn’t a total bust. Papago Brewery is a fantastic land of tasty draft beers and vast collection of bottles-for-sale, which you can drink in the bar or use to build a six-pack for consumption at home.  I definitely need to check this place out again in the future – if you find yourself in Phoenix, I highly recommend it!

Czechvar - Czech Budweiser

Later that evening, we went back home and raided the Beersurfing stash to conduct some tasty research, in addition to tasting some of Justin’s European beer.  To start out the night, we cracked open a couple of bottles of Czechvar, from BBNP Breweries in the Czech Republic.  The beer pours out clear and sunny yellow, from which you’ll get a whiff of cedar chips, sawdust, pears, and what I swear is stale urine.  If that description wasn’t enough to make you drink it, the taste wasn’t so bad – using a bit of imagination, you can taste pears and peaches with a slight hint of copper pennies.  To put it bluntly, this beer pissed us off, because we couldn’t determine exactly what it tasted like. After his second bottle, Sean cursed loudly and proceeded to mix a drink with it – “dump in some clamato and pepper and you have a great chelada”.  In the Czech Republic, this is actually known as Budweiser, but the North American Anheuser-Busch Company (which brews, sells, and markets Budweiser in North America) prevents them from marketing it as such in North America; thus, Czechvar was born.  We found a 6 pack of this beer in a liquor store for $7.50, and if you have the opportunity to pass this beer up for something else, take that opportunity.

Wittekirke, from Bavik Brewery

Next on the list of victims was Wittekirke, a hefeweizen in a steel can brewed by Brouwerij Bavik in Belgium. We went through this pack pretty quickly, but compared to the Czechvar, it was ambrosia.  In a glass, this beer is a cloudy liquid with the color of sawdust, and reminded me of the clouds of Venus after swirling it around. After inhaling the fizz, I was left with the impression that it’s a very weak hef, with the typical aroma of bananas and cloves.  The taste is much of the same, and there isn’t anything outstanding about it compared to any other hef that I’ve had – it’s underwhelming at best, and you’re more likely to taste the 5% of alcohol content before you can enjoy any flavor.  If you can swallow this beer, it has the texture of milk and the bubbliness of Coca Cola, although both are tastier in my opinion.  Overall, I definitely would not go out of my way to drink this beer, especially if I found myself in Belgium. At any rate, my local brewer serves a fantastic hefeweizen a mile away on tap, so I absolutely no reason to drink this again. In a completely unrelated note, I can stick fridge magnets to the recycled steel can, so if you’re easily amused, the evening will not be a total bust. We found a 6 pack of this beer in a liquor store for $7.50, and like the Czechvar, if you have the opportunity to try a different Belgian beer, take it.

Dogfish Head Pangaea

To finish the evening, I cracked open a large bottle of Dogfish Head Pangaea, a limited seasonal from DFH that I’d been licking my lips for all week.  This comes in a large 750mL bottle so I opted to share it with one of my fellow beersurfers.  It pours like any other beer, and has a dark orange, translucent appearance. The smell is quite strange, consisting of cane sugar, rosemary, and wet dog hair.  The real magic, though, happens when it hits your tongue – you’ll find yourself overwhelmed by the taste of pine needles and ginger, along with the distinct tingling on your tongue that only ginger can offer. The taste of pine in this beer was so overwhelming I didn’t want to swallow it, but I really didn’t mind – this beer should be consumed slowly to savor every last bit of flavor from it.  I wouldn’t drink this beer daily (and at 750mL, how could you?), but I definitely enjoyed it! The price is a bit steep at $10 a bottle, but it makes a tasty treat.

I’m going to cut this short for now, because I drank and reviewed about 20 other craft beers over the holidays.  As soon as I gather my notes on all of them, I’ll get them up on the blog ASAP.  Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow for the New Year’s Edition of Thirsty Thursday!

Today we’re debuting a new blog series that will inject a bit more competition into our beer reviews. We’ll try to level the playing field between the beers and eliminate preconceived notions by doing blind tastings. Of course, we will also have to create meaningful groups of beers to compare. We would love to get your input on other types of beer to test out. If you’ve got a favorite, an interest, or a grudge against some beer, let us know.

For this week’s installment, Treehorn tried four different stouts. As the name might suggest, a “stout” beer was originally the catch-all British term for the strongest brew on offer at a given brewery. The term was coined in the late 17th century, at which time all beers in Britain were ales made with roasted malts. Over time, as new varieties of beer were developed, the term “stout” continued to refer to those strong, dark ales to which it was originally applied. Today, stouts can be had in several sub-varieties, from the more traditional dry stout (see Guinness) to more experimental versions such as New Zealand’s Oyster Stout.

