5.2% ABV on draught (Valhalla is too motherfucking dark to take pictures in)

My final beer of the night on my recent visit to Valhalla.  And, yes indeed, you better make a fruit beer one of your final beers of the night.  I had already built up goodwill and established my drinking street cred by making my first two beers of the evening a 9.5% ABV Belgian strong dark ale as well as a giant 7% ABV strong ale served in an ice cream sundae-sized snifter.  And much like the Easy Company during World War II needed to accumulate 85 “points” before they could leave the European Theatre and head home, one should probably put together at least 15 percentile points ABV-worth of drinking before ordering a fruit beer.  At 16.5 percent, I was in the clear.

This one smells terrific, maybe even better than Blue Point’s effort, surely the blueberry beer par excellence.  This one is incredibly fruity tasting.  If you want something that only has a hint of blueberries, then avoid.  If you want a blueberry drink that has only a hint of beer, then this may be for you.  It’s very good, but something about it just doesn’t seem to have the overall “oomph” that Blue Point Blueberry has.  Whatever the case, I’d like to try it again in the privacy of my own home.

One final thought…there’s nothing better than a blueberry beer burp.

B

4.7% ABV

Aaron, you are so weak. You probably take back girls that treat you like shit and walk all over you with their Nancy Sinatra boots. You probably return to restaurants that forget your reservations and serve you undercooked food. And you probably keep rooting hard for your shitty college sports programs that let you down every goddamn year (”This is OUR year!!!).

Just four days ago, after my debut sampling of a Leinenkugel brew–their Sunset Wheat–I called it one of the worst beers I’ve ever had, giving it a big fat D. Yet, here I was today at the store searching for a beer or two to wet my whistle while watching the NBA Finals and what beer started calling out my name? Fucking Leinenkugel and their Berry Weiss. I’m so weak. Fruit beers are my kryptonite. God, it sounds so refreshing. Not strawberry or blueberry or raspberry but simply fucking “Berry”–as in those aforementioned ones and many more exciting berries (boysenberry, blackberry, cranberry, mulberry, and even fucking loganberry)–all crammed into one single wheat beer. It sounded like the Fruity Pebbles of beer. Oh, and it had such a beautiful label, the metallic magenta of it reflecting in my eyes. I didn’t want to do it. I looked around amongst the selections for any other beer available to bail me out. But none called for me. So, I sucked it up and grabbed a beer from the brand I thought I might never touch again. And then, to add insult to injury, I grabbed the brewery’s Honey Weiss too!

Wow. This is a very nice beer. It pours a color rarely seen in nature or the beer world–almost like the kind of fluorescent neon pink you usually see advertising “Girls! Girls! Girls!” or “Nudes! Nudes! Nudes!” or, quite frankly, anything scandalous in triplicate. A very, very fruity smell like a lambic. Tastes great too. More on the fruity side than the wheaty side. A tad sour in a bad way and the finish and aftertaste isn’t stupendous, but those are minor quibbles. Very carbonated like a soda. I could drink tons of these. I regret that I only bought one.

Negatives are that it’s not particularly complex and doesn’t exactly taste like a beer. This would be a good brew to give to your fourteen year old daughter if you were trying to get her into drinking.

Here’s to second chances. You’ve won me back Leinenkugel. At least for the interim. Now excuse me, I need to go call all my ex-wives and see if they’ll take me back. And I may visit that restaurant that served me a steak covered in pubes last week. And then I’m gonna drink my Honey Weiss.

B

5.1% ABV

My love of fruit–not fruity, fruit–beers is fairly well documented. Now it might be considered quote unquote “gay” to like fruit-packed brews, but when you’re often also throwing back 12% ABV bombers with abandon, I’m not sure you need to prove your drinking mettle. In fact, a lot of these so-called fruit beers pack a bigger punch that a Budweiser. And ain’t no one gonna call that truck driver at the end of the bar drinking Buds some sort of sissy.

If I buy any sort of beer on a whim, it’s gotta be fruit beer. Oooh, raspberry hefe? Sign me up. I’m a sucker for a fruit beer, the stranger the fruit the better (I love Saranac’s Pomegranate Wheat but really struggle to find it). The only problem with most fruit beers is that they simply aren’t fruity enough. I’m not asking to be pelted with fruitiness like from a Lindemans or even a Kastel Rouge–though I adore both of those–but I still want to taste the frikkin’ fruit that is supposedly in the beer. A lot of these fruit beers just taste like a bad ale with like a single, puny berry squeezed into them.

That’s not the case here, however, this one tastes like a delicious, juicy raspberry. Although, I wouldn’t call the beer mind-blowing or anything. Not really wheaty at all. Though considered a hefe on it’s bottle, I’m loathe to even categorize it as one. This is most clearly a fruit beer. Probably smells a little better than it tastes. Worth giving it a shot though. I’d like to mix one up with a Blue Point Blueberry and make the gayest berry berry beer cocktail evah!

