No saisons were harmed in the filming of this daring, disgusting, uncompromising film that pushes the boundaries of human decency.
No saisons were harmed in the filming of this daring, disgusting, uncompromising film that pushes the boundaries of human decency.
So today we have a RARE GEM from the Brewer’s Cut series from Sudwerk, these scamps in Davis. So this is a STRAWBERRY berliner, but then when I went to their website, it notes “Davis microbrewers of hand-crafted lager beer adhering to the Reinheitsgebot German Purity Law” so I WUTTTTed pretty hard. When I initially asked people about this, they said it was a myeh brewpub, but then other people staunchly defended the brewery itself and said that the barrel aged/brewery only offerings are amazing compared to the quotidian offerings sold at the yawn-worthy pub. CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. So let’s see what these Davis boys be putting they tips into in today’s review:
Berliner, 6.5%
Sudwerks, Davis, Strawberries added, in comport with purity laws.
The brewer presses his hips against yours and whispers this into your ear, lovingly tugging on your Beats by Dre ear buds:
““Strawberry Solera is a blend of Solera Weiss fermented with Sudwerk microflora and a Brett-Saison aged on 1lb/gal Sacramento Valley strawberries in Bordeaux barrels. The nose is lactic, lemon, and berries with moderate Brett character. Clean palate with bright berry and tropical highlights with a dry finish.”
A: This is a turbid lil messy Jesse and has a creamy look of some Vermont trubtastic offerings, but at least this makes sense given the unfiltered hefty wheat bill. There’s an orange julius and whipped smoothie carb to it and it looks gentle albeit far too substantial for a BY THE NUMBERS berliner. But Southampton brews shit like UBERLINER and gets away with it so, whatever, just think of this as a Wittbier with fruit, you don’t give a shit.

Whenever I see strawberry on the label, I flashback to horrid beers from the past. Trying to live life in the present like Foodbabe tells me to.
S: At cold temperatures you get this lightly plastic aspect that can occur when using strawberry as an addition. It isn’t like a sick/ropey/phenolic, none of that business, its more like when you unroll a fruit by the foot and there’s a faint synthetic aspect. After it passes 55 degrees this burns off and it is imperceptible. The fruit character is very pronounced and the berry exhibits that same tannic farmer’s market aspect attendant to Cask 200 Strawberry or Omniscience and Proselytism. As long as you don’t drink this exceptionally cold, you are cash money records.

