Somehow I have gone 4 batches without ticking bdp.

Slipping so hard. Given the fact that the SP grisette is secretly one of their finest offerings I am actually almost more stoked to get Pays’ed

This is amazing. Next step: Cable Car Krieky Temples.

Your move Toronado.

Photo credit: Tyler Baker.

I am not shitting you up the dick with this one, someone took the time to make this.  This is an actual show that pushes the cringeworthiness beyond BREWDOGS into a post-Dark Horse realm of beerTV embarassment:

Before you ask, no, this is not an ironic DDB parody.  That is an actual trailer for an actual show.

So the premise, so far as I can glean from the MODERN AHABS website is that a crew of people go to ultra rare beer releases and then…purchase a beer…at retail.

You know those mega-whales that everyone is always talking about, the super limited/tens of thousand of bottle runs, that barely see distro to many many states across the entire nation?  Well dream no longer, the mystery of these massive cetacean delights can now swim in pods directly to your eyes.

If it were just a shitty show, then fine, put it on HGTV, and I can move on with my life.  I am still waiting for VH1’s I LOVE MONEY to release a criterion collection Blu-Ray, so I am not being some bookish snob about shows that make you pinch the bridge of your nose.  This show compels sighs because it degrades beer culture in the way that REAL HOUSEWIVES sets women back to the Gilded Age.  The show is unresearched and portrays pursuing these libations as 1) something praiseworthy and 2) fails to authentically demonstrate rare beer, its consumers, or any of the actually hilarious non-ironic aspects of ex-bando beer recluse pathology.

The production value of this show is like if you handed me a GH4 and told me to expose the secret underworld of Frisbee Golf.  I am sure that would be an entertaining show for some people, but here’s the thing: I KNOW FUCK ALL ABOUT FRISBEE GOLF.  I want to see a profound self-realization about the futility of a hobby that has legitimately degraded into MyFirstStock portfolio.  This is some Charlie Papazian pangloss take on a subcultrue that is currently entering an I AM LEGEND phase of ale-fueled brutality.

I posit that the best way to watch these non-ironic shows, is to treat them like a Christopher Guest mockumentary.  I can only hope that someone makes an intentionally hilarious iteration of this concept, but I cannot be bothered to do so at this time.

OH SHIT SPEAKING OF BLATANTLY SELLING OUT AND SUBVERTING THE BEER WORLD BUY THIS FUCKING SHIRT THEY ARE ALMOST GONE IMPRESS YOUR CADRE OF TABLETOP GAMING FRIENDS:

The “authenticity” of American wares is contantly impugned when cast under the examining lens of their Belgian counterparts.  No sooner than someone begins to extol the virtues of Duck Duck Gooze, they are met with the reverberating refrain that “LOL YA BUT REGULAR 3F GUEUEZE BETTER AN EAASIER TO MAKE HAVE URS!”

It’s the mandible grinding equivalent of PARAARABOALA standard bearers, making blanket statements about shit they  1) either have never had, or 2) have set out intentionally to fell new idols to bolster the old.  The most frustrating part is, the sentiment that Belgian beers are superior is USUALLY correct.  This is a synthesis of both the multitude of one dimensional lacto-forward American wilds, and the pedigree of bottles to which they are being compared.  BUT WHAT IF YOU MADE THE FIGHT FAIR: TAKE THE BEST FROM BOTH REALMS AND MAKE THEM GROPE AND GYRATE AGAINST EACH OTHER BLIND DARKNESS?

DDB set out to do just that, assemble some of the most lauded examples from each side of the globe and let them have the UFC 200 on full musty steroids. At the outset I am sure I will hear absolutely vapid objections from both sides with innumerable “LOL POVERTY TASTING NO BRABANTIAE? WER DAFUQ IS BEE KEEPER” or whatever else.  Regardless of your OCD compulsions, it would be difficult to nonironically maintain that this list fails to capture some of the best from both sides of this dispute:

Belgian Contenders:

2005 Brouscella Grand Cru

2011 Geuze Mariage Parfait

2012 Cuvee du Saint Gilloise

2012 Cantillon Classic Gueuze

2010 Cantillon 100% Bio

Drie Fonteinen Armand and Tomme

American Shasta Deviants:

Broken Truck 1

Broken Truck 2

Duck Duck Gooze

Cable Car 2013

Obviously we omitted fruited lambic and pLambics, gooze or die. Sure we could have included innumerable allagash coolship batches or whateverthefuck else.  I get it.  De Kam, sure, Zomer, fine, tweet me your complaints so I can assemble a ZFG list.  Let’s get to the results.