We decided to include three rather traditional stouts and one more experimental version in order to get an idea of the range of flavors and typical traits to be found in stouts.

A look at the stats:

The Fort Collins Brewery: Chocolate Stout

Style: Chocolate Stout

Alcohol content by volume: 5.3%

Brooklyn Brewery: Dark Chocolate Stout

Style: Imperial Stout

Alcohol content by volume: 10.1%

Victory Brewing Company: Storm King Stout

Style: Imperial Stout

Alcohol content by volume: 9.1%

Dogfish Head Craft Brewery: Chicory Stout

Style: Stout (modified)

Alcohol content by volume: 5.2%

In order to do a blind tasting, we labeled glasses 1-4 and had an independent, though slightly besotted, observer randomly assign each beer a number. We covered the numbers and poured the beers so that we could judge the head before the blind tasting began. Once all the beers were poured, we removed the bottles, shuffled the glasses around, and revealed the numbers again. The following tasting notes were generated with no knowledge of which beer we were tasting.

Perhaps the two most traditional stouts in the tasting were the Fort Collins Brewery’s Chocolate Stout and Brooklyn Brewery’s Dark Chocolate Stout. While the category of chocolate stouts doesn’t necessarily contain any actual chocolate, the malts used are deeply roasted. This lends the beers a deep, chocolaty flavor. The Chocolate Stout from Fort Collins was a true expression of the espoused style, but Brooklyn’s Dark Chocolate Stout was actually an ingenious hybrid of the Imperial and Chocolate Stout styles.

Oddly enough for a Chocolate Stout, the Fort Collins brew’s head was the lightest of all the beers in this tasting. With a body black as night, the light head created a great visual contrast. This is the sort of beer that makes me long for a roaring fire and monk’s habit just looking at it. While it’s appearance wrote a big check, it’s body definitely cashed it. The nose started off with strong notes of toffee and caramel, and created an expectation of a rich beer with dominant carmelized sugar flavors and undertones of coffee. The first sip introduced a soft, smooth carbonation and medium body that gave way to a punch in the face of smoky, roasty coffee flavors. Although the typical toasted grain taste of roasted malts was present, it was the mellow flavor of wood smoke that captivated my palate.  As the smoke dissipated, more subtle hints of hickory and a mild, hoppy bitterness started to come through.  This beer scratched every stout itch I had, and the delicate balance of deep roasts and hops kept me coming back for more. While the alcohol content was low compared to the Imperials we also tried, this was probably the most sessionable beer in the group. If it were me, I’d just have a few. When there’s a cold front rolling in, I’d highly recommend picking up some of this beer.

Brooklyn Brewery’s Black Chocolate Stout. The Brooklyn take on this style is actually a mash-up of Imperial Stout and Chocolate Stout styles, with the gravity of an imperial at 10.1% ABV but the extra-dark malts of a chocolate. The alcoholic hypertrophy was immediately detectable in the nose of this beer, redolent of aged rum and dark roasted coffee with a spicy edge of nutmeg. The head was a deep coffee-and-cream brown, but rather anemic in size and staying power. Not to worry: what the head lacked the flavor of the beer more than made up. Viscous and moderately carbonated, this beer was deliciously substantial. The dominant flavors were dark, dark caramel and chocolate that faded into rum and then a dry, tart and earthy aftertaste. Just on the edges of the fading aftertaste, a few gentle wisps of smoke gave one last added twist of complexity to this heady brew. While the hops were very muted in aroma, they did lend the Brooklyn a refreshing bitterness. I generally enjoyed this beer; however, the acidity and alcohol-forward flavor profile made it the least drinkable of the beers in this tasting. I would gladly drink a pint of Dark Chocolate Stout, but probably no more.

In the next installment of “Is it a Weekday?” we will try the final two beers: Storm King Stout from Victory Brewing, and Chicory Stout from Dogfish Head Craft Brewery. One will pack a cruciferous kick in the best possible sense; the other will have a hop profile more typical of an IPA than a stout. Will the comforts of a traditional stout trump, or will novelty take the day? Tune in Monday for the exciting conclusion of the Stout Shout Out!

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

~Lord Acton

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

~Emerson

We’re going to build a better world, and we’re going to do it over a beer or two.

The idea of Beersurfing evolved out of a love of beer, travel, and the exploration of the human experience. We want to make it easy to find a place where you will feel comfortable and welcome, even if you are exploring a foreign place. Hopefully, with that comfort will come the ability to make connections with new and different people. The exchange of ideas, face to face and in earnest, is not only one of the most personally rewarding activities you can engage in, but a critical component of a peaceful world.

