Ah finally a beer that is older than your girlfriend. Let’s mix it up a bit with a rare gem from earlier days: Triple Bock. Ok, transport yourself back to 1995 for a moment, you’re listening to Spin Doctors, buying Beyond Baggy Jeans at Millers Outpost- shit is going pretty well right? Well not for craft beer. Unless adjunct lagers got you all half mast, craft beer was not as it is today. This beer was an innovative testament to show the world what beer COULD BE. These days, it is more a testament that COULD does not always mean SHOULD. Let’s hit on this geriatric gem in today’s Elder Abuse review.

Boston Beer Company (Samuel Adams)
Massachusetts, United States
American Strong Ale | 17.50% ABV

A: This beer comes in a weird little 7.5oz cobalt bottle, but don’t worry, you aren’t getting ripped off, you wont want much more than 2 ounces of this beast. So it pours our like spent canola oil with potato skin burned fragment sludge bobbing gracefully in the wake. This is what Lake Tahoe is gonna look like in the year 2031. There is a murky sludge aspect to it with teenage chunks of malty char chunks suspended in the medium. Spoiler alert: there is no carbonation. This beer looks like bottled felch.

S: The smell is like the tire aisle at Costco. Then you get this deep cigar muskiness from the Golden Age that is like rummaging through old dresses at Good Will. Next comes a putrid wave of Kikoman soy sauce olfactory rape. It is like your nose is doing lines of Dragon Roll. Finally a sickening sweetness like asian candies where you don’t know exactly what it is, but you’re afraid because you’re pretty sure there’s durian or shellfish in there.

T: Oh man, this is where they really slam your cock in a car door. This initially tastes like pencil graphite, burnt gristle, and Skoal dip cup spit. You get a lingering sweetness and a chocolate presence that pushes its hand to the glass but the death sentence is clear. There’s aspects of Lowe’s peat and gardening dirt, pennies, and tonguing an open coldsore that imparts an iron rich maltiness. Finally the oxidation sets in and you get this dryness that tastes like used breakdancer cardboard and Filipino sweat.

M: The mouthfeel slops and sways like the contents of a lava lamp but the solution rides upon a hot layer of booze everywhere it goes. It is like Iceman, how he used to tear ass on that ice bridge, except this bridge is made of composted solids, tar, and the blood of Owlbears. While I was finishing my final refreshing sips, I got a huge chunk of black malt on my tongue, which usually means that an angel just got its wings. I pressed it between my fingers and it looked like I just got booked by LAPD. Which is so appropriate because what apt foreshadowing for a beer that will get you really hammered and make you feel like you just went down on a Cal Trans worker?

D: This beer could not be less drinkable if it were a gas. This plays an important part in beer history but, the sheer importance as an extreme beer does not a good ale make. I am glad to have tried it but it makes me longingly look at the state of today’s beer market with love. One great use for this beer would be to give it to your kids at age 11 and be like “YOU WANT BEER! THIS IS BEER! NOW FINISH THE WHOLE THING AND LOVE IT.” Scare them straight before they turn into a mesomorphic asshole like me.

Narrative: Walter Murkmire was a regular fixture in the Boston Common. He trudged covered in muck and melted tar and people avoided their gaze if only to avoid thinking how someone became so caked in the dregs of society. “DONT FORGET TO ROTATE THEM TIRES!” he would scream at insouciant pigeons in the early morning with petulant refuse dripping off of cloak. Some Boston fables said that he used to work at the Boston Tire Company and lost it when they took his Z rated patent from him. Now like an urban Lazarus, he found the most fragrant and odious piles to rise from, each day, like a putrid trash phoenix. “1995! The tires toll! Not for you, but for US ALL!” he called menacingly to a disintered hot dog vendor. How was a guy supposed to earn a living with a local Baron haunting the park smelling like burnt hair and indian food? A 17 year old boy looked on across the park and caught his penetrating gaze. Murkmire produced a piece of filthy California Roll and smiled a knowing grin. His lineage was secure in this lad, drawn from the mire in 1995, but the clinic would never admit such a thing.