Author Archives: dontdrinkbeer

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Veritas 015 is Big Willey Style, Got @LostAbbey on that I Am Legend Tip

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Lost Abbey has around a 40% kill/death ration with the Veritas line, more than enough to keep you in the majors.  For every whaley V004 we receive, there’s always some oddball V009 stuttering and playing with a Leapfrog book.  By now people just treat the Veritas series like dropping a hot acid round in the revolver and spinning the chamber, because when it pays off it pays off hard.  This is one such instance where you not only don’t get lit up like Veritas 011, but this enters the ranks of the best Veritaseses ever created.

Let’s cut up this fruit AWA and get our Rachel Ray on in today’s review. Knife work gettin you promoted up from line.

Rolling up Big Willie Style of the Sour Game V15 I AM LEGEND

Rolling up Big Willie Style of the Sour Game V15 I AM LEGEND

Lost Abbey, San Marcos, North County Toolboxland Churchillsburg, CA

6.5% abv, American Lambic Wild Ale with Fruit, AmeriFoune

This beer showcases exactly what Lost Abbey does best: making the best fucking sour blonde ales in the game.  Whenever you hear them shutting the club down with some DDG or Cable Car joints, it is never centered around some sour dark ale or barrel aged barleywine. Lost Abbey blonde sours pay fat dividends like that unsplit Berkshire Hathaway stock.

When I heard the specs on this beer it sounded like an even more fruited version of Spontaneous Cheer, my micropeen was primed for a tart road trip.  The beer pours more radiant and bright than Spontaneous Cheer and looks outright radioactive in the glass, frothy carb bursting forth lacing the glass with intense pop rocks crackles, an appearance strangely similar to Duck Duck in many ways, or Cable Car 2013.  You get the jist, I dont need to draw it out for you like the plot of Sense8.

This beer get funky just like D.O.C. do

This beer get funky just like D.O.C. do

The nose is cut kumquats, highly acidic, unripe tangerines, honeydew, there’s a wheaty sort of grist to it that almost reminds me of a mineral character, with a fully lacto finisher to it that is almost too sour for my gentle nose holes. This isn’t as apeshit as Veritas 10 in acidic fruit, but this is def a serious american wild Desert Eagle with that oaky kickback.

The taste is straight sub-saharan dryness, the cankersores about to be budding if you dont have some water on hand from those receding cells getting bombed on with dehydrating goodness.  The only thing keeping this from being some insane ph-bomb is the presence of fruit as it warms.  The magnetic tangerine and clementine are buttressed by peach and apricot, it’s every shade of citrus Life Saver in the roll, oaky, puckering and intensely satisfying. There’s a sort of cheesy marmalade aspect that gives a bit back from the armed tastebud robbery that it commits in the process.  It’s like a roguish bandit that puts a carnation in a girl’s lapel after robbing the tongue stagecoach. THANKS FOR THE FRUIT VERITAS UR A GOOD GUY.

Overall, this doesn’t have the stumbling blocks of other american sours that attempt to hazard this level of intensity and has a certain degree of panache that keeps it from being a one dimensional acidic asthma attack. This should be well up on the top of your want list despite the cost of entry because unlike most stupid ass DDB reviews, this is one time where I can’t be like “JUST BUY DERP D’OR FROM CROOKED STAVE” or pointing to some Belgian analogue.  I had this the same day as Fou and both are stellar and completely different.

OH WE ON THAT PAGANI VERITAS SWERVE? Hode up, lemmie get to a save point.

OH WE ON THAT PAGANI VERITAS SWERVE? Hode up, lemmie get to a save point.

Before you ask, yes, this is way different from Stone Bu, Imperial Peach Bu, Bu Banger, Bu Bae, Jew Bu, or whatever 47 different stonefruit berliners are released this month. While those might be easier to land, this doesn’t have much in common with many of the De Garde fruited offerings, and no it doesn’t taste similar to Fen Tao, due to the ratcheted up acidity. No disrespect to any of the foregoing, this just isn’t quite on the same scene, blowing seaweed green out that Pagani sunroof, cutting up them pitted bricks on the passenger side.

Seek it out, and be sure to offer up X-Mas Bomb or some shit so we can have some LULz in the process.

