Jester King Brewing, microaggressionville, Tejas

8.3% abv Brandy barrel biere de Garde

Last week we talked about how Council brewing made a musty not even sour BdG and addressed the constantly evolving nature of this dark horse genre. Jester King went all regal and borderline 50n on these tickers with a brandy barrel treatment, yes I know, cognac. But is this tasty?

In a word, yes. It is undeniably a biere de garde in sum and substance. The carb is phenomenal and the srm is that caramel extravaganza of deep orange and ruby amber hues you would expect. The nose is more acetic than I enjoy and falls closer to the realm of flanders red really and exhibits a touch of cherry, maltiness, raspberry nail polish, bready malts, and a long caramel finish.

So many feels in the mouth.

The taste leans even further to the flanders/Wanderer realm and presents a massive bready opened like Hawaiian rolls, red wine vinegar, middle raspberry, Rolos, baked rye, and a sharp currant finish. It is intensely drinkable and the FG is the classic JK 1.0000000000000004. You can pound this and think of Oud Bruins that could have been.

Some may say this is straight american wild ale given its clear interplay with monoculture emphasis but that doesn’t mean it isn’t dry and intensely tasty. If you love Herfst drink the Council offering, if you enjoy Caracterie Rouge, drink this. I would love another clearly inferior beer site to rate the two back to back, the biere de garde genre commands it. 

They waiting for the next Fedex box to land. 

In sum, this is really tasty and if you liked Wanderer you will love this meticulously crafted entry.

i shared this gem with the boys at Live Oak brewing and the trans-Austin pipeline was complete. So if you are like me, you may have thought that dichotomous was a one off but BE STILL YOUR HEART, this is a series focused around the seasons themsevles. According to owner/brewer Ron Extract, the dichotomy is created by paralleling the concept of brewing in anticipation of a season, a living product constantly evolving, that in turn serves to parallel the season prospectively in fermentation and retrospectively as it ages later in the bottle. I think I paraphrased that correctly. It is an interesting series akin to the Armand 4 where you are using sensory elements to capture the inherently unstatic joie de vivre of time, and fuck mad bitches.

So what does fall taste like? For most neckbeard pussies it tastes like damp earth and getting stomped out behind the band room first day of school. It’s like they don’t even know how much a clarinet costs. Here’s the commercial description:

“The ingredients used in this beer are meant to evoke the season. Butternut squash, acorn squash, and the herbs and spices used—dried sage and long pepper—are common components of autumnal meals. Head Brewer Garrett Crowell smoked the acorn and butternut squash over oak barrel staves, to invoke sense memories of fall. As he describes his motivation:

“I’m very inspired by nostalgia, and the smell of burning leaf piles is perhaps my most nostalgic memory of fall. The subtle smoke and spice character in the beer reminds me of those dim-lit autumn afternoons, running through the neighborhood and the smell in the air.””

It has to be understood as the outset that most beer nerds have a US Weekly reading level and Island of the Blue Dolphins on their shelves so I understand if the foregoing is lost on them. Let’s just talk about my subjective impressions, the absolute authority on how everyone should feel universally.

The carb is really toeing that Ale Apothecary line of “filipino foam party” and is borderline excessive. The SRM is dark amber to light mocha hues, the wet silt from harvest season attendant thereto. The nose is intensely spice driven and even more earthy than the winter iteration and seems like the two could have been outright swapped given the beer world’s predeliction for winter to mean “add nutmeg and allspice to everything.” 

There are lightly acetic aspects that are hardly perceptible over the leafy spice, musky raked pine needles, a touch of lemon and toasted rye pumpernickel.

The taste is better than the nose and it is more malty and offers root vegetables, cloves, banana, and a lingering spice profile like zucchini bread. It is a fine beer, but easily my least favorite of all the seasons. It is unquestionably well done and a testament to jester King that they can take that insane list of ingredients and still pull off a pretty tasty albeit aberrant beer.

I prefer beers with a turbie mash

Crisp, intensely dry, a touch of earthiness and sweet yam tannins. It is highly crushable and at 4% it is drillable like cork board. The carb is fantastic and leaves a frothy whipped creme fraiche and clings longingly with the subtle acidity from the mixed fermentation cultures.

Come look upon the finest beet beer ever crafted in calm contemplation.

I would have enjoyed a wagon ride or the option to take a sultry afternoon snooze in the hay loft, someday.

