10.3% ABV bottled

How do you remember how good a taste was?  My “normal” friends always wonder how I can recall what beers I liked and what I disliked.  How I can recall that a stout I drank in September of 2007 is better than one I drank in November of 2009.  And, you know, they raise a valid point.  How can one ever remember a purely visceral experience?  For beers, one could review their tasting notes, but I’ll be honest with you, for 99% of us beer reviewers they’re just going to be packed with trite buzzwords scrawled on a cocktail napkin while toasted.  IPAs are “hoppy,” “piny,” and “citrusy.”  Barley wines are “malted,” “caramely,” and “boozy.”  Belgian dubbels and quads have tastes of “candi” and “dark fruits.”  Stouts are “roasted,” “chocolately,” and “coffee-like.”  Yeah, big fucking help.  We’re all frauds.

It would be like trying to explain why some random sexual experience in 2005 was better than some random sexual experience in 2007.  Yet you could probably do that, right?  Because what you’re remembering–what you’re using to “rank” the experiences–is the remembered pleasure you got from it.  So, yeah, I do remember Surly Darkness 2008 as being maybe the sweetest stout I’d ever had in my life but I more remember sitting on my friend’s couch on a cold November night and both of our eyes just popping out of our heads, our jaws dropping to the hardwood, staring at eachother after the first sip and just saying similtaneously, “Is this not the best fucking beer ever?!”

And so, when I tell people Surly Darkness is the best stout I’ve ever had, I’m not telling them that based on side-by-side tastings with every other halfway decent stout I’ve ever had, but rather based on my seemingly clear but probably hazy memory of how I felt that one time I drank that one rare bottle.  An inexact science, sure, something that will always be influenced by the time, place, surroundings, and what happened before, during, and immediately after the experience, but it’s all we got.  And, hey, that bout of great sex you seem to recall having a few years ago probably is better in your memory than it actually was.

Legendary Minnesotan The Captain got me that one rare bottle of Darkness last year and the gracious dude also got me that one rare bottle this year.  I’d heard that this year’s recipe was completely different from last’s–apparently brewmaster Todd didn’t like how sweet his last batch had been–and so I was a little concerned.  The sweetness was what I had liked about last year’s batch, what I felt had set it apart from all the other legendary imperial stouts out there.  So now I had assumed Surly had just gone all status quo and made your typical *BUZZWORDS!* “roasted,” “chocolately,” and “coffee-like” stout.  You know, good, but nothing unique, just throw it on the pile.

I’m glad to report I was quite wrong.  Darkness 2009 smells incredibly hoppy, totally unlike last year (as I recall!).  Honestly, if you were blindfolded and this was put to your face you might guess it a DIPA or a barley wine.  The taste is also a little more hoppy and bitter but that special underlying sweetness is still there.  It’s really blurring the line between what we think of as a stout and perhaps the catchall “strong ale.”  Man, this one drinkable motherfucker.  Most imperial stouts naturally have a drinking “governor” on them if you will and through pure booziness you’re forced to take eye-dropper-sized little sips each time the glass comes to your face.  But not Darkness.  I could chug Darkness and it’s so damn good I struggled mightily to savor each sip.  In my mind, I feel like Darkness 2008 was a hair better–of course even if I had a bottle of 2008 a comparison now would be invalid as it would be aged a year–but Darkness 2009 is still one of a kind and out of this world.  I will continue to call it my favorite stout on planet Earth.

A+

I had warmed up for Darkness with, perhaps, Surly’s polar opposite of a beer Hell (likewise provided by The Captain).  The cool name betrays the very uncool style–helles lager, a kellerbier (aka zwickel bier) technically–and based on the internet geek buzz I was already kinda pissed off at this beer.  Why was the great Surly, makers of boozy masterpieces like Darkness and flavor-packed hybrids such as Furious, Bender, and Cynic wasting my time with such a lame, low ABV (5.1%) style?!

I was so wrong.  I totally expected to hate this, to bitch at Surly for eschewing their high-ABV flavorful beers, but I really dug Hell.  So crisp and refreshing.  Light and grainy.  Bready and sweet.  It’s like the best “shitty” beer I’ve ever had.  That sounds like faint praise I suppose, but Hell is what Bud/Miller/Coors should aspire to.  If I gave this to my macro-swilling chums there’s no way the wouldn’t now realize that Bud/Miller/Coors is adjunct-ingredient garbage.  I’m not sure this style could be rendered any better.  I could drink these all day long and probably would if I live in Minnesota.

B

11% ABV bottled

It’s always exciting when a new brewery penetrates (huh huh, he said “penetrates”) your market and Nectar Ales was no exception.  I still don’t quite understand what’s going on with this brewery despite the fact that they’ve been a California staple for some twenty years.  They seem to be different from but still affiliated with Firestone Walker–the highly acclaimed and still-not-available-in-New York brewery–who seem to own Nectar Ales but not exactly brew Nectar Ales.  (Maybe some smarter cookie can elucidate things for me.)  Any how, Black Xantus was their first ever limited release “big beer” and was much desired…until it was released and became one of the more hotly debated beers of the year.  Pretty much no one thought it was a masterpiece everyone expected it to be, but many still thought it was damn good.  Just as many, however, thought it was swill.  Everyone, though, pretty much agreed it was way overpriced (some $15 in my neck of the woods–though if everyone still bought said “overpriced” beer then it wasn’t overpriced now was it?)

I was still excited to try it, even with tempered expectations, and it certainly didn’t disappoint.  Yet another bourbon barreled Russian Imperial Stout–the style du jour of this era and thank god for that!–this one has your typical buzzword tastes of bourbon, vanilla, dark roasted coffee, and a bitter chocolate finish.  It’s a liitle too boozy, a little too thin on the mouth, and lacking a certain richness, but I still enjoyed it a lot.  I wouldn’t say to rush out to “overpay” for some, but if you see it on tap or want to split a bottle with a hobo, I’d said it’s worth trying.

A-

A few days later at The Pony Bar–which has now passed Rattle ‘n’ Hum on the Hardest NYC Bar At Which To Photograph Taps and Beers list (though dig the artistry in the above shot!)–I had the semi-fortune to get to try Nectar Ales longstanding flagship beer Red Nectar (with it cute-as-a-button hummingbird tap handle).  This may be a craft beer “classic” but like many of the forefathers of the industry, most beers that have been around for twenty years just aren’t going to intrigue a modern palette that much any more.  A nice enough 5.5% amber ale, minimal hops, a little creaminess, incredibly drinkable, easily forgettable, and I’ll probably never have another glass for the rest of my life.  Looking forward to try some other Nectar Ales though.

B-

10.9% ABV bottled

On Geekiness

Now it makes perfect sense to me how the world of comic books and sci-fi and computer games can attract geeks.  Of course they attract geeks.  Geeks are stereotyped as overweight undersexed obsessive loner nerds.  Why wouldn’t they commit their free time to fantasy worlds better than their own?  To worlds where nerds just like them can get bitten by a radioactive spider and are all of the sudden the coolest pajamas-wearing dude in all of the five boroughs.  Where innately knowing how to wield a lightsaber gets your hot sister to want to make out with you just to make Harrison Ford jealous.  Where being a shut-in who is really good at video games affords you the opportunity to play Super Mario Bros. 3 in front of adoring fans.   Geekiness makes sense among fantasy world devotees.  These people aren’t geeks because they follow fantasy.  They follow fantasy worlds because they are geeks.

Then what about sports?  Sports, at first glance, would seem surely less a bastion of geekiness.  I mean, aren’t jocks the ones usually picking on geeks since the beginning of time?  And, any how, everyone likes sports.  And most people played them at one point in their life too.  So how does geekiness infest the sports world?  I would argue here it’s an aspirational thing.  A fantasy world that is actually feasible for real humans to achieve so long as they practice hard and take lots of PEDs.  Sports also attracts nerds because it allows them to implement their honors math skills in a real world setting.

Now, I don’t think most people could possibly understand how beer could be geeky.  I’ve been a beer connoisseur of varying degrees for at least a half decade and I didn’t even fully understand the magnitude of beer geekiness until recently.  I mean, beer is so cool, right?  Beer is what the “bad” kids in school drank under the bleachers while the rest of us were cheering at pep rallies.  Beer is what we fed to girls in college to get them to sleep with us.  And have you seen beer commercials?  Uh, does that look like a geeky time?  Shirtless hunks and gummy-bear-implanted women and a lot of “woohoo-ing” and Spuds McKenzie!  No fucking way is that anything but the antithesis of geekiness.

But, sorry to say, beer culture is just as geeky as Star Trek or comic books or LARPing or baseball card collecting.  Go to any beer tasting or convention or special release party or event where a legendary brewmaster is set to appear and you will be slack-jawed at the geekitude.  The air will be permeated with the stench of dork.  (It smells kinda like inappropriate sweating and unfounded pretentiousness.)  Oh man, could you imagine if craft breweries had commercials depicting the true world of craft beer?  It would’t be hunks and sluts and party animals and Wassssuppping and Clydesdales.  No sir, an accurate craft beer commercial would depict a sausage party with a paucity of pussy and guys with pubic-like beards in too tight of brewery t-shirts proudly wielding their own personal tasting glasses like Minnesota Fats brandished his prize cue while debating the difference between storing their cellared bottles upright or sideways and waiting for Sam Calgione to arrive so they could pester him with arcane questions about yeast strains.  Par-tay!!!!!)

Thinking about how such a seemingly cool thing like beer drinking could have as great a geek quotient as a Half-Life party got me thinking.  Are there geeks in other aspects of life?  Perhaps in all aspects of life?  Are there geeks even in what would seemingly be the most super-cool niches of this world?!