In recent weeks, much has been made of the tensions and hope in international relations. Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for improving the tone of diplomacy, while the climate summit in Copenhagen has underscored the unresolved differences between nations. Rather than placing all of our hope in officials and high-level negotiations, we believe that everyone has the ability to create understanding and encourage peace. For all the good that rhetoric and policy does, it cannot touch the power of a human connection. You don’t bomb a city if you have a friend who lives there.

People disagree for many reasons, some innocent and some self-serving. On a planet with over 6.8 billion human inhabitants, someone somewhere disagrees with you about everything you hold dear, and everything else besides. Such a person may be curious to ponder but remains largely harmless to you. Unfortunately, things get a lot more dicey once groups of people start disagreeing. As a species, we both congregate with others who agree with us and are influenced by those around us. These tendencies are harmless at first, but rapidly lead to homogenous groups that view outsiders as strangely different.

The great leaders of history have been those that could bridge the divides that separated groups. They could rally disparate others to their cause, whether through persuasion or compulsion. However, such aggregation and unification is essentially the creation of another, yet larger, homogenous group. The larger the groups that disagree, the larger the resources behind the ensuing conflagration. Even if we could trust our leaders to stay true to peaceful goals, we would still end up with larger and larger groups, capable of building larger and larger machines of war. And history shows that the vast majority of leaders who were handed unmitigated power should never have been trusted.

The genius of modern democracy is that it slices power up into the smallest possible pieces, and distributes them evenly to everyone in a society. Without a concentration of power no voter is corrupted by power, and an entire society bears the burden of making the correct decisions. A big part of Beersurfing is contributing to the democratization of international relations, with billions of ambassadors rather than a chosen few. Like secret, boozy agents we will infiltrate borders. Our espionage will be a willing ear, our propaganda the experiences of our lives, and our handlers the innate human desire to understand others.

In our new blog series, we will (quite literally) be celebrating openness and communication by doing blind beer tastings of your suggestion. For the first in the series, we’ve chosen a group of stouts. We will be tasting two Chocolate, an Imperial, and a “Chicory” stout to give a comparison between more and less traditional versions of this winter favorite. In the future we will be relying on you, the Beersurfing community, to suggest new and fun groupings. If you’ve always had an abiding interest in beers made with fugle hops, let us know. If you want to see a beerified version of world cup favorites compete, just say so. Any coherent grouping is game, as long as we can get our hands on the beer!

We’re building something big, but let’s start with a few beers…

There’s tasty beer on tap at our house:

Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA

Because we all have leftovers to take care of, tonight I give you a tale of cleaning out the fridge. The victim: Sprecher’s Oktoberfest, a beer from Sprecher Brewery out of Glendale, Wisconsin. I have been to Milwaukee a few times in my adult life, and every time Sprecher has been my beer of choice. I actually carried 50 pounds of various Sprecher beers through three different airports at one point in my life specifically because of its epic taste. Fortunately, I did not have to go through all that trouble this time – a recent visitor to our home brought a few bottles of Sprecher’s Oktoberfest with them and left them here as a present for our drinking pleasure. Being ever-curious, I cracked one open for the sake of science and poured myself a glass to collect my thoughts on it.

Oktoberfest Brew from Sprecher

A lager, the Oktoberfest comes out of the bottle a deep, very clear amber color with a bit of a head on it. My first drink was a harsh one since the Oktoberfest doesn’t even bother masking the alcohol content, a fact that makes itself apparent in the aftertaste. However, this is a very flavorful and malty beer – it has sugary hints of honey and caramel, and is definitely a beer best enjoyed by imbibing in sips. It is a bit bitter, though I suspect that had more to do with the booze content than any hops tossed into the brew. The smell is what really makes this beer stand out – the aptly named Oktoberfest smells of pumpkins, honey, and ripe fruit. Couple this with the fact that it glows orange in sunlight, and you have a beer that reminds you of many of the awesome things October has to offer, like tasty beer. If only a voluptuous European would appear to serve endless pitches of it!

Overall, this is a very good beer for what it is, especially compared to the other Oktoberfest brews that utterly saturate the market in early October. While this is a very well done beer, Sprecher has a lot of other, and frankly better, beers that almost make this one forgettable. The Oktoberfest is a nice treat to enjoy a couple of times a year, but you’ll get tired of it after a couple of bottles. You can pick it up in just about any Milwaukee grocery store during the month of October along with other Sprecher beers.

I’ll post the beer review tomorrow – I ate too much turkey!

~The Dude