 The tasting room has plenty of awesome saison and farmhouse offerings from local breweries and a well stocked cellar full of European saisons and Shelton gems. No tomes though, due to licensing costs in Texas. The lone star state would break old Dany’s ghostbank 

I have been seeing less and less Jester King on the shelf lately and apparently they have no difficulty moving a ton of product without from direct retail sales. This means I will need to fire up the old fedex three tier system to stay current. FARMHOUSE STRUGGLES IS REAL IN THE STREETS

The ambitious catalog of offerings is impressive, the barrel room splendid, and hands down one of the most tactile petting zoos I have ever encountered. Their core catalogue of “normal” releases keeps improving and the mixed fermentation and care that goes into their most pedestrian offerings would suffice as a special release for other breweries. That is saying quite a bit.

The uber was costly to stop by this stately rustic complex, but then I could dip low in the back and wipe dabbers of Dupont starters on my gums.

 It is absolutely worth stopping by this aesthetically impressive spot. Just don’t show up like an unannounced asshole when they are closed and expect some special treatment. 

cigar city, nascarland, FL

9.5% abv, ba stout with coffee cacao nibs and vanilla

WELP, time to face the stark realities of the blogger condition: cigar city knows how to make phenomenal stouts. Sometimes they just choose to troll the shit out of their fan base with crazy adjunct offerings, other times they release undisputably world class beers. This is the latter camp. 

On paper I jokingly mused that it would be a flabbier version of ba speedway and twisted my waxed moustache like a judgmental prick. Boy was I wrong. This comes out of the bottle with silky mocha foam and sheets of latte drapery coating the glass. It is deep and black with dark beige tints sheeting downward like when you are picking out Sherman Williams swatches for the room with the sex swing.

The nose is a blast of whoppers, kit kats, malt balls, caramel, and of course Mocha frap. It Smells fantastic and used the coffee and cake batter in tandem to level itself out, like when you snort a rail of hydroxycut cut after downing hydrocodones, because those kids gotta get to school amirite?

The taste never leans too hard on its one two adjunct punch of cacao and vanilla and lets the coffee aspects round the edges off. It is frothy and substantial in the heft of the coating but never step over the boundary, like your buddy who always tries to wrestle with your hot cousin. The coffee isn’t sharp nor is it dull or muted, it’s a full roast that has a triple frap upside down quad shot aspect, it is only missing the cream. Perhaps that is a VEDEO revue for another day.

When this was set forth I had all the designs for a hilariously shitty review and then this derailed all my expectations by being outstanding. God damn it. I didn’t start this site a fucking half decade ago to be doling out dollops of heaping praise like some kinda section 8 lunch line. However, when something is this good, one is compelled to call it.

When one bolt on addition simply isn’t enough.

This is a fantastic coffee stout and you would be remiss to skip it. Top five CCB beer, easily. What are the other 4? Glad you asked:

Apple Brandy huna

Leon

Double barrel Mz

Nielsbohrium

Go get this grinder already, then sample it with someone from Grindr.

Need ta hit that yellow rose and live oak hef from the backside

Carton Brewing, New Jersey

Imperial cream ale with coffee added 12% abv

New Jersey hasn’t exactly had its day in the sun. I know the average NJ ticker will generate a list of innumerable local pretty tasty options, but in the larger scope of things, it isn’t the Napa of fermented grain. When Carton released boat beer I was on board and really enjoyed the simple and refreshing framework.

Sure enough a few months go by and you have NJ tickers already heralding 7700WWXXYXYX as the next heady wait no BETTER THAN HEADY IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND. It is lamentable to see a solid brewery poisoned by dipshit fans. This is something akin to how TOOL is a phenomenal band but for some reason attracts nothing but insufferable assholes as followers.

This isn’t a site for reviewing the locals attendant to a brewery, this is ostensibly a blog that looks at beer critically. So is Regular Coffee a shitty beer? Well it really depends on your expectations going into this thing: do you enjoy double digit abv in your cream ales? Do you want a lactose sweetness with a bitter coffee aspect? Finally, do you need these packaged in  multi-can packs for rapid consumption? Then perhaps you are the model consumer.

Kiwi can’t handle coffee up in the club

The beer pours a strange deep orange with hazy light brown and amber at the center. The off white carb billows and serves as a Trojan horse for this strange 12% beast.