Rock ‘n’ Roll

With drug-addled, chain-smokin’ long-haired men on strobe-lighted stages singing symphonies to the devil while gyrating the armadillos in their trousers in overt sexual manners, rock music has long attracted a committed following from two specific groups.  Reprehensible sluts is one, obviously.  But scratch the surface just a bit and you see that rock also attracts massive geeks.  For whatever reason, gross Matt Pinfield/Lester Bangs/Cameron Crowe types have long loved obsessing over men that are much cooler than them and the minutiae of the music these men create in the spare ten minute refractory periods in between their groupie fivesomes.  Like beer geekdom, a “High Fidelity” like obsession with rock music also involves a lot of hanging out with men men glorious men.  Perhaps the reason John Norris is such a big rock ‘n’ roll geek, come to think about it.

Drugs

Surely there must be hard-core drug geeks that take their love for illegal narcotics to the same highly-critical extremes that we do.  There’s got to be a Coke Advocate website somewhere.  “The pour of my Bolivian Marching Powder from my two gram Ziploc baggy onto my West Elm mirrored coffee table cascaded out in a luxurious white stream akin to Niagara Falls in December…”  There must be a RateMeth too.  “The symetrical crystals had a nice mouthfeel as I swallowed them whole, unable to locate my pipe and a spare sheet of tin foil, no matter how frantically I searched my house…”  And there’s surely the Great American Weed Festival held every year in Boulder or Portland or Madison to honor the year’s best in marijuana releases.  I’m certain of all of this.

Sex

The idea of sex geeks seems paradoxical, impossible even, but I know they must exist too.  Men that go on message boards to scrutinize technique with each other.  Who attend conventions of some sort to trade insider secrets on the state of the art of fucking.  Men with Excel spreadsheets where each sex geek meticulously logs his “wants” and “hads.”  (Had:  twins, GMILF, ginger;  Wants:  Albino, hermaphrodite, circus clown.)  Actually, come to think of it, I may very well be a sex geek.  Moving along…

But even if I am a geek in any other genre, by now beer geekiness must surely be my forte.  And my geek fancy couldn’t help but be tickled by a line of beers that so brazenly holds a mirror up to us.  Aside from last year’s collaboration with Stone, these would be the first beers I had ever had from Mikkeller and, whoa, what a place to start!

Beer Geek Brunch Weasel

10.9% ABV in a 500 mL bottling

I was lucky enough to try this at the wonderful Paradiso in our nation’s capital and so glad I did because this is a stunner of a beer.  From what I understand, Mikkeller doesn’t have their own brewery–in fact, the Mikkeller brewmasters actually have day jobs!–and this was brewed at Nogne O’s brewery.  Brunch Weasel is an asskicker of an oatmeal stout brewed using “the world’s most expensive coffees” (according to Mikkeller it’s around $100/lb) and “from droppings of weasel-like civet cats. The fussy Southeast Asian animals only eat the best and ripest coffee berries. Enzymes in their digestive system help to break down the bean. Workers collect the bean-containing droppings for Civet or Weasel Coffee” (again, according to Mikkeller…uh, are they joking????)  Whatever the case, this cat-shit beer is incredible, frequently residing in the 95-100 range on the BA Top 100*.  One of the most coffee-tasting beers I’ve ever had, yet not in that burnt, unpalatable roasted way a lot of coffee beers unfortunately are.  This has a nice chocolaty sweetness and a good boozy burn.  Much better for waking you up during Sunday brunch than a measly Bellini.

A

Beer Geek Breakfast

7.5% ABV in a 500 mL bottling

Based purely on anecdotal evidence, Breakfast seems to be easier found than Brunch Weasel and, such is life, it’s also not quite as tasty.  Though it’s still solid.  Opened for me with a frothy, latte explosion.  Bitter and muted, oaty and dark chocolaty, I missed the lack of booziness in this one compared to Brunch.  Good, but not worth trampling over a kid in a wheelchair for (Brunch most certainly is worth trampling over a handicap child for.)

I’d passed over Mikkeller beers for far too long–perhaps due to their lofty price tags (about $12-15 for the smallish bottles where I live)–but now I’m most certainly eager to try more of their offerings to see what these crazy Danes have a-brewing.

Looks like there’s a few more from the Beer Geek line, though they appear to be small-batch bottlings only available in Europe.  Darn.

A-/B+

Question of the day:  Where have you seen utter geekiness where you least expected it?

*I should note I have now become almost disenchanted with the BA Top 100.  It has become just too much of a Sisyphean task to tackle it.  Every time I have a Top 100 beer, a new exciting release comes out and meteorically jumps onto the list.  And, then, that same release usually has several similtaneous, even rarer, tap-only iterations (bourbon-barreled, oaked, vanilla beaned, cocoa nibbed) which add two to four more beers onto the Top 100 and all of the sudden you’re not gaining any ground on conquering the Top 100.  And let’s not discuss those times when you finally take down a Top 100 “white whale”–see Veritas 004 which I had last night–only to see that beer become “retired”–which Veritas 004 will almost certainly be in a few weeks or so–and then totally disappear from the list.  It becomes frustrating and I feel like I’ve been stuck in the “had” 65-70 of the Top 100 for the last few months with little traction made.  Which actually makes me happy, because now I’ve decided to just enjoy great beer, may the Top 100 list be damned.  (Unless of course I ever get me hands on some Black Tuesday and then, woohoo!, #1 beer in the world!!!!!!)

Note: 2/3rds of this post comes courtesy of a trade with Jay at Hedonist Beer Jive.

When I get together with my friends DW and Batch, we like nothing more than to set up a blind taste test amongst some hard-hittin’ beers.  There’s no more accurate way to judge, and enjoy, a great beer than with no preconceived notions.  No inner monologue dancing around your head saying stuff like, “I think I kinda hate this beer, but it’s #13 on the Beer Advocate Top 100 so maybe I actually do like it…?????”

For this blind, I’m sure some beer geeks are going to get all up in arms that we pitted an American double stout vs. an American porter vs. a Russian imperial stout.  Blasphemy they’ll say!  He disrespected beer!  They might even start a nerdy discussion about it on the sad BA Forums.  But I’ll argue that it was an apropos matchup.  These styles are virtually the same and in this case, all three beers had near identical ABVs and, more importantly, strongly relied on coffee for their flavor profiles.*

The contenders were the currently #13 beer in the world AleSmith’s Speedway Stout, the #73 beer in the world Deschutes Black Butte XXI, and, just to throw a would-be tomato can into the mix, Pozharnik from Pennichuck Brewing from out in New Hampshire.

We were anxious to throw these down, but we faced one crucial problem:  how to set up a blind tasting when we were the only three people around.  Usually there’s a wife or a girlfriend, a macro-drinking friend, a teetotaling toddler, you can enlist to set up the glasses for tastings but in this case all those kinds of people were shunning us.  Three people born in the 1970s, well-educated, and we couldn’t possibly figure out how to set up a blind to drink ourselves.  Perhaps we were a little toasted too.  And I was most anxious to get on with this tasting as I was getting a firm case of drinking blue balls.

Finally, DW decided he could pull out nine total glasses, label three of them with a 1 on the bottom, three with a 2, and three with a 3, pour the same beer in the same numbered glass, then have Batch mix the glasses up, then have me distribute.  It worked.  May drinking beer never be so hard again.

On with the tasting notes:

Beer #1:  I found this one strongly smelling of soy sauce while all three of us detected a spicy chili pepper scent on the nose, recalling Dogfish Head Theobroma a bit I thought, oddly enough.  I found this one thin in the mouth, and bordering on unpleasant.  I didn’t even want to finish my blind taster glass.

Beer #2:  This was sweeter than #1 and quite flavorful.  I found it, likewise, to be a little thin on the mouth, but it was a very solid effort I enjoyed.

Beer #3:  By far the best of the three, all three of us blind tasters thought it easily won the troika matchup.  Rich in coffee taste and with a silky mouthfeel, toasty, roasty, and chocolaty, I greedily slurped this one up.

And the reveal:

Beer #1:  Black Butte XXI

Beer #2:  Pozharnik

Beer #3:  Speedway Stout**

We were all floored how resoundingly the beautifully wax-dipped Black Butte XXI got its ass kicked.  After the reveal, we still struggled to enjoy it and nearly considered passing the remaining 3/4th of the bottle to a bum outside.  (Respect that BA!)  XXI would be the only of the three bottles we didn’t enjoyably finish.  But, to be fair, it explicitly says on the Black Butte XXI bottle that the beer is best after 10/17/2010, but with such a lofty numerical standing and such rave reviews pretty much to a man at this very second in time, I would have hoped for better.  Nevertheless, I would really like to try another bottle of it exactly 369 days from now and I’ll give it a marginal benefit of the doubt til then.

The little-discussed Pozharnik was also quite a surprise, in the more pleasant surprise direction, and held up quite well in matching the wax-dipped XXI with a plastic plungered bottle.  The victorious Speedway Stout opted for the silver foil-wrapped top, completing the trifecta in what may not have been our greatest blind tasting ever, but was surely our greatest fancily-capped bottle tasting ever.

Black Butte XXI:  B-

Pozharnik:  A-

Speedway Stout:  A

*Commercial descriptions:

Speedway Stout: “A HUGE Imperial Stout that weighs in at an impressive 12% ABV! As if that’s not enough, we added pounds of coffee for a little extra kick.”

Black Butte XXI: “Building on the existing chocolate notes already present in Black Butte Porter, brewers added Theo’s Chocolate cocoa nibs from Seattle,  1000 pounds of Bellatazza’s locally roasted Ethopian and Sumatran coffee, and then aged a portion of it in Stranahan’s Colorado whiskey barrels.”

Pozharnik: “The 2007 Pozharnik is an intensely flavored Russian Imperial Stout infused with espresso that compliments its rich chocolate & roasted malt character.  Pozharnik is guaranteed to warm a winter chill with its 10% ABV and dark fruit (raisin & plum) & vanilla undertones.  Notes of whiskey aromatics are brought on by the aging process in a “single barrel” whiskey cask.”

**Interestingly enough, the only of the three to NOT be barrel-aged.  Though, I’d love to try the barrel-aged version of this one if any one wants to hook a brotha up.