Here’s a handy Veritas chart of jankrank scaled from most trifling to next level shit:

V009 – most jank

V001- second most jank

V002- trifling

V011- moderately trifling 

V013- pretty deece

V008 – pretty legit with time sans tea

V010- tasty fun times

V014- damn I’m sweating 

V007- Shit is getting real

V0012- no jank, all body high

V006- it’s kickin in, I feel it

V004- can’t handle the club right now

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The new barrel aged Full Malted Jacket got both feet in the paint, 300 bars and runnin

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If you somehow missed the massive 150 bottle release from two years ago, this is back on the block slanging yellow tops. This is still phenomenal and another entry into Beachwood BBQ’s under appreciated, well executed barrel program.

While this feels a touch thinner than the previous iteration, none of the barrel components have been lost in the fray. If you jock aftw, bb4d and the Alesmith ba wee heavy, this is right up your alley. There’s a delicate creme brûlée shell, Carmelized brown sugar, skoal bar, a touch of tobacco like a light Cohiba drag with an oaky finish.

I hope people continue to sleep on these because Jean Quad, Rye Like an eagle, and the oaked System of a stout continue to wild out well off the radar of those who love flabby disjointed adjunct extravaganzas. 

The newpalate crowd will lament that the beachwood barrel aged offerings are too thin, as though a mouth replete with unfermented malt is something worthy of celebration, streaking their teeth with saccharine oversight.

  
Barrel aged wee heavy? Now I feel less lonely.

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1993 Fantome Ete, A Ghost That is Old Enough to Drink Itself – TRANSUBSTANTIATION INDEED

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If you got into beer in mid-2013, please exit this review immediately and keep spouting your typical “FANTOME IS BAND AIDS” rhetoric, this review isn’t for you.  Go attend a homebrew meeting or cicerones anonymous while we discuss some grown ticker shit.

Today we have a geriatric gem from before the Spin Doctors were cool.  TRICK STATEMENT: Spin Doctors were never cool.  Regardless, this is a ghost from the bygone era, some early 90’s discman shit that was pumpin hot in the streets of Soy back when people were watching DOUG and still dialing 411.  This was right around the time that Fantome became “Fantome” and not Brassiere Prignon I believe, but before the iconic ghost showed up.  The early bottles had these creepy bas relief women on them which almost evoke more of a spectre haunting vibe than the cartoon ghost.

Anyway, it is Ete, except 22 years old.  JUST HOW YOU LIKE EM AMIRI- predictable age jokes.  We still doin em.

Jared from Subway is eating fresher than we are for today's review. HE BE GETTING THEM FRESH VINTAGES.

Jared from Subway is eating fresher than we are for today’s review. HE BE GETTING THEM FRESH VINTAGES.

Fantome, Soy, Belgium

Saison, 8% abv

A:  The label unsurprisingly looks like shit and I half expected this whole affair to be a nightmarish descent into buttery cardboard world, getting my urethra swapped with rolled up sepia photos.  WHO HASNT BEEN THROUGH THAT. But the carb was substantial even after two decades, it pours with a pillowy cloud of retention and a hazy murkiness that shined radiant and turbid. The cork was in really good shape too, not the necrophage blackness you usually get with old bottles, them Brabantiae corks be looking like wet death cast upon the Swamp of Sorrow.

IT WASNT EVEN BARREL AGED NO WAY IT COULD BE GOOD THEN

IT WASNT EVEN BARREL AGED NO WAY IT COULD BE GOOD THEN

S:  The nose is a magical musky melange of honduran fruit harvesters sleeping in an old rickety barn next to some sweaty leatherworkers.  The chubs were not insubstantial and the sheet depth of crazy lemony goodness coupled with wet Brooks leather saddles, crushed leaves after a rain, and a sort of brulee’d orange peel rounded out the experience.  It has age, in that inexplicable amazing way that isn’t quite at “thrift store/elemtary school yearbook” levels of oxidation, but just old enough to put it on you because it isn’t self conscious about itself anymore it is mature and through with all the games and it fucks you back in a selfless way that has been through enough bad cellars to not care anymore, just primal nose fucking, no need to call back or put on airs, an authentic mature presentation that you hold in austere reverence simply because it aint about all that drama.

I shared this with Alex from Upright Brewing, a halogen filled romance that would span across time.

I shared this with Alex from Upright Brewing, a halogen filled romance that would span across time.

T:  The taste has this cheesy, gristy, dupont left in a time machine sort of creaminess to it like the water from Oikos yogurt.  You get Trix cereal milk, clementines, peeled tangerines, this brie rind, a really strange like earthy oiliness from some budding diacetyl tones that reminds me of some cave aged cheddar, and a long citrusy herbal closer that just lingers in the air like the sustain of a hollow body guitar.  The whole affair cannot be imitated and the age takes those regular tomes to crazy new depths in the crypt.