The nose is sickening sweet nondairy creamer, honeycomb, of course intense coffee but more of a Nescafé verve over single origin Chemex pour overs. The waft takes that distilled cream ale and really pushes rails of sweet n low down your nasal passage, the bitter coffee a cold overseer to this process. This beer is all over the place.

The taste delivers on the ransom note that the nose presented, sticky sweet confectioners sugar, butter almost tart coffee grounds like the bottom pour from a press pot and what seems like a touch of DMS rounding out the chimera with a cornbread tail hissing on the swallow. Noble makes a “golden stout” with coffee called naughty sauce, and it is pretty tasty. This is like if the Foot Clan mixed mutagen with that beer and a huge unbalanced monster spawned from those good intentions. The sticky honey and frothy latte drool spilling from the grinding maw of stale coffee filters, inspiring breakroom terror while you contemplate those OSHA posters.

The mouthfeel is syrupy and crackles with the light body and dryness from the coffee just clanging and banging pots and pans along your gumline, leaving candy wrappers pell mell like the floor of a shitty movie theater. I had difficulty polishing off a single 12oz can and the fact that they sell this beyond the single unit assumes Herculean patience from the consumer.

I don’t know who this beer was for. I can’t say why Carton decided that this beer needed to exist, but, here we are. This isn’t so horrible that I would shudder upon hearing the crack of a can, but I certainly never need to revisit this, and 12% cream ales may be dead to me altogether, but I never was one for absolutes. Perhaps this was just outside their wheelhouse. Carton seems to shine when employing reductionist, refreshing crushers. On paper this looks like something you would see on a Kuhnhenn whiteboard next to a bulletpoint that reads “carbonation: the inexplicable mystery.”

Get yourself a can. Put on Undertow and shake the night away with sticky caffeinated ptsd to the sweet sound of Maynard’s dulcet tones.

Cartridge whales alert:  

Council Brewing Co, land of 196 breweries

7% abv, barrel aged Biere de garde

If you just fell into the beer game in the last 9 months, you would probably think that a Biere de garde is a saison with some caramel malts and less acidity.  The modern ticker doesn’t have the time to go hunt down a bottle of sans culottes or do some backtracking in the farmhouse game. That’s fine, I know there are sticky hefty adjunct stouts to drop singledigit  reviews upon. 

For the rest of us, the Biere de garde genre remains a largely underserved style that is constantly evolving, barrel aging making things all the more complex. This entry marks another in a style that is tough to pin down but remains ever intruiging.

The pour is a touch darker than most BdGs than I have seen, the carb billowing out with fury from that bottle conditioned cork. The nose doesn’t exhibit much fruit or acidity for that matter. It has a malty breadiness, a sort of wheat and sourdough, a touch of leather and caramel.

The taste begins with a sort of boring sweetness, fruit preserves and toast, then a dry earthy chanterelle mushroom and raked leaves. Then out of nowhere off of the top ropes, this fruity persimmon acidity saves the match and drops a tart elbow that couples with the earthy aspects nicely. 

The mouthfeel is thin and bone dry, you can crush this 750ml while getting the shit kicked out of you by 9 year olds in Hardline.  

This royal rumble is unlike any other Biere de gardes and pushes the earthiness envelope in the way that Herfst did back in 2011. Not every BdG can or should taste like Norma, and I welcome breweries trying new things while still staying somehow within the malleable style guidelines. That is one of those intuitive oddities in this genre, like obscenity, you can only identify what a BdG is when you taste it and this is decidedly memorable. The oak and rope makes this perfect for a cool autumn evening and the repease date in sweltering inland San Diego seems anomalous for spring. Silt and dry oak take center stage here without question. Most people will like it less as a result, but if you dig Brett c and that sort of copper finish, you’ll enjoy this riff on beers for saving.

Or go drink a Hennepin and talk blindly about how trading is stupid and unecessary, DRINK LOCAL, RESPECT BEER without qualification, and all that other antiquated ignorant shit. Put a Starter jacket on and complete that mid-90s look.

Westbrook Fisticuffs, South Carolina, land of unending tolerance

Should you try it? Sure. Should you ISO this hard and pull your nips for it? I am not here to tell you how to live your life. Maybe this will fill that crushing emptiness in life, rye sugar water that serves to bolster the confidence needed to ask to be promoted to assistant manager of Arby’s. Who knows. Get your grind on, if you got that gold tank then you clearly know No Limit.