8.5% ABV on cask

The Great RV Trip Non-Debacle 2009

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.

No.  We were somewhere around East Stroudsburg, near the Delaware Water Gap, when the vodka began to coarse through us.

No.  That’s not right either.  What is it about besotted road trips that makes every one want to pay homage to the master?  To steal from Hunter S?

I shall start again.

What is it about moving while drinking that makes it so much more enjoyable?  Whether on plane, train, boat, or car (hopefully not while driving) it is such a greater pleasure than to imbibe while static.

We were in a twenty-five-foot-long recreational vehicle, an RV you dope, hurtling down the highway as fast as King Otto could drive without the governor stopping us.  The governor on the car.  Not Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, though he wouldn’t have been thrilled with the activities we were partaking in as we marred his miserable state.

In the back, Cuseman and I sat in the booth across from one another.  Dean, Dean, the Sax Machine (aka:  The Tapdance Kid) lounged on the back bed dispensing homemade pineapple-infused vodka–much more potent than you will ever know–from a two gallon tub.  Atop the bunk bed, the babe of the trip, Epstein slept.

When King Otto suggested we rent an RV for our sojourn to State College, PA to see our beloved Syracuse Orange lose to Penn State, I was a little leery.  Oh, don’t get me wrong, I signed up immediately, but I was certainly leery.  Leery about:

• the quality and comfort of a rented RV
• living with four men within the confines of about fifty square feet for forty-eight straight hours
• King Otto’s ability to drive the thing
• not dying from any of the above

One thing I wasn’t leery about:

• actually getting a hilarious story from this most certain debacle of a trip.

I would live on the RV, tailgate with the RV, and hang with likeminded RVers, many of the professional variety, for an entire weekend so that none of my readers ever would have to.  I would be the Bear Grylls of driving, sleeping, relaxing, eating, pissing, and shitting all within the same vehicle.  I was certain I would be incredibly glad to have gone on this trip, and almost certain that I’d never want to do it again by trip’s end.

I have to say, I was so very wrong.

First of all, I was greatly impressed by our Cruise America “standard” rental.  If you’ve never had the fortune–yes, fortune–to ride in an RV, let me briefly explain its interior.  Though it looks no bigger than a utility van or a smallish U-Haul on the outside, inside it’s like a funhouse and you are simply blown away at how much is packed into the thing.  Pure American ingenuity and efficiency.  Above the driver’s cabin–identical to a truck cabin but with access to the back living quarters–a bunk bed big enough to house three heterosexual men that don’t mind incidental contact, three across like sardines.

In the middle of the living quarters, a sitting booth akin to what you’d see at a Denny’s or standard dinner.  A perfect place to play cards, eat fast food, or get tie one on hard while the “dad” of the trip–King Otto in this case–drove.

Loaded up and ready to go, King Otto took the wheel still smarting from layabout Cuseman’s insubordination in loading up and preparing to go in a timely manner (let’s hope the two of them wage a war of words within my comments below–it will truly be hilarious), and we were off.

The drive to State College from New York City is…well, honestly, I have no fucking clue.  I wasn’t paying attention in the least.  Nor really was Cuseman, Epstein, or Dean, Dean, the Sax Machine (aka:  The Tapdance Kid).  It was raining hard, it was dark out, but the back was like a bar where time simply doesn’t matter.  Yeah, sure, like a bar with no TVs, no women, inaudible car radio, and only four customers in it.  But the drinks were free, the cold beers were only an inch away from you at any time, and there was never a line to the pisser.  A bathroom about the size of an airplane lavatory, I should note.

Drinking on road trips is always not just a desire, nor a necessity, but of the utmost importance.  Shit, I’ve been known to risk life, limb, and the tender skin on my palms just to get an open bottle of beer for a ride.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t condone drinking and driving in the least and I’ve only done it once in my life–no lie–but I condone drinking and passengering with all of my being.

Why it is a crime in America to drink alcohol while not driving a car but while simply sitting in it is extremely baffling to me.  A typical case of America finding solutions to problems that don’t exist and which are really not solutions at all.  (Have a lot of drunk passengers wrecked the cars they weren’t driving?!)  I suppose lawmaking muckety-mucks would say you can’t drink and passenger because, well, because it sets a bad example for the man at the wheel.  Heck, it might even make him downright jealous.  Well shit then, shouldn’t it be illegal to not read while in the passenger seat?  Or do a crossword?  Or play air drums to “Dazed and Confused?”  Or fucking sleep?!  Cause, while I may not be any sort of vehicular safety expert, I know countless people that have successfully driven a car while lit up like a menorah, but I don’t know a single motherfucker that has successfully made it from point A to point B while fast asleep.

And that’s the great thing about having the RV.  With a car, you’re always conscious, always worried about a cop driving by and seeing you opening a cold one, about empties littering the floor, about needing to break the seal too early and slowing down your entire trip.  But all those problems are negated in an RV.  With the curtains closed, no one else on the road could possibly see what mischief we were getting into.  It was our private sanctuary, our own movable speakeasy, for throwing back the hooch with no consequence.  Unless of course King Otto wrecked the car and then we’d face the quite troublesome consequences of seeing what happens to a man who is standing in the back of an RV, chugging a beer, when said RV fishtails into a highway girder.  Perhaps we should wear helmets in the back next time?

Without question, this was the most enjoyable roadtrip I have ever had driving-wise.  On other roadtrips, you’re obsessed with the time while en route.  “How’s are time?”  “We making good time?”  “What time do you think we’ll be in?”  Why?  Well so you can get to the bar and start drinking.  But when the bar is with you, time is of the utmost insignificance.  We could have arrived at 9 PM, midnight, or next year and I wouldn’t have give a damn.  Unless the beer had ran out.

The insignificant time we did arrive ended up being 10:50 PM.  Pulling into the grass rolling hills of a parking lot at 10:50 PM we were floored.  Hundred upon hundreds if not thousands upon thousands of RVs already set up, as far as the eye could see.  There must surely be an RV caste system as we were ordered and then tucked away into a far corner of the lot amidst other smallish rentals and amateur RV enthusiasts.

We immediately grabbed a handful of beers and set out to explore.  To see the real RV pros at work.  We took laps around the ad hoc “streets” of the RV City, our wasted eyes agog like Dorothy in Oz.  We soon learned that the lot opens at 5 PM sharp on Thursday night with a line of RVs already ready to enter and set up, and for the next three days the place becomes like a slapdash wild west mining town, thrown up over night to assure a place’s newest and likewise temporary inhabitants, can find places to grub, drink, gamble, and fuck while finding as much gold as possible.  We were amazed to see impromptu sports pubs, dance clubs, karoake bars, and even gambling venues pieced together through a series of interconnected tents–closer to circus than pup–covering all sorts of tables, furniture, and electronics powered by miles and miles of extension cord connected to satellite dishes and RV generators.  Suffice to say, many if not most of these big time RV “establishments”–for lack of a better word–were larger, more spacious, and had far more eminities and creature comforts than not just my Manhattan apartment but most groggeries in New York City proper.

There’s nothing better than waking up at sunrise on Saturday, walking outside in your sleep clothes, taking a piss in the dewy grass, and immediately popping a beer to shake off the cobwebs, then sparking up the grill, and setting up the Cornhole boards.  (As we all know Cornhole is the greatest outdoor drinking game in the history of the world, and any time I get a chance I play it until my arm falls off, my liver explodes, or, more likely, the cheap wood board shatters.)  We drank and ate burgers and sausage, played Cornhole and Beer Pong until 11:50 AM before hightailing it to the stadium.

There’s not much worth discussing or explaining about the day’s game.  Beaver Stadium may the biggest stadium in America and the third largest in the world, but it’s fairly unspectacular.  You might say, well, Penn State was playing the miserable Syracuse Orange, sure.  And that does justify the fans lack of enthusiasm and propensity for sitting on their hands.  But that doesn’t justify it being an undistinguished Erector Set of a dilipidated sporting venue, nor the school have a shockingly ugly student base.  King Otto, Cuseman, Dean, Dean the Dancing Machine (aka: The Tapdance Kid), and Epstein can back me up on this, the four State fans in front of us were of another species.  A species that surely evolved and survived by not being the fittest, but rather by being so goddamn repulsive no predators possibly wanted to get near these mutants.  Literally slack-jawed with the gummiest mouths you’ve ever seen, acne-riddled skin, hair straight from the bird’s nest wig collection, and the dopiest hick hollers of “Cuuuuuuuuuuum’on, less’go Stuuuuuuuuuu-ate!”  Sickening.  And this is coming from a man that hadn’t showered or even brushed his teeth that morning.  My standards were not exactly high on that misty day.

Of course you can’t drink during the game because the hypocritical NCAA likes to pretend that it has some ethics, so I was forced to swig on Diet Pepsis all game, which I won’t deny were incredibly reasonably priced so yay for that.  After a 28-7 loss, after nearly falling asleep from our three hour lack of alcohol, we jumped back into drinking and exploring the RV scene.  (Marv Albert voice:  “With authority!”)

An expert myself, I am not one to haphazardly praise the drinking prowess of others, thinking most “party” schools to be grossly overrated, most hardcore imbibers hardly able to throw it back, but I can say this:  Penn State fans can drink.  They are one of the finest drinking schools I have ever dealt with.  Good lord, State College on a gameday might be the drinking capital of America.

As a connoisseur of drinking games, I was both intrigued and excited to learn that Cornhole and Beer Pong have pretty much become passe at State College.  Still respected sure, but more in a retro way like, “Ha, isn’t it cute.  We’re playing beer pong!  That game we used to play when we were in junior high!”  Oh no, these ugly Penn State fans have moved on to far more aggressive drinking games.  Games of the highest skill, abilities, and suicidal tendencies.  I learned at least four new drinking games but my two most eye-opening favorites were Dizzy Bat and Speedball, explained as follows:

Dizzy Bat–Take your classic yellow Wiffleball bat, cut the bottom of the handle off it, fill the barrel with an entire can of beer and…CHUG!  After you’ve finished chugging, put the bat on your forehead, bend over, and spin around ten times, then stand up and try to take a swing at the empty beer can as a friend/enemy tosses it at you.  Amazingly, or not considering how awesome America is, there’s actually countless great Youtube videos of this sport.