This is an exceptional beer from a bygone era of bricklined mash tuns and 1 hectaliter batches, foraging for random items, and making beer for local consumption. It is inimitable fresh and with the brett metabolization given years to perfect its craft, it is like when Edmond Dantes gets out of jail in the Count of Monte Cristo and he has all these bad ass new skills and you can only golf clap at the revenge he takes.  OH SHIT SORRY I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO READ DUMAS SHIT OK BACK TO THE TWILIGHT REFERENCES.

Old ghosts inhabit you make you want to touch the no-no and listen to Tiger Army

Old ghosts inhabit you make you want to touch the no-no and listen to Tiger Army

This would probably be at the pinnacle of fuckery to be like “seek this one out guize!” since I will probably never come across a ghost this ancient again, unless I get hella into Sepultura, tarot cards and exorcism, alas I have already graduated from the 8th grade. SHUCKS.

You review grocery store hefe’s and people say you are falling off, you review 50 bottle runs of Summation, people say you jumped the shark with homebrew reviews, but with 22 year old bottles of Fantome the WAT Index is so scrambled that I am confident people will just write this DDB shit off altogether.

Good riddance. the beer game was better when it was just Dre, Scarface and Esco.

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GROCERY STORE WHALES: @weihenstephan Weihenstephaner Hefe, a Gem from the Paleozoic Papazian Era

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If you have been following DDB for long enough, you might remember that in 2011 the big joke was to review top 100 beers from BA and RB and take them down a peg, and we were gonna do all of them, until I remembered that Kaggen was on that list and was like LOL fuqqq that.

Back before the world became obsessed with ultra acidic 300 bottle count wild ales parading around as “saisons,” this beer used to itch that wheaty yeasty patch for tickers who weren’t obsessing over hops.  Hops were super big in the late 2000’s, go look it up.  People actually had debates on BA regarding Pliny vs.- wait fuk. HOW FAR WE HAVE COME.

Anyway, this is the archetypical Hefe by which all others are measured.  Honestly, I am glad that is the case because this beer is still phenomenal, refreshing, and a pillar of classic execution.  In five years some brewery from Florida will make FLORIDAWEISEN and it will be like ph3.0 with a series of different barrel treatments and the annoying traders from the 2021 class will be like “I NEVR LIKED HEFS TIL I TRIED THIS WON!!!”

So let’s preemptively lament that fate by reviewing one of the standard greats, before it is uncool to laud praise on nice things:

No one sent me this, I totally just have all this Weihenstephaner merch laying around

No one sent me this, I totally just have all this Weihenstephaner merch laying around

Weihenstephan (WHY-HEN-STEPHAN or if you want to show people you studied abroad like a condescending dickhead, VAI-EN-SCCCCHTEPAN)

Hefeweizen 5.4% abv

A:  This is the king of ropey turbidity before brewers started emptying their monoculture loads in the secondary.  The wheat grist is frothy and allows a radiant burnt honey and muddled biscuit through with ample carbonation cascading upwards like a malfunctioning sprinklerhead.  The lacing is generous and sheets in rings like a deliciously flithy bubble bath.  In Plato’s analogy of the cave, this is the archetypical FORM of the Hef.  Adjust your eyes and look upon it in reverence.

NO ONE HAS EVER EVEN SEEN THIS BEER BEFORE GET A GOOD LOOK

NO ONE HAS EVER EVEN SEEN THIS BEER BEFORE GET A GOOD LOOK

S:  This is the mold from which all others were cast, not just chronologically, but in logical influence and scope.  It is the Mario of the Hef world, balanced and nimble in execution without stupid shit like honey, coriander, orange slices, or other garbage.  The drawback of drinking this is some middle-aged Stepdad with a fermenting bucket will try to talk to you about Reinheitsgebot and that is the worst of all fates.  You get fresh Grand’s biscuits, esters like clove and fennel, obviously a huge navel orange and tangerine presence and a lemongrass finish to the yeasty profile.  It is refreshing, approachable, a pick up and play console before the current wave of beer nerds started acting like condescending PC assholes playing Witcher 3 on full resolution.