Tasting Order:

1. Cable Car 2013
2. Broken truck 2
3. 2012 Cantillon Classic
4. Mariage Parfait
5. 2005 Brou Grand Cru
6. Cuvee Saint Gilloise
7. Duck Duck Gooze
8. Armand and Tomme
9. Broken Truck 1
10. Cantillon 100% Bio

SO HOW DID THINGS SHAKE OUT?  RESULTS FROM BEST TO WORST:

First place: The Broken Truck 1

Second Place: Armand and Tomme

Third Place: Regular ass Cantillon 100% Bio

4. Broken Truck 2

5. Duck Duck Gooze

6. Cantillon Classic

7.  Cuvee Saint Gilloise

8. 2005 Brou Grand Cru

9. Cable Car 2013

10. Mariage Parfait

Commence the bitching immediately because DDB “favored” an American beer and ranked it first in a blind tasting with other people.  Trust me, I was staggered by the results as well.  I went back to review Broken Truck in both iterations and was floored by how phenomenal they were.  My personal rankings had AnT above BT1 but both scored ridiculously high. The disrepaired Silverado is likely one of the best AWAs that I have ever tasted, no superlative overload.

Burn ward.

Here are the salient points that I can surmise that changed the course of the results:

1. The baby palates in the tasting eschewed and nerfed the scores of any musk/cheese/funk forward bottles.  The bottom bracket consists almost entirely of less “bright” albeit more complex bottles tossing doses of grist and oxy-cobwebs.
2. Similar to the way that people preferred the approachable sweetness of English Barleywines, the acidic “brightness” was favored almost universally, and when I compared the scores I found a preference for this in lieu the more muskier leathery delights.
3. Cable Car 2013 was wildly overrated, in a way that is crushing to the soul when I think back to what I gave up to land it.  I say this beyond the scope of mere trader’s regret and more in the realm of “the list of superior, more accessible beers is staggering.”
4. Mariage Parfait was reviled for its sickly honeycomb sweetness and tepid watery body. Kill confirmed, the Brewdog of the goozie world.
5. Brouscella Grand Cru poured nearly flat, as usual, and many people nuked it for this, but holy fuck was that bottle complex.  It has the most depth and character to it by a mile.  If you like dating quirky alt-women who play tabletop games and are into crystal chakra healing, this would be your hot alternative medicine.
6. DDG is still swinging like an acidic champ, despite rumors of the anatidicide. It is odd because given the component blending and release dates, you would expect the horrendously underwhelming 2013 Cable Car to have some component blended Phunky Duck or Mellow Yellow, or something resembling that quacky king.  This is not the case.
7.  In the same breath as the foregoing, Armand and Tomme might be one of the best gueuzes ever made.  I rated it easily the best of the evening and I would be hard pressed to think of a more balanced and flawlessly executed gueuze, and amongst my favorite beers of recent memory.  It has traveled so far in depth and grace and nuance in the past three years, surpassing the previously untouchable Zomer.
8. Finally, the most salient takeaway is this: look at how fucking well that regular ass Cantillon Bio/Classic performed.  Consider the fact that you could have anywhere from 4-10 times the bottles in lieu of any of the “touted” entries on this list and the diminishing returns approach “bourbon levels” of hilarity.  So while once again the PARARABOLEAR protesters aren’t right, but they aren’t exactly wrong either.  In the end, that world class accessibility should be the underpinnings of the grace and nature of beer itself.  A living product, for living people, poised for consumption and not to decay in some Indiana basement on an IKEA shelf only to make transcontinental trips annually to bolster the self esteem of some other cargo short wearing dumbfuck.

Beer is meant for consumption and discussion, organically fostering some of the best possible moments amongst friends and family. Those vignettes of gentle repose, beyond the reach of competition or feelings of inadequacy, the fleeting foam a gentle analog to life itself, ever cascading upward to a destructive change in form, becoming something greater than the sum of its simple components.  That is the essence of classic ales and innovative libations, ensconced outside the ambit of covetous carrion grips, transcending to a realm that modifies the social experience lieu of supplanting it.

OH WAIT SHIT I MEANT TO SAY BEER IS MEANT TO BE LEVERAGED TO SELL SHITTY BLOG T SHIRTS: BUY THE DDB SHIRT ONLY A FEW LEFT THAT IS WHAT I MEANT TO SAY EARLIER CLICK THE LINK BELOW SO I CAN BUY A CHROME SUZUKI HAYABUSA:

If you have your DDB desktop calendar, you may recall that there hasn’t been a shitstorm warning since the good old ABVMZABVMDZMZ row a solid three weeks ago.  Sadly, there’s no idol toppling in today’s post because Creature Comforts came correct and pumped out two amazing beers.  If you came here for some yellow journalism, sensationalism, and mudslinging to drive up engagement: apologies in advance. I’ll try harder to undermine my non-existent credibility in the future.

As much as I would love to shit on excellent beers for some alleged petty grievance, I will leave that to my innumerable alt accounts who pander for free beers.  Let’s get to clapping them magic city stacks a second time in today’s review:

Orpheus got the raw end of the deal in the prior DDB review.  While they are far from a paradigm-shifting leader, they are equally far from doing anything deficient.  The Rites is a solid, over the plate fastball that is traditional but easy to get a solid piece of.  The biggest issue that I had with this faintly tropical affair was a honey cornbread sweetness to the malt profile that seems to be attendant to many of the Southern breweries.  BMIs and palates of Southern creatures seem to engender sufficient malty sweetness in the way a waify Vermontean loves FG1.0000 and wooden bowties. This beer is fine and leaves me with little to deride or exalt.