Speedball–Probably the most dangerous drinking game I’ve ever encountered aside from gloryholing, this game works like this:  Two-versus-two with each team set up on opposite ends of your typical beer pong length table.  Each player has a full can of beer placed in front of him.  One teammate hurls a ping pong ball at one of his opponents’ two cans and, assuming he hits a can, his partner is allowed to begin chugging his beer and chug it as long as he can until the “defending” team is able to retrieve the ping pong ball and lay it smack on the table.  Sounds easy, sure, but here’s the rub:  the player that hurled the ball at the defenders’ beer cans is allowed to chase after the ball and the defenders and use any means necessary–kicking, scratching, blocking, tripping–short of outright tackling, or covering the ball, to prevent the defenders from returning the ball to the table.  Teams go back-and-forth taking alternating shots, game is over when both of a team’s players have drained every last drop of their two cans.  You are guaranteed to be sweaty, tired, filthy, perhaps injured, and certainly wasted after a game of Speedball.  Fans gather around like they are watching a Michael Vick sanctioned canine UFC event.  Not surprisingly, all the players and spectators, are men.

As nightfall came and drinking games became an impossibility, now wasted and worn, we walked around the dark lot getting into trouble and creating memories at the various dance clubs, bars, and various drinking scenes.  Making friends with strangers, watching nationally-televised football games on projection satellite TV screens blasted onto walls and giant RVs, and eventually becoming shit-canned enough to hit on ugly ugly women (photographic evidence destroyed.)  We even managed to get a little illicit gambling done, with Dean, Dean the Sax Machine (aka:  The Tapdance Kid) absolutely mopping up.

I was worn and wasted before even 1 AM, after approximately seventeen straight hour of drinking and twenty-six of the last thirty-three hours with a drink in my hands, I aptly feel asleep that night still clutching a half-drunk brew.

I'm even a legend while I sleep

Th next day, the RV was an absolute pig sty, our toilet not overflowed but filled to the brim, our two gallons of vodka killed, our three bottles of spice rum decimated, and 84 out of 96 cans of cheap beer taken down (OK, who was the slacker here?).  We were most certainly ready to get back to civilization.  Unfortunately, the drive back home to New York through the tumbling hills of nowhere land, where you can’t even find a McDonald’s for hundreds of miles, is a lot more boring when you’re hungover and not drinking.  Oh well, road trips always end poorly.  No one ever says:  “Man, you know what the best part of this road trip was?!  Driving home at the end of it!”

Having said that, I’m pretty sure the five of us are now RV enthusiasts for life.  It’s a lifestyle I think I could get into, the cornerstone of a splendid lost weekend, though I would die an early death if I did it more than once a year.

Though I guess I may have to change my life expectancy:  King Otto’s considering buying an RV.

After having not showered, or defecated, sorry for the too much information, for the entirety of the trip, I had to handle both post-haste upon re-entering Manhattan society.  But I also had to hightail it to Rattle ‘N’ Hum because after drinking garbage macro beer all weekend, I needed some flavorful, weighty, and potent sugary poison in my system, and luckily, my favorite bar was hosting the Gotham Cask Festival, with quite a few notables on tap amongst several dozens specialty casks.

I started things off with Sixpoint’s Hops of Love “IPA 4 Evah” dry-hopped cask beer.  I was quite impressed with this 6.2% offering and found it even better than their well-acclaimed Bengali Tiger.  Hops of Love was made specially for Sixpoint brewer Ian’s wedding and apparently they made far too much, which is our gain!  Our at least mine.  Dry-hopped with cascade and Northern, this is a flawless and complex blend of grapefruit, piny hops, and bitterness all in a slippery smooth little package.  I really enjoyed this luxurious beer which just coddled my throat (A-)

I also tried the official beer of New York City Craft beer week, the NY3, a collaborative effort between Empire State brewers Captain Lawrence, Ithaca, and Southampton, brewed with local honey from each of the three brewers, dry-hopped with Willamette hops among others from Pedersen Farms.  I eagerly anticipated this effort but was a tad let down.  A solid session effort no doubt, kinda like Liquid Gold Lite, but nothing spectacular, and a beer that easily got lost in the shuffle compared to all the legendary, high ABV offerings I had around during the past week (B+)

But I had come specifically to the cask festival at Rattle ‘N’ Hum for one much desired beer, a Beer Advocate Top 100 effort and no doubt George Lucas unapproved, the Imperial Stout Trooper.  A vintage 2006 keg no less!  I found the stout to be a most warm and relaxing imperial that actually tastes far more boozy than it truly is.  Burnt and roasted coffee tastes, a kiss of chocolate, silky and most delicious, though I don’t think it deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with the all-time legends.  At least on cask.  I hope to snag a bottle this winter.

A-

*Of note, you can still drink at Syracuse’s Carrier Dome, so fuck all you teetotaling heathens.

(Be sure and check out this fun interview Jay at Hedonist Beer Jive did with me)

Craft Beer Benders

It shrinks my liver, doesn’t it, Nat? It pickles my kidneys, yeah. But what it does to the mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar. Suddenly I’m above the ordinary. I’m competent. I’m walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. I’m one of the great ones. I’m Michaelangelo, molding the beard of Moses. I’m Van Gogh painting pure sunlight. I’m Horowitz, playing the Emperor Concerto. I’m John Barrymore before movies got him by the throat. I’m Jesse James and his two brothers, all three of them. I’m W. Shakespeare. And out there it’s not Third Avenue any longer, it’s the Nile. Nat, it’s the Nile and down it moves the barge of Cleopatra.
–Ray Milland, “The Lost Weekend”

When I own a brewery we’ll make a beer called Methadone-ale.  A clean and near-flavorless low ABV session beer packed with healing nutrients which will help ween a man off the shit coursing through his body from a lost day, a lost weekend, a lost week of aggressive imbibing.

I’m finally free after what ultimately ended up being an eleven-day craft beer bender.  Through a confluence of events, parties, friends visiting, friends to visit, dates, meetings, and just general ennui, I was forced, forced I say!, to drink heavily for all these days.  Beginning in Philadelphia two weeks ago at the legendary Monk’s, ending just yesterday at Union Hall in Brooklyn, and knocking off along the way several states, cities, many famous watering holes, and many more famous beers, I finally have a respite right now.  My body is in pain though.  My mind is putty.  I must have lost five to ten IQ points in the time.  I am in full detox mode and it hurts.

We craft beer drinkers like to pretend we aren’t alcoholics, and most of us aren’t, technically, but many of us would be lying to say we aren’t at least drunkards.  Whether intentionally or accidentally.  Luckily, most of the macro drinking world isn’t aware of these facts.

They see a man getting wasted on the cheapest beer in the house, the thriftiest rotgut vodka around, and the sensors go off:  ALCOHOLIC.

They see a man like me slowly sipping a dark and viscous beer out of a chalice, a snifter, and they think: “What a classy young gent.”

If they only knew!

So the alcoholic is absolutely pummeling his body with Bud Lites and Popov vodka and Wild Turkey shots, seeing how fast he can get these into his system, the carcasses of label-peeled beer bottles and sticky shot glasses in his wake, and I’m slowly sipping an Old Rasputin XII.  Taking a good hour at least.  Probably more.  But, naw, he’s no alcoholic they say when they see me.  He’s a “connoisseur.”  I was psyched to locate the what-I-assumed-was-very-rare 12th Anniversary bottling of North Coast’s flagship stout Old Rasputin and I paid mightily for it.  The most expensive bottle of beer I’ve ever bought quite frankly.  Was it worth it?  Eh, perhaps.  Is fermented liquid ever “worth” it?

From what I understand, simply the “normal” and very good Old Rasputin aged in bourbon barrels, this is one delicious stout. However, it simply lacks a little “oomph.”  An ineffable je ne sais quoi to make it an unequivocal classic.  I like really, really boozy, bourbony, bourbon-barreled beers–Goose Island Bourbon County and Brooklyn Black Ops to name two–and this one doesn’t quite have that potency.  But it’s still good and very well made.  Incredibly smooth and silky, chocolately malts with more hints of vanilla than a full-out assault of bourbon and oak, and a nice, tingly little carbonation.  A thinner, less syrupy mouthfeel than I would expect and desire too.  So was it worth it?  Yes.  But only one time I would say.  I would never pay what I paid for it again, unlike other prohibitively highly priced stouts like the aforementioned Black Ops which I’m always happy to make it rain for.*

So how can that man drinking an Old Rasputin XII–a beer we’ve never heard of!–be an alcoholic or a drunkard?!  That man’s refined!

But he probably is one.  Just not one like all the other ones.  Like youse guys.

Differences between a craft beer drunk and a normal drunk:

1.  Price — Even in uneconomical Manhattan, a drunkard can belly up to a barstool at a classic dive like Rudy’s, Desmond’s, Doc Holiday’s, and drink the night away with $6 pitchers, $2 cans, $3 shots.  Even soak the beer up with gratis hot dogs, popcorn, peanuts, and the like.  And if he’s friendly with the bartender, which he will be since the bartenders are likewise drunks and drunks are friendly to drunks, quid pro quo–usually–he’ll get out for under a single Andrew Jackson.  Meanwhile, us craft beer alcoholics are cavalierly ordering $50 rare bottles from the back room, “sessioning” with $10 barleywine snifters, and nightcapping with a $12 stout pour at 3 AM.  And for us, the bartenders never seem to knock on the bar, turn over an empty shot glass, and “Next round’s on me!” when you’re throwing back Ommegong Rouge at the Ginger Man.

2.  Speed — Low-brow alcoholics crack me up.  Striving for “nirvana,” drunkenness, yet throwing down cans of low-ABV macro-crap.  As Clay Davis would say, “Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet,” that’s going to take you all night to get buzzed.  Meanwhile, us craft beer drunkards can enter a bar at 5:05 and be wasted by 5:30, well before the happy hour rush, after having only had a pint of Oaked Unearthly and a snifter of Chimay.

3.  The people — You’re a standard alcoholic, you’re hanging with the unsavory hoi polloi of the vomit-soaked dive bar scene.  Fellow belching beerbellies too lit up and full of carbonation to possibly have a clever conversation.  But us beer snobs are in fine wood-panneled establishments, soft jazz playing, interesting chatter, real swank scenes, when we get our drunk on.  A buncha prententious a-holes you might even say.  Surroundings paint a false picture of realities.  A false picture of non-drunkardness.  But, honestly, some “established” craft beer bars have been the sites of the rowdiest nights I’ve ever seen.

4.  Lack of care — If I were to polish off ten pitchers of Miller High Life, a friend, a drinking buddy, the fucking bartender would probably say, “Why don’t you go home buddy, you’ve probably had enough for tonight.”  But no one’s EVER going to say that to me:  “You’ve had enough, pal.  Call a cab.”  Enough?!  Why I’ve only had three beers all night!  Admittedly a 120 Minute, a bomber of Stone Old Guardian, and a Goose Island Nightstalker.  But still, that’s just three beers!  No one ever has a weepy intervention** with a craft beer “addict.”  “I think you drink too much, pops.”  Too much?!  I only had one beer on Saturday night!  Yes, technically true, but wasn’t it a bomber of Serpent’s Stout?

5.  Hangover — I unfortunately don’t (usually) get that hungover from craft beer.  I say unfortunately because it doesn’t teach me any lessons.  And one is supposed to learn lessons when they do harmful things to themselves. Frank Sinatra would probably feel sorry for me, but I feel sorry for these drunkards waking up with pulsating headaches, the adjunct cheap ingredients acting like a tornado inside their skulls.  Better ingredients, better hangovers, your desire to get drunk again not muted whatsoever by any worries.

6.  Productiveness — I’ve been perpetually drunk the last few weeks.  If I was just a measly alcoholic I would only have to show for that a protruded gut, a bulbous W.C. Fields nose and bloated face, and a pickled liver.  And while I may have a few of those things myself, as a craft beer drinker, my rampant alcoholism also allowed me to knock off twelve, count ‘em, twelve Beer Advocate Top 100 beers, nearly one per day, during this recent binge.  Why, that’s a major accomplishment!

I’m no alcoholic, I’m an ambitious overachiever!

A

*On a somewhat deplorable note about North Coast’s bottling of Old Rasputin XII.  It appears to be in a 750 mL bottle, and goddamn it’s certainly heavy enough to be a standard 750 mL bottle, but it’s got the thickest Harry Carey glasses bottom you’ve ever seen in your life, making it deceptively large and heavy when it fact it only holds a paltry 500 mL.  You’ll be sipping a glass thinking, “Swell, and I got at least another full glass to go.”  But, no, no you don’t.  The bottle is completely empty despite it’s great heft.  You’ll be stunned.  Dump it upside down searching for liquid.  But it ain’t there.  And all you’re left with is a heavy trophy of a bottle to shoot BBs at.

**Best reality show on TV and #2 ain’t even close!

Never have I religiously continued to watch a show I so detest as I have continued to watch the deplorable “Entourage.”  For whatever reason, every Sunday night at 10:30 I’m back in front of the TV cringing through twentysomething hard-to-endure minutes of lame plots, boring cardboard characters, excruciatingly mundane and unoriginal ideas, and trite dialogue.

I don’t even think Doug Ellin and his cast and writing staff are still trying.  Take last Sunday’s episode which was supposed to end with a moment of great pathos, when, in the final scene, dunderheaded charismaless “A-list” movie star Vincent Chase returns to his house alone, confused, and saddened that he has to spend the wee hours of the night with just his brain to keep him company.  (”Entourage” viewers lament this fact on a weekly basis.)

Who hasn’t been crushed by an overwhelming sense of loneliness and despair?  Everyone has.  And we viewers might feel for Vinnie if not just an hour earlier in his night, in the episode’s penultimate scene, he got to fuck a 10-out-of-10-hot one-night-stand in his brand new Escalade.  Oh, not to mention, Vinnie has just attended the premiere of his new soon-to-be-both-critically-and-commercially-successful movie, Martin Scorsese’s “The Great Gatsby” retelling, in which he stars.  (Though it’s hard to imagine what role the effete and dull Vincent could possibly be fit to play.  My bet’s on Daisy Buchanan.)  And, have we mentioned that the house he’s alone in is a massive double-digit bedroomed mansion in the Hollywood Hills?!  Oh, whoa is me, Vinnie Chase!

And that demonstrates the exact problem with “Entourage.”  Its storytelling lacks any sort of tension, any sort of drama, any sort of human problems, which are the basis for truly good comedy.  Each week new-but-similar plot pivot points are brought up and within minutes they are solved and Vinnie and the boys go back to living a life of mind-numbing leisure.  Which would be perfectly fine if it was actually enjoyable to watch.  Which it’s not.

It’s always been hard to buy Vincent Chase as a huge movie star and the “best young actor of his generation” because, well, the actor that plays him, Adrien Grenier, is neither handsome enough, talented enough, or interesting enough to be anything more than a pay cable semi-star which ipso facto means he is not a “Vincent Chase.”  Most of the other acting, though, is admittedly passable.  Jerry Ferrara as Turtle is one-note but enjoyable enough, perhaps the only lovable character still on the show.  Kevin Dillon as Johnny Drama used to be a highlight of each episode with a good self-deprecatingly inward zinger or two toward his own lackluster career but now he’s become just a pathetic old manchild more concerned with making fun of who good buddy “E” is or is not fucking.  (In one of the lamest running plot gags in “Entourage” history, and that’s saying something, Drama has become obsessed with razzing E for maybe still having feelings for former flame Sloan as played by Emmanuelle Chriqui.  I don’t know about you, but I usually goof on my friends that are fucking one of the hottest women since the invention of breasts and vaginas.)  Speaking of E, Kevin Connelly seems to have developed some disease which is causing him to shrink at a rather alarming rate.  Always lilliputian, this season Connelly has become downright pocket-size, looking like some crows-feet-eyed ventriloquist dummy who gets to hang out with a movie star and fuck women that could tomahawk dunk on his wee head.  (Hmmm…that gives me an idea for a new pilot.)  I do actually like Connelly and think he is a skilled enough actor but Ellin does him no favors with the dialogue he places into his tiny mouth.  You can almost see Connelly cringing as he delivers feeble line after feeble line.  I feel bad for him.  Even Jeremy Piven as agent Ari Gold has become downright boring, though he’s such a good actor and such a better character than everyone else that by comparison he seems to be operating on an incredibly elevated comedic stratosphere.

Lame plots, boring cardboard characters, excruciatingly mundane and unoriginal ideas, and trite dialogue.  You might say, “Entourage” isn’t supposed to be good, it’s junk food for the brain.  Fair enough, but it’s not even good junk food.  It’s not Sour Patch Kids but Brand X Sour Gooeys.  I could stomach the show in its first few seasons when it was actually presenting a world anyone of us would want to be a part of:  lots of fast rides, hard parties, and bare breasts.  But these ennui-riddled characters don’t do any of these things any more and it’s actually alarming how few bare breasts now appear on the show per week.  You get as much out of the “On next week’s ‘Entourage’” thirty-second teaser as you do watching a full episode.

If you want some actually enjoyable comedy junk food for the brain to replace “Entourage,” might I suggest Showtime’s “Californication,” now through two seasons.  While no masterpiece and perhaps not even a great or even very good show, it is an incredibly enjoyable show and an eminently digestible one.  The story of a famous New York novelist turned Hollywood fuckup, “Californication” revels in presenting onscreen similiar Los Angeleno pleasures as “Entourage,” laziness, driving fast cars around all day with no purpose, drinking, drug use, partying, and promiscuous sex, but it is all shown in such a more interesting and realistic way.  Like “Entourage” the show isn’t much about “anything” but it has sharp dialogue, funny and original situations, three-dimensional characters, the effortless charm and comedic chops of David Duchovny who is truly a great actor, and a Warren Zevon-infused soundtrack.  If you start this show on DVD or OnDemand you will burn through it quickly.  You won’t be talking about it or obsessed with it by any means by the time it’s over, and aside from Duchovny’s work you will have probably forgotten it within weeks if not months, but while watching it you will be highly entertained.

Going back to the late great Warren Zevon, his best song is fittingly “The French Inhaler,” a scathing critique of Hollywood dreams gone awry.  An all-time favorite track of mine, listening to the lyrics I can’t help but think the crummy “Entourage” would do good to take its cues from the brilliant song to realize how truly worthless it is.  How soon it will be just another piece of shit in television history if it doesn’t have a little course correction.  Were he not dead Zevon could have easily been talking about “Entourage” when he wrote this great piece of poetry.

How’re you going to make your way in the world, woman
When you weren’t cut out for working
When your fingers are slender and frail
How’re you going to get around
In this sleazy bedroom town
If you don’t put yourself up for sale

Where will you go with your scarves and your miracles
Who’s gonna know who you are
Drugs and wine and flattering light
You must try it again till you get it right
Maybe you’ll end up with someone different every night

All these people with no home to go home to
They’d all like to spend the night with you
Maybe I would, too

But tell me
How’re you going to make your way in the world, woman
When you weren’t cut out for working
And you just can’t concentrate
And you always show up late

You said you were an actress
Yes, I believe you are
I thought you’d be a star
So I drank up all the money,
Yes, I drank up all the money,
With these phonies in this Hollywood bar,
These friends of mine in this Hollywood bar

Loneliness and frustration
We both came down with an acute case
And when the lights came up at two
I caught a glimpse of you
And your face looked like something
Death brought with him in his suitcase

Your pretty face
It looked so wasted
Another pretty face
Devastated
The French Inhaler
He stamped and mailed her
“So long, Norman”
She said, “So long, Norman”

I think I’m done with “Entourage.”  As the failed actress said to her pimp in “The French Inhaler”:

“So long, Norman.”

Pannepot (2006)

10% ABV bottled

I had the great fortune to try my first ever De Struise beers over the weekend, not coincidentally their two most famed creations, both mainstays on Beer Advocate’s Top 100 list.  First up, the supposed #43 beer in the world, Pannepot.  There is so much going on with this beer, it is truly as complex as they come.  Like a mix between a quad and a stout, maybe even a strong ale, it’s really hard to even accurately categorize it.  A potent aroma you can smell across the room, packed with tastes of coffee, bourbon, and vanilla along with subtle hints of candi, molasses, cookies, caramel, sugar, and spice and everything nice.  I’m not sure if this beer is oaked or not, but it sure tastes like it.  I can’t believe how much flavor is packed into this thing.  It reminded me of a glorious Rochefort 10 with a whole buncha spices mixed in.  A true highlight of my beer-drinking year!  Seek out at all costs.

A+

Black Albert

13% ABV bottled

Next up I had De Struise’s stout Black Albert which teeters at the bottom of the BA Top 100.  I found Black Albert a little too burnt, bitter, and dull for my liking.  A muted coffee flavor, the smell was more enjoyable than the taste.  Somewhat thin and quite drinkable for the highfalutin ABV, I just didn’t love it, yet I still had to admit it was good and well-crafted.  It just made me wish I was still drinking Pannepot.

A-

13% ABV bottled

My Drinking Life

Author’s note:  Inspired by a recent reading of Pete Hamil’s exquisite classic “A Drinking Life,” I decided to write my own imbibing bio.

I remember once when I was fifteen or so I walked into the living room and saw my dad drinking a beer while watching TV.  It was a Corona.  “What the fuck are you doing, dad?”  We cursed heavily and with great aplomb in my family, one of the few things my parents were highly laissez faire on.

“I’m having a beer, what?”

What?  What?!  I had never seen my dad have a single sip of alcoholic in his life.  And now all of the sudden he thinks he’s Homer Simpson, able to just come home from work, pop a beer, and veg out in front of the boob tube?  Where did this mystery bottle of beer even come from?!  He surely didn’t go to the store and buy it.  He wouldn’t even know how to do such a thing!

Suffice to say, alcohol did not really play a part in my parents’ or my life as a youth.  No, my parents weren’t teetotalers.  Alcohol just seemed to not interest them in the same way, say, American politics or CBS’s primetime lineup simply doesn’t interest me.*

Thusly, in high school I hardly drank at all which makes you think I must have been one of three things:

1.  A huge nerd

2.  A huge health nut.

3.  A huge religious freak

EH!  Wrong.  I certainly wasn’t Big Man on Campus Jock King Sirfucksalot or anything but I was quite popular, even the class president one year, though we all tend to overrate how high our approval ratings were at a younger age.  Likewise, though I played various sports year-round, my diet pretty much consisted of Taco Bell, McDonald’s, chain pizza, and the like.  I wasn’t exactly a foodie just yet.  And, even before my face necessitated shaving, I already was a virulent atheist amongst a sea of kids that thumped the bible, studied the bible, and quoted the bible on the back page of your yearbook (”Aaron, Have a terrific summer but never forget Proverbs 10:5 ‘He who gathers crops in summer is a wise son, but he who sleeps during harvest is a disgraceful son.’”)  Not to mention, even if I wasn’t an atheist I was a Jew and we’re allowed to drink religiously from like age 5 on.**  Alas, the Manischewitz always made me start snoozing during the latter part of shul.

I never snuck off into the woods to drink, I never stole a nip of some uncle’s vodka and refilled the bottle with water, I never paid an older kid to get me a six pack from 7-11.  In 12th grade I got busted by the police for simply being at a party where underage people such as myself were drinking.  I’d only just arrived and had only had a single sip of cheap keg beer.  The schnook of an Oklahoma City cop tried to emasculate everyone by forcing those under eighteen years of age to call their parents on speaker phone in front of the entire party to tell them, “Mommy, daddy, Officer Jeffries has just busted an alcohol drinking party I was attending and you need to come pick me up lest I get a ticket from this kindly man.”  Pretty sure he broke protocol for what was a most cruel and unusual punishment.

Those eighteen or older like me didn’t have to call our parents but we were cited with a hefty Minor in Possession ticket and an ensuing court date.  The whole ride home after having picked me up, my histrionic mother cried and shrieked, “Now you’ll never get to go to college!”  “But mom, I’ve already been accepted.”  “Syracuse will find out and they’ll take your scholarships away!  They’ll throw you out of school!  You’ll have to go to some shitty community college!  Your future is ruined you fucking idiot!”  Eventually my court case was thrown out, my ticket was revoked, I was allowed to attend and even matriculate at Syracuse, and that still, amazingly, as far as I can recall, remains my only brush with the law.  Alcohol related brush that is.  Purely alcohol related brush that is.

At the aforementioned college, Syracuse, I drank just like everyone else, nothing special, nothing to brag about.  Thrown into a collegial melting pot with kids from major cities such as New York, LA, Chicago, and Miami, and, more significantly, kids from ramshackle blue-collar drinking towns such as Scranton, Pittsburgh, Utica, a kid from Oklahoma quickly realized how much of a bumpkin, how much of a drinking neophyte he truly was.  Many of these kids had not only been inside bars, they were regulars at bars already.  They didn’t just drink whatever they could score, they actually had favorite beers and liquors.  Admittedly, in retrospect, their favorites were shitty, but being that I only knew about those beers that had major network commercials and those liquors that had full-page ads in Sports Illustrated, I was duly impressed.

I shouldn’t have been.  What we, what everyone drank, in college was foul.  Kegs of shit like Milwaukee’s Best (”Beast”), cans of Natty and Genny Light, bottles of Labatt if we were splurging.  Plastic handles of Popov, airline bottles of Seagram’s 7 we’d stolen from whomever, fifths of Bacardi if we were super lucky.  Always mixed with a potent punch or a generic supermarket cola to make the vile liquor even less detectable.  We drank worse than many local bums.

By now I loved getting drunk, but I didn’t love drinking.  It was a means to an end.  I sucked it up for that first hour or so just to get to the ultimate euphoric feeling.  I eventually switched to potent Long Island Iced Teas just to ameliorate and expedite the process, and for economy’s sake (they were only $5 a pint at our favorite bar.)

I loved getting drunk, but I couldn’t help thinking:

This can’t be it.

This can’t be why everyone drinks.

There has to be more to this.

For thousands upon thousands of years, man has drunk, and man has considered beer and liquor the nectar of the God’s.  And I’m not talking about just the morons over the centuries, the beerbellies, the buffoons, the dummkopfs, the rubes throughout history.  No, I’m talking about truly smart people:  Pliny the Elder, US Grant, Alfred Hitchcock, Edgar Allen Poe, Dorothy Parker, Hemingway, Ben Franklin, and Winston Churchill.  There was just no fucking way that these great people were praising something as horrific as Molson Ice from a tallboy can.

Yet, I seemed to be the only person my age questioning things.  The only person around having an existential drinking crisis.  Everyone else was perfectly content with sucking down vile pisswater so long as it eventually got them shit-canned.

There had to be more.  And I was going to discover it.  I was determined!

I was still more a liquor than a beer guy back at the turn of this millennium and now, while prebarring back in my college hovel with my friends, I’d get on the dial-up internet and go to cocktail websites, find one or two drinks that sounded interesting, that had a cool name, and then order them that very night.

I’m not proud to admit that I became the kind of twenty-two-year-old jackass who went to packed college bars on a Thursday night and would order a round of drinks for his friends like this:

“Yeah, could I get two of the $4 Coors pitchers for my friends, and for me…a Rusty Nail.”

To which, inevitably, a fellow classmate of mine, forced to tend bar to earn enough for the following semester, just trying to get through the night, maybe get a sexy female patron’s number, hopefully not have to clean up too much bathroom vomit, would incredulously reply:  “What the fuck’s a Rusty Nail?”

Luckily I’d memorized all the drinks I wished to try and I could proudly say, “Why that’s three parts Scotch and one part Drambuie.  Serve over ice in a rocks glass.  Garnish with a lemon twist.”

“Uh…yeah…I don’t think I know how to make that.  I can pretty much only make ‘blanks’ and ‘blanks’ where both ingredients are named in the name or shots that slutty women drink to justify their promiscuous behavior.”

He’d turn over his shoulder to the “senior” bartender, some drop-out from our very college who was now twenty-five and still bartending to fund his drug and fucking young sorority girls habit, and call out, “Eh, Scotty?  We got Drambuie?”

“Dram–what?”

“–buie?”

“Buoy?  Like in the water?

“Drambuie?”

“Oh, yeah, I think I’ve seen a bottle of that stuff.”

And ten minutes later a dust-caked bottle of Drambuie would surface, the cap soldered onto the bottle by the sticky liquid and the fact that it hadn’t been twisted off in years, since the last time some wannabe had taken a gamble on it, and then the poor bartender, who by now had missed dozens of drink orders and ensuing tips, who had caused a line of peeved dipsomaniacs to congregate at the bar, would try his damnedest to make me a Rusty Nail.  And it would inevitably be overly heavy on the booze component because we were college kids and we made our drinks strong and, you know, who wouldn’t prefer more liquor in a drink than mixer?  Only a fool.

I feel bad about these years, this behavior of mine.  And most of the drinks I forced these poor bartenders to make were fucking horrendous.  Old man drinks from the roaring 20s when I guess people had more tolerance for absurd recipes that featured components like milk, honey, and even onions.  Sure, I discovered a great cocktail or two that I still throw back on occasion to this very day–a Manhattan, an Old-Fashioned, even a simple gin and tonic–but I mainly drank a lot of overpriced-for-a-college-kid and poorly-mixed-by-a-college-kid cocktails.

I was trying, I was embarrassing myself, and my drinking life was most certainly not improving.  Nor was my sex life as no twenty-one-year-old dame really wants to fuck the weirdo drinking a Sidecar in a bar loudly playing Nelly’s “Ride Wit Me.”  And I was getting drunker quicker than all my friends as I matched their watery pitchers of lite beer with Scotch and bourbon based drinks.

My first year out of college I moved to Hoboken, a helluva drinking town, anecdotally called the “per capita bar capital of America,” “more bars per block than any place else!” locals will tell you, but if you’ve ever done even a modicum of traveling in this country you’ll quickly learn there’s about a dozen places in America that make these same ludicrous and uncomfirmable claims (Austin, TX; Athens, OH; Lacrosse, WI; Newport, RI; Anchorage, AK; to name a few.)

In Hoboken I was fortunate enough to live with two friends that greatly shaped my drinking career.  One, an inveterate drunkard from Scranton taught me about manly bar culture.  How to get the bartender’s attention, how to order a drink, how to tip on a free round, how to drink a Guinness, how to throw back Irish whiskey, and how not to get 86ed for inappropriate behaviors.  Seemingly simple things to know now, sure, but so is kissing, yet everyone sucks at that the first times they try.  You have to learn these things somewhere.  The other friend, a well-heeled white boy from Cincinnati, Kevin, taught me about the finer vices in life.  Raised by a country club epicurean father, he knew about good Scotch, cigars, and vittles by the time he graduated from high school.  Not to mention, he’d spent a summer of college actually working in Belgium.  He told me that this was the greatest beer producing country in the world, first introducing me to the more ubiquitous Belgian fare:  Leffe, Hoegaarden, Chimay, and Duval.  All these beers absolutely fucking floored me.  Yes!  I was finally drinking, and getting drunk!, on good stuff.  My dreams were becoming reality.

Now, on Friday and Saturday nights, in the early evening, while our other friends were throwing back cheap pitchers at some dive, Kevin and I would go to Belgian bars like the wonderful Markt–then in the Meatpacking District–where we’d casually and coolly sit at the relaxed bar like two proper gents.  Enjoying delicious Belgian brews from their appropriately logoed and designed glasses–a revelation!–amongst Markt’s typical crowd of golddiggers and men that dress like celebrities (fedoras, sunglasses indoors, sneakers with pinstriped suit pants) but aren’t really celebrities (musicians without gigs, scenesters, “artists”).  Of course by drink four we were back down the street at the late, great Village Idiot where we would recklessly drink pitchers of Miller High Life, vomit onto the sawdust covered floor, try to find a woman sans STDs, and misplace our memories.  Yeah, real proper gents.

I still assumed American beer was shit, “fucking close to water” as they say, I mean it’s all but axiomatic isn’t it?, but this final barrier would change sometime later that year on my first ever visit to the glorious Ginger Man.  Strolling the garbage covered, urine soaked streets of the W. 30s while on a day date, looking for something to do, looking for clean air to breath, I recalled having read about this brilliant nearby bar with a gobsmackingly prodigious draught list.

I would later, upon becoming a regular, learn that this huge place is usually packed during happy hour and on evenings, but on this one particular Saturday afternoon it was completely empty. Me and my date were the only customers. (And, yes, I do take dates to dark bars in the middle of a beautiful weekend day. What, like I’m gonna go hold hands at a museum, Christ.)  The sole bartender on that first day of attendance was bored out of her wits. She needed to find some way to liven things up. You know how Baskin-Robbins lets you sample some of their 31 flavors with those little pink plastic spoons? Well, on this Saturday afternoon, the bartender let me sample many of the Ginger Man’s seemingly hundreds of craft beer draught offerings.

One tap that day immediately caught my eye: Arrogant Bastard. What a name! It was exactly what I thought I was at the time (I was actually just a Big Douchebag but that isn’t a great name for a beer). Arrogant Bastard’s gargoyle logo was so freaking cool too. Oh, and the taste! It was an eye-opening experience, like losing my virginity. I didn’t know beer could smell so good, look so good, and taste so fucking good.

Instantly, on the drunken spot, I declared Arrogant Bastard my favorite beer in the world. Believe me, it didn’t have that stiff of competition back then.  By the sober next day, after kicking the girl out of bed, I was on the Stone brewery website reading all I could about my new favorite brew. I even ordered an Arrogant Bastard t-shirt and pint glass. I wore my shirt proudly and often that ensuing year and it garnered much attention and chuckles, acting as a great conversation piece. I think most people assumed it was one of those faux-vintage pseudo-hip fake company t-shirts you get at Urban Outfitters.

“Nope, it’s a real beer,” I’d tell them, “It’s my FAVORITE beer.”

Wow. I thought I was so freaking cool for having such an “obscure” non-macro as my favorite brew. Back then it was pretty hard to find Arrogant Bastard. Only a few bars had it on tap and only a specialty store or two in the NYC area had it bottled. Now, of course, it’s one of the most ubiquitous craft beers around.  One I rarely even have much any more because I’ve come to take it so much for granted.  But, the few times per year I do have it, it brings back nostalgic memories much like it must have done when Proust bit into his madeleine.  Simply tasting it makes me feel young and dumb again.  And you can’t beat that.

From that point forward, my life would never be the same.  I discovered Beeradvocate.com and their “Top Beers on Planet Earth” list, printing it out in a minuscule footnote-sized font so I could keep it as a handy reference in my wallet at all times.  Now, whenever I hit a beer store or nice bar I would discreetly pull out my list and see if they had anything on it.  They rarely did.  An Old Rasputin here, a Victory Storm King there, but those were few and far between.  Even as recent as 2004/2005 most of these “great” beers simply could not just be stumbled upon, you truly had to seek them out.  And I still had no clue where to look and the majority of my friends certainly didn’t want to assist me in my new found hobby.  They all still preferred drinking Miller Lite.  But my drinking was still improving and I was on my own discovering new craft breweries to love by the week.  Not just Stone but Victory and Dogfish Head, Rogue, Allagash, and of course local favorite Brooklyn Brewery.

And now here I am in 2009, often drinking many of the finest beers in the world.  Such as the great and faux-limited Dark Lord.  OK, it is fairly limited, something like 20,000 bottles made per year, and, of course, only available on one day per year (aproposly, Dark Lord Day.)  And, yes, I couldn’t get it any other way than in being lucky enough to know a great guy like The Captain who kindly procured a bottle for me.  So I am indeed eternally grateful to have it.  I am blessed in my beer-drinking life.

Back in the mid-2000s, really so recently, I would look at the BA Top 100 and fantasize about having any of the big dogs.  I was near certain I would never, never, never get to even sniff any of the legendary bottles on that list from places like Russian River, Founders, and Three Floyds.  Where did you even go to get such oddities?!  Hell, as recent as 2007, probably the best, most highly-regarded beer I’d ever had was Stone’s Imperial Russian Stout.***  But now I get to try all the great stouts.

Dark Lord is a glass-staining black stout with a potent aroma of roasted malts, dark chocolate, coffee, and stinging booze.  Additional tastes of dark fruits with just a hint of candi sweetness.  Smooth mouthfeel, neither too carbonated, nor too syrupy.  Wonderful and meaty, a top ten stout in the world for sure.  I didn’t quite like it better than Darkness or Kate the Great, but when we’re getting into such rarefied air, it’s like splitting hairs now, isn’t it?

And my drinking life goes on…

A+

(I’d be curious to hear other beer bloggers’ (or simply drinkers’) “A Drinking Life,” either in the comments or your own blogs.  Go for it!  Let’s make this an internet sensation!!!!!!)

*What’s that great Jim Gaffigan joke:  “When you don’t drink, people always need to know why. They’re like, ‘You don’t drink? Why?’ This never happens with anything else. ‘You don’t use mayonnaise? Why? Are you addicted to mayonnaise? Is it OK if I use mayonnaise?’”

**Not to mention, according to Dr. Drew on a recent episode of The Adam Carolla Podcast, Jews can’t even become alcoholics.  Something wacky about our Semetic blood.  Nice!

***I currently count some 58 beers I’ve had on the Top 100 as of this second.

11.7% ABV on tap

No matter their ethnicity, race, intelligence, classiness, drunkenness, wealth, politics, ideals, or odor, I’m always willing to listen to an older man tell me a thing or too about love and sex.  The rare topics that advanced age always gives advanced wisdom too.  Usually.

I was drinking alone on an early evening at the Ginger Man, pre-barring at a bar if that’s possible, before meeting up with some macro-loving friends.  I had nearly fallen out of my chair the previous night when I had seen the rare Night Stalker first appear on Beer Menus and needed to score some before it got tapped.  (For the record NYC folks, I do believe Night Stalker should be around for at least a few more weeks, but I’d still advise hitting up the GM post-haste.)

One of the most buzzed-about beers in America right now, the Goose Island offering has had a meteoric rise up to the #33 beer in the world slot on Beer Advocate’s top 100.  (Then again, we are in the era of super-hyped (and sometimes over-hyped) beers that go straight from released to the top 100 list in a matter of days it seems.)  But, being that Goose Island Bourbon County Stout is one of my absolute favorite brews around, I was fiending to try this one.  You see, Night Stalker is essentially Bourbon County sans bourbon barreling.  Jet black and rich, so chocolaty and full of bold espresso goodness, this sucker makes Brooklyn’s awesome Intensified Coffee Stout taste like motherfucking decaf.  It’s easy to just think that Bourbon County Stout minus the boozy bourbon would make it far less complex and tasty, but truth be told, eliminating that bourbon actually allows many new flavors to shine through creating a just as complex stout.  Certainly not a “lesser” one by any means.  Night Stalker is more bitter than Bourbon County, “dry hop(ped) like madmen” says Goose Island, more chewy, and more spicy.  Alas, I will not go so far to call it as legendary as Bourbon County Stout but it is fantastic nonetheless.  And it may very well now be my favorite unbarreled stout. Is that possible?!  Brooklyn Black Chocolate, Avery Mephistopheles’, Dark Horizon, Lost Abbey Serpent’s, Kate the Great…yeah, I think it is very well amongst that esteemed class.