T:  This has a creamy mouthfeel to it that is a great platform for the baking spices and lighly herbal saazy dryness to the finish.  Someone will invariably be like I THINK ITS ACTUALLY HAUERTALLER or HEY I LIKE VITUS MORE LETS TALK ABOUT VITUS, and those people need to get vasectomies asap.  The typical thing to review this beer is to just repeat the words “BANANAS AND ORANGES” six times in a row, but to be honest to my geriatric palate, I feel this is more yeasty and estery than anything else.  Those aren’t mutally exclusive, but I get allspice and clove, huge wheat grist, and a kinda pineapple swallow to it.  Inb4 everyone says DDB likes frothy pineapple swallows.  I get it.  Jizz.  We all get it.

the KRISTAL is also noteworthy, but let's not get too off-course here.

the KRISTAL is also noteworthy, but let’s not get too off-course here.

Candidly my favorite Hefe of all time is made by Live Oak brewing, but this is easily top 3 and it stands like the classic lines of a C4 Corvette which can stand the test of time and still have even the most seasoned vets come back to enjoy.  It is the arms of a comforting Bavarian wench after you are impressed by a naval crew of beer shitlords.  You escape that Melville scenario and remember that you don’t need a Fedex account to get day drunk and watch Storage Wars on an ipad in your backyard.

NO FEDEX ACCOUNT AT ALL!

If you haven’t had this, be prepared for your beta casual friends to bring you a bottle of this around October because LOL UR MY BEER FRIEND AND U LIKE OCTOBERFEST RIGHT THE GUY IN THE WINE AISLE SAID THIS WAS OCTOBERFESTIVALS ALSO HERE’S A PRETZEL NECKLACE K

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Speedwale from 2009: @newbelgium Bottleworks X Anniversary Ale

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Today we have an aging matriarch from the days of the Speedway Jim top 100 white whale list aka them extinct speedwales. If you are a johnny come lately to the beer game who covets King Henry and thinks that Sr-71 should trade on par with Zomer, chances are you have no fucking idea what this is. To those people, Bottleworks is that one store that sometimes sells Deviation, and that’s it. To everyone else Bottleworks is the proto-City Beer model of classic bottle shop meets beer culture hub from the old tymie days. This is the tenth anniversary bottle brewed by New Belgium, 1400 bottle one off released in 2009.

It might even pull a single bottle of Vanilla Rye if you are lucky.

washed out label, needs more contrast, cool pic

washed out label, needs more contrast, cool pic

New Belgium, Colorado

American Wild Ale, 6.5% abv

For some reason Hair of the Dog also posted up hard in the trap and brewed Matt for Bottleworks X that year, so this old gem is often forgotten under the sands of ticker time. This bottle represents something larger for New Belgium as a ubiquitous ultra micro giant, the end of a non-pasteurized, brewery only fun times era. Now you usually hear about them when your drunk stepdad tells you about how he loves “Fat Tire Brewing Company” and you nod in sad reflection, thinking of Caged and corked la folies past.

This beer is foeder fermented la folie, la terroir and a golden ale blended together and bottled live, un pasteurized, rolling monocultures all raw dog.

The pour immediately looks more beautiful than both Twisted Spoke and 2009 cage and corked la Folie. You can hardly pull your penis out on the metro without someone mentioning those two beers next to this one. The pour is a ruddy burnt orange and light amber that radiates like a turbid blood orange cocktail, with the carb still billowing flawlessly with determined cling. It isn’t that dark auspicious deep mahogany of its contemporaries and it looks great.

Oppressive Portland sun ruining everything for all the white people in that city.

Oppressive Portland sun ruining everything for all the white people in that city.

The nose thankfully doesn’t exhibit any of the acetic red wine vinegar aspects of the 09 la folie and instead has tangerine zest, Brie cheese rind, clementines, sliced honeydew, oak and pencil shavings, a touch of light construction paper oxidation and a red berry closer that lingers. The whole affair puckers the bunghole air tight and there is no seepage, no weeping. For all the things that time could have denatured, it has unquestionably improved this beer to a level without contemporary analogue. There’s a degree of musk and earthiness that only time can accomplish, despite what some kettle souring Colorado charlatan may tell you.

The taste is a touch more acidic than the nose suggests but the creamy mouthfeel with ultra fine jacuzzi bubbles offsets the acrimonious effect. It pushes a raspberry and grapefruit pith, there’s a bit of vanilla and Chardonnay staves, white grape that is equally moscato sweet and tart like rainier cherries. The whole experience is a many faced God and a ticker never forgets.

