Wild Blue Blueberry Lager turns me into Violet Beauregarde

Three things strike me as unusual here; an 8% lager, a fruit lager (rather than being an ale) and a crown royal pillow case. I'm more surprised that I haven't featured a prized possession in my entire beer blogging year. Shame on you Walker. Shame. I'm also surprised with the choice of lagering a fruit beer and I'm tired of wondering what the result will be...

It's a lager, so I poured this into a pint glass but I can't smell anything. Online the website recommends a tulip glass, which would probably be the first lager poured into a tulip glass. This beer is crazy. The alcohol is surprisingly well masked. The berry flavor is sweet and tasty cold and as it warms, the flavor actually sticks with the body of the beer. In many fruit ales, as the beer warms the fruit flavor noticeably separates from the body of the beer - the result of using fruit syrup rather than real fruit - and it turns a decent beer into something considerably less so. I'm really enjoying this bizarre but tasty blueberry style. I'm a little bummed I chose to savor this tonight rather than on a summer afternoon, but you can't win'm all. Besides;

Despite this being made by Anheuser-Busch, I enjoyed it. Sue me. ARMAGEDDON rating.

Shipyard Signature Smashed Blueberry helps homebrew an Oatmeal Stout

Today is the nexus of two ideas I hatched weeks ago; buying a fruit beer actually made with fruit and not syrup and brewing my first dark beer. My spidey senses are tingling

First the beer. From the same brewery that brought you the delicious seasonal Smashed Pumpkin (smashed-pumpkin), Shipyard introduces another fruit infused beer, Smashed Blueberry.

A little yeast starter goes a long way

It's a whopping 9% blueberry beer that lies somewhere between a porter and scotch ale. There's a lot going on in this, coffee and chocolate notes and a bitterness at the end that takes away from the blueberry, which is surprisingly subtle. I feel like this is a little "Midsummer Night's Dream" in a way, the dark chocolate and fruit mix together in a moody way. David isn't a fan, but I'm enjoying this latest entry. Will I buy it again? Probably not, it didn't appeal to me that much, but I'm happy that I experienced it. TRANSFORMERS rating.  I would buy this again and pair it with food, duck or lamb. That would be really interesting.


Brew day is upon us! I began a yeast starter (above) two days ago and picked up the supplies yesterday. The apartment smelled like malt when I walked into the door, which is such an appetizing aroma. I'm working on my third partial mash home brew today and I'm still learning the process. One of the tubes in the sparge cooler popped out and 180 degree water poured out all over my hand, burning it decently. I fudged up on another aspect, which made me angrier at myself than the water cooler, so that cooler is in the clear...for now.

Untitled Oatmeal Stout

Here is a link to the recipe that is reprinted below: Oatmeal Stout. This is a Walker original recipe:


Malt Extract:     Pale 3 lbs
                       

Grain Bill:         American Two-Row Pale 4 lbs

(8.5lbs)            Flaked Oats 1.5 lbs

                        Munich Malt 1 lb
                        Chocolate Malt 12 oz
                        90 L Crystal Malt 12 oz
                        Cara Pils 10 oz
                        Roasted Barley 8 oz
                        Special B Malt 4 oz

                                 

Hop Schedule: Northdown (7.5%) 1.5 oz at 60 mins
                                
Yeast:            White Labs London Ale (WLP013) 
                 
My other mistake was I misunderstood how much water to mash and sparge with, so while my original gravity was 1.065, it turned out to be 1.056, which means I will have about 5.5% alcohol and 28.2 IBU's (previously it would be 6.1%). I thought at the time this would be a huge loss, but, not really. I had to take about a gallon of wort out of the boil kettle and there was less efficiency for starch extraction during mashing. Usually you want to hit between 70% 75%. The pro's do it way better, of course. I hit 55%. Stupid math skills getting in the way of fun again.


The color is going to be 42 SRM, which is black as a moonless night. It's going to look great. What's interesting about the hop schedule with stouts, is that you don't use any flavoring or aroma hops, just bittering to balance out the malt. By excluding hops later in the boil, more of the roasted malt is exhibited. Not all breweries follow that rule of thumb, but it's pretty standard.


Failure to brew on Sunday resulted in an unavoidable late Thursday night. We didn't even start cooling the wort until after midnight. I started boiling water at 7:15pm.

We finished around 1am and cleaned up and then shot the sh*t till late.Not the smartest of moves to do on a school night, but sometimes the Chappelle show comes on, home brews are opened and you start talking about life and suddenly the clock reads 4am. Worth it. 

Beer # 366: Dogfish Head Festina Peach is this summer's latest tart

After our libation filled 365 Beer Every Day Great Success party last night, I wake up, drag myself out of bed at 8:30am to drive 3 hours up the coast to attend my wine club's, Ampelos, annual summer bbq. Two red bulls later and I'm there with a smile in my face.

I know what you're thinking: why does this beer enthused weirdo also belong to a wine club? The answer lies in the subtle updating of a Chinese proverb. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Well for a birthday, give your son a box of wine and he will drink well. Give him a wine club subscription, and he will drink well for several years. Some gifts just keep giving.

It's the curse of a father in love with wine. Three birthdays ago, I asked for a membership for my favorite winery and have been grape-content ever since, although my collection is now stockpiling because I haven't the libido to drink a beer every day AND wine. I'm unfortunately mortal and have found my limit but that doesn't exclude me from taking advantage of free food and vertical flights of wine up in beautiful Solvang, CA.

Classic 2006 Pinot Noir with classic coke

The owners, Peter and Rebbecca, are both awesome and hilarious. Their story is also really fascinating. They were working in SoCal for Disney while their son studied Viticulture at UC Davis (THE place to study wine making). They bought the amazing land you see for their retirement, and one summer in between class their son asked if he could live in a trailer on the land and grow wine. Soon after, Peter and Rebbecca become sick of the corporate world and leave Orange County for the greener hills. They learned winemaking from their son, who now is the winemaker at the prestigious Sea Smoke, and then they began their own business. How often does a parent learn a profession from their son? 

They make really good wine and you should check out their Rho Pinot Noir or their Grenache if it's available. Under its influence, bearded people wear Justin Timberlake hats for the first time. It's science.

Even silly hats can't disguise a beer nerd

Driving 6 hours round trip for 4 hours of wine drinking and eating slow roasted pork can get me pretty thirsty for something light and refreshing. Good thing I have a low alcohol neo-berliner style weisse bier that's fermented with peach juice waiting for me at home. Also awaiting me is the disaster that is my apartment.  

Drinking Jenga!

The wheat beer style lays the foundation for a light and refreshing brew with a relatively low alcohol percentage for Dogfish Head, 4.5%. The style is also pretty sour, which makes it a good choice to partner with peach juice. I'm unfortunately not a fan of tart beers, evidenced by my dislike of every sour beer ever drunk and this one kinda assaults your tongue with that character. But there will certainly be those who like this style and the flavor, so if you like lighter beers give it a shot. THE ISLAND rating.

Belmont Strawberry Blonde tastes of fruity excrement. Novelty Beers: wah wah wahhhh

Just because it's Good Friday, doesn't mean we have a good beer planned. I bought this beer weeks ago just to piss off David and now it's zero hour. When we first started this year, one of the first beers I brought home was a Banana Bread Beer. I bought it because from time to time I want to taste beers that are different, that I would normally never try and are out of our comfort zone.

People always ask David, what's your favorite beer? That's always a hard question to answer, there are so many...Okay they say, what's the worst beer you've ever had? Easy answer. BANANA BREAD BEER. And David wasn't wrong, it was truly horrendous. Here's my write up: Wells Banana Bread

David hates fruity beers. David hates novelty beers as much as he hates fruity lambics and saisons. Come to think of it, David hates a lot of things but most of all horses. I don't know how he does it, but David has found glue made from horses. I think it came from Colonial Williamsburg. He doesn't even own a dog but he buys the dog food with horse meat in it, just to keep up their bottom line. It's the least he could do.

See what horses can do to a line of thought? They're such a tangent. Another point illustrating horses are evil. Anywho, the irony of me buying a beer to piss off David, is that I have to drink it as well. Before recommending me for idiot of the year award, do know that I don't mind the fruity beers as much as David, but in my nearsighted decision to purchase the fruit brew, I had forgotten how truly awful novelty beers are. They taste like...Horse Glue.

I can smell the intense Starburst-like flavor from far away. It's nearly overpowering. However, this smells much better than it tastes, because it tastes like @$$- like an off batch of natty light. Similar to the Banana Bread Beer, the fruit is all in the aroma and not in the flavor profile.

The funny thing about novelty/fruit beers that the general buying public don't realize, is that the beers aren't actually "brewed" with fruits (typically, although exceptions like Dogfish Head Aprihop might use apricots in the boil). When you see a 'blueberry' beer, you're actually getting a beer that was made with ingredients similar to any other type of ale, but right before the beer was bottled they added blueberry syrup. Thus, there is little fruit flavor to the beer as the beer has already stopped fermenting. It simply smells like blueberries. Once you see behind the curtain, fruit beers become less of an ale and more of a novelty.

This style of beer always smell decent but taste horrible. Even though the Strawberry Banana was better than the Banana Bread, it still receives a PEARL HARBOR rating.

As we finish off this brew, I'm already looking forward along to my trip down to San Pedro with Sara P, Mark Snyder and Joanna for the long anticipated Railroad Revival Tour - Old Crow Medicine Show, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, and the truly transcendent Mumford and Sons. The three bands are touring via railroad for a handful of dates from Oakland to Austin and plan to collaborate on material along the way. CAN'T WAIT!

Unibroue Éphémère aka Granny Smith Apple Beer

It's simple. I like apples. I like beer. Combine the two and it becomes Ephemere. Maybe it's not such s a good idea.

Unibroue uses chambly fundamentally in several beers, much like George Lucas used Star Wars IV-VI as a platform to launch episodes I-III. Now, some good things happen. Noire de Chambly. Yoda flying around kicking tail. Natalie Portman is beautiful (my intern just asked me if that was necessarily relevant and I stabbed his arm with my letter opener). Some aspects that are extensions of the original are the opposite of, let's say, good. For example Jar-Jar Binks, I wish you never existed.

Here the perfectly Canadian folks at Unibroue decided to mix their delicious white ale with a green apple flavor, and it's just too much. Every sip was followed by a frown. The only thing I can say after drinking this is, congratulations on your beer being as good as TRANSFORMERS 2.