Smog City has been laying low in those southbay weeds, a slow simmer engaged in between Toyota factories and plastic manufacturers waiting to snipe its next unsuspecting LA consumers. Their releases are erratic and seem to fly out of nowhere like the resonant POP of microwave kernels.  By the time you realize what has happened, all 250 bottles of Black Currant saison are gone and your chest is wet.

This time around I figured I would give the midwest and Florida a heads up so they could properly ruin a release for all of the Los Angeles locals.

http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2498069

Tomorrow they are releasing 1pp bottles of Cuddlebug, Snugglebug, and Chinooks and Crannies. I think there’s like 100 bottles of the latter, so have fun with that.  A page straight from the Monkish playbook.  So fuck it, let’s look at these bad bangers:

So they have a new barrel space, two actually, one for strong beers another wilds offsite.  I don’t know what they are aging in that Craftsman but the metallic notes are gonna be ultra legit.

So tomorrow they are selling 150 bottles of “Chinooks and Crannies” which is a puntastic reference to the fact that this is the Cuddle base beer with cranberries and dry hopped with Chinook. The nose on this isn’t a hop bomb and oddly goes more of a cantaloupe and strawberry for some reason, from the cranberry to the tropical this is forged as a result. The mouthfeel is dryyyyyy but never so acidic that it makes hurtpockets of HSV sores exploding along the peripheries.  Not so much as a cankerbug. If you had Funk Factory Scarlett Letter, you will know what you are in for, long tannic cranberry presence that at times reminds me of rhubarb and maraschino cherry.  This is nothing like Cascade Cranberry if that was lingering in your mind.  You can drill the massive 500ml bottle to yourself while watching the bachelor and not even feel bad about yourself for the beer, at least.  This is a very solid variant in the bug family, if not in name.

This though, holy shit. Snugglebug is not fucking around and does a ribbon dance floor routine of raspberry, boysenberry, and a jammy blackberry sort of panache that would make even a military father proud of his effeminate son. If you had Nocturn and mixed it with Arterial Robeycite, you’d get this deft dancer, poised on the balls of its bone dry frame. This is far from the preserves presented in the New Glarus world and this is certainly a “metabolized” fruit beer in that it presents the blossoms and decimated husks of the produce skins in lieu of straight jelly. If you took something like Blackberry bu, refined the mouthfeel, gave it a lingering minerality to the swallow and reduced the acidity, you’d get this. The drag along the gumline is a 4th grade sick day of bingeing Squeezits and fruit by the foot, quintessentially fruit in lieu of actual fruit consumption.

Oh also the new Snugglebug is dank as fuqqq. I didn’t need to really deliver more exposition about that stone fruit ratchet do i?

Suffice it to say, the b3 is back to the b1 levels, not that b2 was somehow deficient. I ain’t sayin its back or nothin because that implies that its back from somethin, if its back then it’s a tick you owe it:

So there you go. People in SoCal keep asking me to ease up on Highland Park, throw a tarp over Monkish, not say shit about Smog City because this site has the carrion touch and rends a plague of rapacious shitlords upon the land like stretchmarked mongol invaders.

The problem with this form of neckbeard germ warfare is that I do not possess the antidote, only the destructive capacity.  Only when it is ruined for every region will we all become whole, the dystopian landscape stretching on for horizons, brewing bandits in hot contest for sparge water throughout.  This is our future and secondary values will deliver the slow death that it seeks.  So go grab your California proxy whipping boy, the one you send faded bottles of DAISY CUTTER to as a gracious THANKS YOU FRIEND, tell him to fire up the Corolla and get his ass in line once again for your capricious desires.