No salad dressing tones detected

No salad dressing tones detected

I feel like the aging grampa in the 80’s complaining “they don’t make ’em like this no more” and referencing the non pasteurized, aged, meticulous Detroit steel beers from the past. This is truly a magnificent, highly drinkable gem that stands in stark contrast to so many of the ultra acidic offerings clouding today’s lacto and ultra Brett L focused market.

Yet another entry in the ever expanding journal of “this near extinct beer is great, seek it out” annals. DDB is a useless resource, I need to switch to 140 char UNTAPPD reviews for the millennials with short, heavily-medicated attention spans. SOMEDAY

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NANOWALE ALERT: @3sonsbrewingco Summation Dressing that Floridian Nascar Crowd in Vanilla and Coffee Furs

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Man, these entitled DDB reviewers and their IV trickle of whale reviews sure do get chapped labias when a guy tries to review some accessible Almanac beers. Fine, these entitled kids can chew on this ultra-nano shit for today’s review. MAYBE A 50 BOTTLE RUN IS SMALL ENOUGH FOR THESE GUFFAWING BUTTHOLES.

Today we have the KBBS killer, the baron of low yields, the Homebrew miracle that made Florida nipples lactate pure vanilla extract: SUMMATION. No this isn’t the Russian River beer that could have been, it is a decidedly original adjunct monster capable of toppling goliaths with a single tiny release.  The Facebook page for Three Sons doesn’t evidence an actual location at the time of publishing so let’s just keep acting like condescending assholes and call them HOMEBREWERS and put on a pince nez with regal panache.

RED WHITE AND JET BLACK

RED WHITE AND JET BLACK

THREE SONS BREWING, Somewhere in planning, hypothetically located in South Florida, ALLEGEDLY

10% abv (?)

Vanilla Coffee BA Stout

So what’s the deal with this shit? When I obtained this bottle it didn’t seem as though Three Sons had a per se brick and mortar brewery and tasting room. The batches are usually in the double digit bottle counts, so it is typical Florida business as usual.  If you suffered through the traumatizing 2011 Funky Buddha “30 BOTTLE RELEASES” you know exactly what I am talking about and the rifts never heal.  So essentially, you’re gonna need a bleached butthole to land one of these elusive loot drops as it seems to trade almost exclusively for KBBS in my experience.

The label isn’t the poverty tier experience you would expect from a grassroots brewery, but it feels stripped down and reductionist. The pour rolls out with a lava lamp viscosity, sheeting obsidian coats in igneous waves on the glass with frothy silty foam. The clear alcohol legs cut through the residual malt and it feels coherent beyond the scope of the “HOMEBREW” pejorative.

Avery labels got that sick lip smacker gloss

Avery labels got that sick lip smacker gloss

The nose is absurd and hammer strikes your face relentlessly with waves of vanilla bean, waffle cone, kit kats, whoppers, a dry earthy Ethiopian sort of coffee roast and a long lingering Rolo finish. While the majority of that rhetoric makes it sound as saccharine as Wonka taint, it isn’t a one dimensional Southern Tier disability jaunt: this shit got more layers than Trident gum.

The taste lends an outstretched hand as you jump from vanilla jeep into a chocolate helicopter. There’s an intensity to it that doesn’t come from the sweetness, it feels more like four stand up comedians shouting jokes at you concurrently. You get in tandem: cold stone creamery, starbucks, four roses and Sweetshop. WHO OPENED THIS INSANE EMPORIUM. It is admittedly very, very good. While vanilla seems to be the most dominant note the coffee and chocolate and barrel serve as a sort of support barbershop quartet back line to bring the elements into malty harmony.

OH NO WAY A STOUT HOLY SHIT TAKE MORE PICS OF IT WOW LOOKS SO INNOVATIVE

OH NO WAY A STOUT HOLY SHIT TAKE MORE PICS OF IT WOW LOOKS SO INNOVATIVE

The depth and delciousness of this is inversely proportionate to its accessibility, and that is frustrating as fuck. I don’t want to condone these efforts or put a gold star on something that creates a self fulfilling shitlord prophecy but it is undeniably world class. This has placed a weapon in the least deserving class of ingrates: the Floridian NASCAR population.

I guess it could be worse.  If Three Sons opened their brewpub in Chicago it would be the equivalent of giving Iran enriched weapons-grade Uranium and bankrolling their nuclear program.