Similar to the foregoing, Wicked Weed shows that its talents lie in purveying expensive wild ales and not exactly in the hop game. With NODA absolutely shutting the club down with Hop Drop, I can’t imagine the average Silverado-pushing Raleigh resident exhibiting much tumescence for these standard wares.  It is less malty than The Rites but also delivers a more resinous sappy enclosure for your big Pooh Bear mitts.  I only wanted a smackerel.

This however, holy shit, now we are cooking with four butane burners.  Other Half has an established pedigree in the hop game but their darker offerings compelled chin scratching that could not reconcile the two.  So then enter Creature Comforts, who up until now have cut their teeth on darker offerings almost exclusively, fruited Athenas notwithstanding. This is a merger of two record collections that results in an incredibly sonorous dulcet aria of chocolate, deep roast, distinctively porter in execution with wafer thin body that swallows exceptionally clean and compels the consumer to froth it along the mandible like a mocha frap.  If this was not exceptionally limited, then holy fuck I would advise to stock up on these pedestrian drillers because it is one of the finest iterations of a standard baltic Porter this side of Imperial Edmund Fitzgerald.  Everett on PEDs.

Photo quality  is commensurate with this pilsner: shit is fine. I am reticent to compare this to the Live Oak and Great Lakes pilsner masters because I don’t think that the Eliminator boat pilots of the world are really looking for depth or nuance in a beer style you can approximate at home.  Sure there’s no certified BJ flaws, no DMS, it’s not exceptionally flabby, nor is it distractingly hopped, but there’s also nothing compelling about it either.  Pivo Pils has already fucked things up for everyone in this genre much in the way that the PAERARARERABOLA refrain will be hot on the lips of anyone buying beer with an EBT card, railing against Fedex deals.  Then again I drank it in a fucking paper cup.  There’s no coffee in this pilsner.

Alright enough foreplay: is Existence a retread of See The Stars?  Do we have to engage in the pabulum of denigrating that poor ATL minority who offered euphonious promises? Thankfully we are saved from that for the exact opposite reasons that made the StS culture so mandible grinding: this beer is phenomenal and almost no one was an asshole trying to redoubtably pump it up.

At 19 months in the barrel, I initially braced myself for the trappings of oversaturation, or some wonky “fresh beer” blended in: the typified high-age/old-cask dynamic.  If the North Carolina way is to cask beer for 6 weeks in a third use barrel, this is a complete inversion of that paradigm.  This falls closer to the magnificent Pugachev 25: long aging, no cutting agents, lacquer and oak forward, a substantial base that can stand the test of time without thinning, and a remarkable roast that neither expresses oxidation nor a beau geste of sweetness.  It delivers so. much. complexity without relying upon any Tiny Tim crutch from the baking/confectionary aisle.  For those who need hard and firm reference points, this was just shy of the Central Waters Ardea and SR-71 platitudes, but that level of moralizing needs to be taken in small doses.  That being said, it is a firm rebuke to homebrewing dumbfucks who clutch a bottle of BCBS and decry any trading or seeking non-local beer.  This is a non-local beer to which you will absolutely not find a comparable analog.

It is the most fitting irony that such a world-class beer was relatively snubbed by the OCD masses of completionist beer traders.  They don’t deserve a phenomenally crafted, adjunct-free landscape portrait of brownie batter and tobacco.  If you can’t handle a region’s shitty traders at their worst, then you don’t deserve ATL traders at their finest.

I would slide the superlative ladder over and start praising this as Creature Comfort’s best beer to date, that is until I dusted off this stonefruit masterpiece that even less people gave a shit about:

I knew that those Creature boys could do stouts, sure they can do porters, but this clipped me in the driver’s side door while pulling out of my peach driveway.  I had no idea they were capable of this degree of nuance and unparalleled fruit expression in anno domini this year of our lord 2016.  This has the vellus hairs right down to the pithy skin, the restrained acidity and delivers with balance and elan unseen since Persica b1 750ml.

Usually when a brewery makes a peach beer they have to allocate stat attributes like Madden create a character.  Too often do we receive intense acidity without tannins, or Haribo Peach Rings with no depth, barrel complexity with no vestige of juice.  This Gamesharks the fuck out of the stonefruit matrix and delivers each with such phenomenal balance that I am left to only praise the milky froth of the body.  This is liquid Jolly Rancher merged with fruit leather structure, that dairy goodness of orange julius that closes with some dry Riesling.

If you have some odd restrictions on regional acquisitions, let this be the only beer from the south that you have this year.  SCOOOP and Decoherence are amazing sure, but bask in the warmth of the second coming of our prophet Chez Monus.  I know that even whispering that shibboleth causes sectarian violence, but seriously it does not get much better than this in my estimation and even my obstreperous attempts at shitslinging cannot deliquesce the form and structure of this peach pillar.

Get pitted fukn siiick pitted fleshy fruit bruhhh.

C:\selfpimp.exe\run.DLL

There’s still some DDB shirts left, buy them so I can stop accepting cash under the table for favorable reviews.  Because that’s what DDB, this non-sponsored, non SEO shithole is all about, PURE PROFIT$$$: