So tonight is game seven of the World Series. I was up until 2am last night watching one of the greatest games in baseball history, so I’m a little gassed, but that’s never stopped me. Tonight I decided to try one of my purchases from West End Beverage while I watch the game. This is Elysian Mens Room a red ale that weighs in at 5.6% ABV. According to the website, it’s a crystal malt, cara-hell, cara-pils, and Munich. The hops are chinook for the buttering and cascade for the finish.

The cascade in the finish has a strong vanilla notes. I have to say, it’s an aroma I’ve really come to love from a brew, but it’s not necessarily what I’ve come to expect from a cascade finish. Perhaps it’s the east coast west coast differences in the cascade hops, but the aromas I expect are more citrus and pine. Maybe it’s the malt that’s actually the malt I’m picking up on these brews, guess I have to keep trying more of them!

Here’s the BA feedback, not a lot of love. It’s by no means a knock your socks off brew, but it would make a great session beer with some real flavor.

Cheers

Many years ago, the winter of 2000 to be exact, I was deep in the jungles of Vietnam sipping a sweet nectar they called “Tiger Beer.” We would ask “toi un Tiger beer, moi lom lom” and they would come back with a cold (for Vietnam standards anyway) Tiger Beer for us. There were other beers there in Vietnam, Saigon Beer for example, but none of them had the flavor of the blue bottle.

Since that wonderful trip in 2000, I don’t recall ever having Tiger beer again. I always knew I could get it if I wanted it, but for some reason I avoided it. That was until I received a fateful offer by Melissa Tavss from The Baddish Group to try some Tiger Beer on the house.  Having been so long and with the changes in my tastes over the years, I had to try it.  Would it live up to the memories?  Would the flavor of this beer take me back to the Mekong Delta watching long shabby fishing boats putter around with the mountains in the back ground?  Would I smell the exhaust of thousands of two stroke motor scoots and hear the constant stream of beeps that turned into white noise?  Who knows, but I had to find out!

So I took Ms. Tavss up on her offer and asked to send along a sample.  Within days there was a box waiting for me and I have to say, I haven’t been this excited about a tasting in a VERY long time.  Now one sits, chilling waiting to be drank.  Will rediscover and old fond love or will my memories be dashed by a pedestrian beer?  Time to find out…

Since the holiday season is finally officially over, I am getting back to brewing and a few lose ends.  More to come on the brewing, but for now, I was the lucky recipient of a surprise package from Flying Dog Brewing Company.  This isn’t a first, I have reviewed Flying Dog per-request by the brewery in the past, and to be honest I didn’t think I would be getting any more samples based on my review.

However, they decided to try to woo me with another brew, and this time it was a success.  The package came as a surprise to me in December.  I had seen the Raging Bitch, Belgian Style IPA out and about, but hadn’t broken down and gotten any yet.

A quick overview, this is called a Belgian-Style IPA which I assume means that they ferment an IPA with Belgian yeast, but I am not sure.  Either way, it was a great brew.  The aroma was vanilla with hints of banana and coriander.  The spices I assume are the result of the Belgian yeast.  The hops as listed on the website are Warrior, Columbus and Amarillo with a reported IBU of 60.  The ABV is listed as 8.3% and is very apparent in the mouth feel.  There is a recognizable after burn, but not offensive and nothing you wouldn’t expect from a brew of this size.  It’s a light copper color, almost suede or camel, not overly dark with a touch of red.  There is some cloudiness in the beer that is another sign of it’s Belgian styling.

The flavor is deep, warm and full.  There are tiny fruit notes and a tinge of hops bitterness that ends the flavor.  The front-end is really dominated by the vanilla (Columbus hops I assume) and maltiness you expect from a Belgian brew.  This beer is great.  I loved the vanilla with all the fruity notes, it was all done in a grace and harmony that made this an enjoyable beer.

Over all, I would say they hit this one out of the park.  In the past I have not been satisfied with Belgian IPA’s because they don’t balance the flavors that make the Belgian beers so wonderful with the power of the hoppy IPA.  Flying Dog breaks that barrier for me and delivers the beer that I had hoped for in a Belgian IPA, balance, complementary hops and an emphasis on the brilliance of the Belgian yeast.  Big score for Flying Dog, great beer and I highly recommend it!  (I’ll be grabbing a sixer before long)

More to come this week, I will be brewing Saturday, time to revisit the Doppelbock.

So over the past few weeks I’ve been pretty tied up with life and have not had a lot of time for brewing.  This has not stopped my from trying new beers though.  This is a Maredsous 8, a Belgian Dubbel that gets much BA’er love with an A- rating (I know, BA ratings are garbage because there is no qualifying the people that rate them, it’s still something). 

For me, the aroma on this really knocked me over.  This smelled like a fine Scotch or a brandy, not because of the alcohol, but just the profile, it really caused me to have a double take.  There were some chocolate notes in there too.  The color was cherry-wood, great for the style with a caramel colored head that left a few fingers of lacing.

This was also an overly carbonated beer.  I was surprised because usually the quark beers are like this, but not the capped ones.  This one broke the mold.  The good news is that the aggressive carbonation did not come off in the mouth feel too much, although after a few, your taste buds feel a little abused.

Over all this was a nutty sweet caramel dance on your pallet that leaves you wanting more.  This is not an overwhelming beer, but one that is better balanced than some in the style.  The flavor falls short of the intense aroma, but that’s not a bad thing, it makes for a sensory thriller where you never know what is going to happen.

I know these pictures are not easy to see, but there are little purple shoots coming out of the ground.  Those are my hops!  I am pretty fired up this year to finally get a full growth cycle out of them.  I have to make a run to the garden center for some stuff and I am going to get some food for my babies as well. 

Cheers

A while back I brewed a Belgian Abby ale that I called The First Tuesday after the First Monday Abby Ale.  The original was an extract brew that I was really pleased with.  Now that I have a little lag time in between large volume brews, I figured I would try a 5 or 10 gallon abby again. 

In line with coming up with a good brew, I want to do some tasting to decide what I want out of my Dubbel.  This brewing in hard stuff.

Anyway, since Wegmans is pimping out with a huge beer selection I figured I would hit them up for an Dubbel I hadn’t tried before.  This is Val-Dieu Brune, an authentic Belgian Dubbel that gets much BA love.  I have also been doing some other tastings of Dubbel’s in the past few months so I had a lot to think about with this new Val-Dieu.

The nose had hits of brandy with sweet nutty aromas.  The color was lighter than both the New Belgium and the Ommegang with hues of red matching the traditional mahogany.  The mouth feel of this brew was less intense than many of the other bottle conditioned brews.  It was light, sweet and had a creamy feel going down.  The flavor was a lot more mellow then some of the other Dubbel’s I’ve had.  There were hints of smokiness in the flavor that blended well with the traditional raisin sweet candy of the Dubbel’s profile.  There was little or no alcohol burn going down on this one.  Very easy to drink for a beer this big.

In the big picture of things, I would say that this is close to what I want to hit.  I want something a little less big and bold than the Ommegang, but I also want to drink a Dubbel when I go to drink a dubbel.  However, I would not add the smokey earthiness that the Val-Dieu.

More to come on the recipe with this one…Cheers.