B

(Hopefully you’re not as big of dope as me. I’d seen the UFO label on certain Harpoon beers for ages. I just assumed it was cool little name for a certain line of their brews. Uh uh. It actually is an acronym for UnFiltered Offering. Hey, good to know.)

8% ABV from a bottle

Whilst in Philadelphia over the weekend, paid a visit to the brilliant beer/wine/cheese bar Tria. It is definitely one of the better beer bars on the East Coast. It’s not one of those places that has, say, 200 beers on tap and another 2000 bottles on stock, it’s simply a place that carefully picks a small selection of great stuff. You won’t find a single macro in this place. Hell, you’ll be lucky to even find things you’ve heard of. Every time I’m there I drink almost exclusively on beers I’ve never heard of, from breweries I’ve never heard of, and, fuck, usually I can’t even spell the beer or brewery! So if you’re ever in Tria and you see some drunk guy with his hair styled like Showtime Lakers’ era Pat Riley, taking about 10 minutes to transpose the 25 word near-vowel-less name of some obscure Belgian beer onto a cocktail napkin, that’s probably me. Sometimes I find myself spending more time trying to write down the long name that I neglect to enjoy my brilliant beer upon its arrival at the table. Oh, and they are always brilliant beers at Tria. My next few posts will be quick-hitters discusses my last adventure there.

Kasteel is one oddball beer. Smells like a Luden’s cough drop, kinda tastes like a Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry jewsoda, and is outright delicious. I can honestly say I’ve never had a beer like this before. You might think it would taste like a real-fruity lambic ala Lindemans but that’s not even an apt comparison. My god is it fruity and sweet but it’s also very carbonated. Without even being a beer misogynist I would say that girlie girls would like this beer. Then again, so do I, so what does that say about me? I tell you what it says…that I like tasty soda beer.

B+

(Gotta drink the blueberry beer in a opium den-like pitch-black bar so as no one sees ya’!)

4.6% ABV

I flat out love this beer, and I’m manly enough to admit that. Heck, I even called it “sublime” once before. And, I’m always—more so than most beers—trying to get my friends to try the wonder of this brew. Perhaps just so I’ll have some more blueberry-drinking buddies to paint the town purple with. I always have to preface my imploring to them with, “I know it sounds gay, but…”

Select one:

1. Blueberry beer is sublime.

2. Blueberry beer is phenomenal.

3. Blueberry beer is like a blowjob in your mouth…no, that doesn’t sounds so good. Let’s stick with sublime.

Most friends refuse to listen to me and try the beer, even when this miserly Jew offers to buy them one, but those that do wholeheartedly agree, thanking me profusely for bringing this into their lives. I’m not even sure how to describe it. It smells like a delicious blueberry waffle has been crammed into a twelve ounce bottle. And it tastes even better than that. So, though many people will swivel their heads to stare at the fruit ordering a fruit beer, proudly march up to your local barkeep and order a Blue Point Blueberry. You’ll thank me later. And learn tons about your sexuality.

A-

5.2% ABV from a bomber

Without doubt, my most whimsical beer purchase ever. I’m usually incredibly methodical with the beers I purchase for “snobby” drinking. I spend hours researching brews to drink, I compile lists and bring them to the store, I flat out nerd it up when making beer purchases. Even when I see intriguing beers at the store, I rarely make an impulse purchase. Preferring first to jot the beer name down to then go home and look it up on Beer Advocate where I can read countless reviews as if it is an issue of Consumer Reports. Most people do this when buying $50K cars, I do it when buying $3 cans of beer. So, I don’t know what got over me when I spied this on the shelf at Whole Foods. I already had a jam-packed shopping cart full of beer—you get a lot of weird looks when you’re using a shopping cart to only lug around beer purchases (Check out clerk: “Oooh, throwing party?” Me: “Nope, just hate myself”)—and had never heard of this beer nor even sampled a single offering from Wells. But, I mean, come the fuck on—BANANA BREAD BEER! That sounds amazing. I love banana bread. I love beer. Sold! (Note to breweries, please do not start making oddball concoctions like cupcake beer or buffalo wing lager or Skittle Brau cause I am a big time sucker and will buy them all).

So, what to say about this brew? After a busy Saturday which included a little bit of drinking, I came home to enjoy this alone over some winding-down-the-night TV. It wasn’t as good as I had hoped for though I suppose what I was hoping for was something along the lines of a beer that tasted exactly like banana bread while being potent and tasty like a beer. Eh, maybe I should of just bought some actual banana bread and a six-pack to pair with it. This one tastes more like a Yuengling that’s had a Laffy Taffy soaking in the bottom of the bottle for a while. And, you know what, that ain’t half bad.

B-