Lost in my own world, my nose inhaling the Night Stalker like I was a Hebrew anteater, slurping it down greedily, my romance was ruined by those few denizens in my vicinity.  Behind me, two yahoos in cheap Red Wings sweaters with thick yet ambiguous and unlocateable accents swigged Bud Light bottles and shouted at the screen as Marc-Andre Fluery let another cheap goal trickle in.  They were scaring, to my right, two Asian skanks seemingly having a pow-wow about whether becoming hookers during a recession was a savvy economic strategy.  And to my left, a wasted mustachioed harlequin in a sleeveless T harangued the bartender.

“Eh cutie.  ‘ow can youse possibly be oldanuff to bah-tend?!  Youse mustbe like…I dunno, justa kid…hey, when can I kiss yer palm?  Naw, not the palm, dat’s not what I meant.  Whatevah’s on da udder side of da palm, dat’s what I want to kiss, like a real gentleman.  While yer attit, couldja gimme a’nudder rum ‘n coke?  Dubba.”

The bartender put on her best face, working for no doubt a tip that would be culled from the lint covered coins in his Dickies.  “What rum would you like, sir?”

“Eh, howzabout Cap’n Morgan?  Naw, wait.  Make’it Bacaw-dee.  Naw, naw, Cap’n’s good.  Bacaw-dee.  Eh, Cap’n'll work.”

“Is that your final answer?”

I was getting annoyed with this edition of “Scumbag Millionaire” as I made some more nasal love to my snifter of splendid stout wondering why the great Ginger Man always attracts such non-craft-beer-loving miscreants.

“It ain’t ‘er palm I’s really wantta kiss.  Heh, heh, heh.  Eh guy, ain’t dey got duh hottest liddle numbahs in here?”

A forearm with a tattoo of Popeye with a tattoo on his own forearm needled me in my tenth rib.

“Uh, I suppose.”

There was really not a women in the joint worth getting in a tizzy over.

“Ya’ think that bah-tender’d fucka guy like me?  Naw, course’not.  Dat’s whatyer thinkin’ right?  Some ugly mook like me?”

He stared right at my face, dramatically pausing as if he was about to blow my mind.

“Well youse wrong.  Lemme tell you sumpin’ bout women.  D’ere all sluts.  Every last one of dem.  Even my ma’, god rest her soul.  My old man walked in on her suckin’ off da’ plumber.  Nudder story for anudder day my friend…”

I hoped that “nudder” day would never come for me as I listened to Popeye Guy’s romance tips.

1.  Get her wasted

“Foist of all, ya gotta get da chicks loaded.  Make’em match youse drink fer drink.  Look’at me.  Been drinkin’ since nine ay-em and you’d t’ink I’d just been sippin’ cola, right?  And if a girl’s wit me, she’d be messed up big time b’now.  D’ese gals wanna be sluts but when dey’re sober dey’s just fuckin’ bitches.  Getta cocktail or two in’dem and soon you’ll have your cock in’dem too.  Heh, poetic right?  Like champagne for my real pain…sham friends…how’da fuck dat clevah line go?”

2.  Be old and wise

“D’ese girls respeck a guy with age, wiz-dum.  I’m fiddy-two.  I know, I know, shocked’ya agin.  Prolly thought I was yer age.  Naw, when I was yer age, hant-some, vig-er-rus, I didn’t even need ta’go’ta bahs to pick up chicks.  Dey was just bangin’ down my door so dey could bang down wit me.  Ha, look at dat, I was poetic again.  I’m a real…uh…name a poet or something.  I’m a real Dr. Soooze.  What ‘as I sayin’?  Oh, yeah, young girls want to be with an old guy who knows what ‘e’s doin’ like me.”

3.  Act manly

“Butcha’ also gotta act like’a real man.  Ladies wanna feel like ladies and dey want a man dat’s a man.  I see all deese little sissies walkin’ around Man’at-ten nowadays.  I dunno whether dey’re gay’re straight but dey’re all fag’its if you ax me.  That ain’t no slur, and I ain’t na’ ‘omophobic or nuttin’.  I juss calls ‘em like I sees ‘em and dey’s a buncha fag’its.  Dey don’t make guys like me no more.  Real men.  Now you look alright.  Not tough or anyt’ing but not a fuckin’ pussy or nuttin’.  But compared ta’ these udder guys your age you’re fuckin’ John Wayne.  Even wit dat fag’it fancy beer in yer hand.”

4.  Pretend your rich

“But manliness ain’t enuff.  These sluts also like a guy with a little coin if ya’ know what I’m sayin’.  I’ma classy guy, ya’ know, and I like to treat my ladies well so I’ll take’em ta nice places, chop’ouses, planning on pickin’ up da’ bill.  But da’ second a girl ack-shully axes me to buy ‘er sumpin’, I’m like, ‘Buy youse sumpin’?!, why don’tchoo suck on my cock?’  Naw, that doesn’t always work but it has before a few times.  I still had to buy dinner though.”

5.  Be great in bed

“Now dis is da most impor-ent point, my friend.  More important den any udder nugget’a wiz-dum I’s given you tonight:  Fuck’er like she ain’t done nevah been fucked before.  You make’a bitch cum and she’ll never leave ya’ side.  Believe me.  Truth be told, I can’t fuck deese bitches one-hundert percent because I’m so good that they’ll stalk me and my pecker forevah.  So I usually just fuck’em at like…say…sixty percent first few times.  Let her know I have da’ tools, but I choose to use them at my discretion.  Dat way, she’s in my control forevah.”

By now I was done with my slow-sipping Night Stalker and had to get going to meet up with my friends.  I thanked the man for his swell advice and he thanked me for listening by picking up my pint.  As I left he winked at me and nodded at the cute bartender with her back to us–it was time for the “expert” to go in for the solo kill.

Unfortunately, I didn’t follow any of Popeye Guy’s advice that night and I went to bed alone at 5 AM.

Coincidence?

I think not!

A+

Deschutes The Abyss (2008)

11% ABV bottled

vs.

Avery The Czar

11.03% ABV bottled

vs.

The Lost Abbey Serpent’s Stout

10.5% ABV bottled

When you’re a besotted loner, it’s virtually impossible to do blind taste tests.  What are you going to do?  Have your cat pour you some beers and mix them up?  Visiting friends in DC over the weekend, I decided to bring along a bottle of the legendary and possibly highest regarded stout in the world, The Abyss, sent to me by San Diego legend Jesse the Hutt to share with my pals.  And when I noticed that my friend Derek had bottles of similarly ABV’ed and not-as-well-but-still-well-regarded The Czar Imperial Stout and Serpent’s Stout, I thought it might be fun to do a little blind taste test.

I always hate, in a way, giving universally regarded beers A pluses because I often wonder if I’m reviewing the beer or the esteem the label already has.  It’s almost impossible to separate the two unless you do it blindly.  It’s why symphony tryouts nowadays are conducted behind curtains.  No matter how hard they tried, no matter how non-biased they thought they could be, judges couldn’t stop themselves from down grading certain minorities, unwittingly thinking it impossible they could play as well as others.

We had Derek’s kindly girlfriend distribute the glasses and here were my findings.

Mystery Beer A

I thought this beer had a great smell, a very complex nose which reminded me of the splendid Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout.  Unfortunately, the taste was much simpler, nothing like that A+ offering.  A creamy, smooth beer with bold chocolate and espresso flavors and a fairly sweet taste bordering on cloying.  A very drinkable, frequent-tippling stout, though no masterpiece.

A-

Mystery Beer B

An incredibly smooth nose that drove through my nostrils and into my brain.  Delicious!  A kind mouthfeel with strong tastes of burnt coffee, molasses, black licorice, and even a little vanilla.   Absolutely wonderful and I would drink it every single day of the year but it did not completely knock my socks off.

A

Mystery Beer C

This one was right up my alley.  Everything I want an imperial stout to be.  Incredibly boozy like some stout/quadruple sort of hybrid, but smooth as silk.  Tickles every single inch of your pharynx and larynx before plummeting into your belly and filtering through your liver and making you dance around the room with joy.  What a pleasure to drink.  A rich chocolate sweetness perfectly balanced with roasted coffee, a burning rumminess, oodles of dark fruits, and a tad hops bitterness.  Smooth, outstanding, a masterpiece.  Cannot say enough about this surely already legendary beer.

A+

Though I liked them all, I didn’t really think it was close, Mystery Beer C won in a blowout on my scorecard.  In fact, it won on 5 out of 5 taste testing friends’ scorecards, all 5 thinking it a landslide.

Beer C had to be the gorgeous wax-dipped bottle of The Abyss, right?

Wrong.

We were shocked when Derek’s girlfriend revealed the answers…

Mystery Beer A:  The Czar (A-)*

Mystery Beer B:  The Abyss (A)

Mystery Beer C:  Serpent’s Stout (A+)

NO!

This can’t be possible.  With newfound knowledge of what each beer was, we tried them again, and still had to agree that the handsomely corked-and-caged Serpent’s Stout was superior to them all.

The next day, we ran into Tomme Arthur at Savor and told him of our findings.  He gave us a stern eye-bulging and said, “Shhh…keep it down, don’t let any one know.”  A cocky smirk fell over his face, like he was proud of the little secret that only he and a few others know, that his imperial stout is better than maybe the most highly-regarded stout in the world.

*Unfortunately not as great as their masterpiece Mephistopheles’ Stout.