Your hombrew club is gonna flip out when you tell them how RAER this beer is. Also, it tastes good, but THAT SHIT IS IRRELEVANT TO YOUR HOMEBREW HOMIES.
T: None of the synthetic aspects are present on the taste and this is actually very impressive. It leads with a tangerine, lightly brackish cream of wheat breadiness, then the strawberry dominates IN THE FLAVOR PROFILE. If you have had many strawberry beers you will know that most of the time, it exists on the nose and then peaces the fuck out on the taste. All that insoluble fiber aint got time to be tasted and shit, gotta take its girl to the seed clinic. This is less jammy and more like a saison with a pump of Torani strawberry, aged on musky red Jolly Ranchers. That last sentence sounds like shit, but this is very legit. Too legit to quit, even.
M: The creamy profile is very silky and soft with a far more substantial heft to it than most berliners. It feels more like a straight up AWA scissoring a saison in a hybrid Apple car. If you told me this were a berliner I would shake my head like when Cigar City hands me a 12% robust porter and starts quoting BJ standards. As long as you dont need your BJs to be completely certified, you will enjoy this fruity creaminess to full completion.
D: This is exceptionally drinkable and again, feels like Cask 200 Strawberry and Cascade Strawberry had some extramarital affair and dropped this tannic trub baby on the steps of the berliner orphanage to be raised under a different name. THAT SHIT SOUNDS LIKE A NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE NOVEL THAT COULD HAVE BEEN. At any rate, I saw the brewpub ratings for this brewery and expected this to be a bowl of anus dipped berries, but it is actually really tasty. Go to Healthy Spirits and ask to see the spot on the shelf where these used to sit, light a candle, make a day of it.
Alright fine, I can hear the preemptive bitching and moaning from the sugar water contingency already: “WE DONT WANT TO SEE THIS WE WANT THE NEW REVIEW OF PRAIRIE APPLE BRANDY NOIR GOD WHAT IS THIS DONTDRINKWHISKEYEYEYYEYE” and all those tired rejoinders. That’s fine, we will be back nutsack deep into describing the same old shit over and over, but these little respites and forays into firewater are for a small segment of DDB degenerates. Thanks in advance to WHYNOTZOIDBERG for sending me this elusive lil minx, bottles of this are currently clearing $400 in secondary markets so for a rounder I owe him like $30.77 in ZJ’s, by my math.
So what is this and why should you continue to not give a shit? It is a 140 proof wheated bourbon, named after a bottler who allegedly invented wheated bourbons. Every brand usually has some nuanced approach to naming it after some stilljockey from the past and Buffalo Trace decided to crown their most ridiculous wheated offering on the top of old WLW’s head. This is the most sought out bottle in the Buffalo Trace Antique Collection and it seems like no one even really opens these as it serves as a super strength Pappy alternative of sorts, except that this is far superior to the Pappy line in my opinion. BUT THIS IS A BEER SITE WHO GIVES A SHIT AMIRITE.
William Larue Weller, Buffalo Trace
140.2 proof (70.1% abv)
A: This doesn’t come across as dark as George T Stagg, but presents a radiant maple syrup aspect with tints like a dark apple juice. It looks deep amber and sheets the glass with the most massive of legs, deep squats, solid form.
S: I was bracing myself for some nose scorching like Stagg Jr, or ECBP but it never lit me up in that fashion. It never develops into a full burn on the nose and instead imparts a huge cinnamon, butterscoch, Skor Bar, nougat, and finishes with piles and piles of attic, saddle, and potpourri. It is intense and massive and if they sold this in aerosol cans, 8th graders would be taking whippits of this from underneath the bleachers. You roll back in to Algebra reeking of toffee and trying to learn how to multiply polynomials.
T: Right out of the glass: fuck no, my baby palate cannot drink this neat. I let it sit for 20 minutes to think about what it has done, just like all my bourbon parenting books has suggested and it still has learned zero lesson, doesn’t give a shit. Hot as Tennessee William’s nutsack. I don’t want to basic bitch myself into a Weller 107 with water so I apply an eye dropper to it and hit the sweet flavor zone, like deep concentrated Pappy 15 on sick gear getting mad swole. You get nutmeg, big red gum, this massive viscosity like floral Robitussin, and one of the longest finishes on a bourbon that I have ever tasted. It lingers like deadening novocaine and oak on the bitter zones. It is admittedly awesome and I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone would seek out any bottle of Van Winkle over this. It presents a blank palate for you to tweak to your profile preference without being some proofed down stepped on shit dictating what you can handle. DubbELLdubb is one of the finest bourbons I have ever had and dominates the EXXXTREME proofed range.
I would seek this out, but expect to offer up 6-7 solid brewery only releases for this $80 bottle that was distributed across America, expect the WLW to have a higher bottle count than any of the beers you may try to offer up. YOU KNOW THE RULES.
I always hesitate to bring Eclipseses into the fray on this site. Usually you have a teeming mass of bottleshop assholes you want to chime in about PRICING or VARIENTS or WHECH ONE IS BEST THES YEAR. It is exhausting to stay ahead of the pack when every time I know I have to look down the barrel of garrulous assholes ready to jump all over this tirefire of a website. To remedy this I have elected to review the 150 bottle, most RAER deviant to prevent grocery store assholes from rocking the boat.
So they gave away one of these to each of the 150 people who showed up for the 50/50 Eclipse release party way up near Donner pass where people ate one another in the Sierras before craft beer was popular. So rare instantly means the best right? ADDING COCONUT MAKES THINGS INSTANTLY AMAZING? Well unfortunately in this instance I can’t parade out tired criticism against adjunct stouts because this beer is actually phenomenal, so I have to holster my classic Propreeshittors rhetoric that I was so ready to dispense. It actually sucks for this site when a brewery releases a rare beer that is incredible. Some people don’t even understand the struggle.

Cant wait to see a bunch of offshelf ballers once again post pics “IS THIS COCONUT? SAW IT AT MY STORE IN CENTRAL INDIANA IS IT THE COCONUT THO, LOOKS LIKE IT I THINK IT IS COCKNUTS”
50/50 Brewing, Sierra Mountainsland
Imperial Stout, 11% abv, fermentable coconut driving up that abv obvi
A: I want you to imagine you had to write about what an imperial stout looks like, now make it fresh and original every single time, now do it say, over 400 times. I am not wasting your time or mine with this imagery, look above. It is slick, black, doesn’t coat the glass in a substantial way and the carb is beautiful and moderate. It stays on track like a box of Pumas.

Whenever another brewery announces that they are going to make a predictable ass coconut stout I be like-
S: This is the entire reason I wanted to write this review, because usually writing favorable reviews is like trying to fap three times in an hour, you just get worn out and sore. Notwithstanding, holy god does this beer have one of the best noses that I have ever encountered on a stout, ever. It is almost comically coconut in execution, like so over the top that you can’t even take it seriously in the pure reduced coconut essence. I was like when Dodge releases that Tomahawk motorcycle with a Viper engine strapped to it, when something is so apeshit you almost just laugh and look at your friends like “does this thing come with a life insurance policy?” It is waffle cone, mounds bar, freshly husked coconut, almost straight up pina colada lip balm, with a touch of chocolate but then entire thing is like getting greased down in a cabana by the Palms pool. The only exception is you can enjoy this in your home without hundreds of oily Persians sipping hilariously priced mimosas. It is mindblowing good and never hits those Yankee Candle or Glade levels where it feels like a reduction, just earth shatteringly inviting. Galactus himself, eater of planets would spare earth if presented with this decadent potable.

Tickers rolling up to tastings with other janky coconut beers flexing throwing up B’s and C’s, not knowing you keeping that Eclipse heater right by the Louis Vutton belt buckle.
T: This carries through the excessive coconut and delivers some depth to go along with it in the form of a light roasty dryness, cocoa nibs, smo’res, and a faint vanilla. The coconut puts everything in a full nelson so that even the barrel character feels like redfaced writhing under its fierce dominance. I am completely fine with that, and usually I would dig in hard about how a brewery is shit-tier for relying upon secondary additions to carry the day. I really want to reach for that e-brake and derail this review but I can’t with any modicum of reliability. This beer is just too good to debase for a few yukyuks.
M: This is slick and almost oily in the mouthfeel, classic clean Eclipse runs along the molars, sweetness that closes dry and resonant. It would be an understatement to note that this is far superior to both iteration of Proprietors. I don’t say that in some iconoclastic fashion, it just hits the mark in such a substantial way that I can’t deny it. If Prop was the already exceptional BCBS with a 10% stats boost for a touch of additional complexity, this is a completely overhauled character. This is so over the top that it could very well be named a totally different beer in that I wouldn’t even identify this as Eclipse unless you told me. It’s like how you can never plan a threesome, they just seem to happen, this beer took the coconut formula, then the stout friend entered the room and you were all kinda drunk and…magic happens that you ruminate upon in the shower for the rest of your life.
D: This is exceptionally drinkable albeit at the crest of an entire bottle to yourself, you will be fucking done with coconut. If someone months later is like “hey wanna hit this Last Snow” you will shake your head in somber calculation, knowing that your coconuts were squeezed so fully that other counters will seem but pale foreplay by contrast. This beer is apeshit and I dont care if I never try masterpiece after having this. Vanilla eclipse was already mind blowing and this took things to absurd new heights, for anyone twisting their nips over Todd Ashman leaving to go make more BA Hifi, rest assure 50/50 is continuing to push things to new limits. It’s like when you used to take single scoop of pre work out drink and then you see what the world is like on two scoops, a jittery world of nitrates and 600mg of caffeine pulsing through your veins like Bane. Shit is getting all too real.
First and foremost, I love the idea of having a 5oz taster glass for a brewery that rolls out 4% beers, get that real Ohio backyard tasting experience. Secondly, this is another in a long line of thin table beers that seem to straddle the AWA and farmhouse realm amiably but never servicing either consumer base to full completion.
De Garde Petit Azzaca, a slightly more tropical riff on what becoming an increasingly samey sort of tart/borderline wild/faint oak execution. The same sort of consistency that put Crooked Stave on the map, that same play that seems to have kept them in Surette gear for the past year. Tasty albeit not life altering, but beverages seldom are unless you are an impressionable malleable dipshit with an Untappd account replete with badges.
The nose is tropical with mango and guava acidity, the taste is sharp but mellows quickly with crackling thin ground bloomers along your molars. It doesn’t lend itself to lengthy contemplation but that seems completely fine looking at the spec’s of this beer and the segment it seeks to fulfill.
In sum, people that love upland shit will think Saisons should have a ph less than 3 and saison lovers will complain that it lacks complexity or body and return to their BJCP message boards with fat alligator tears hitting their Compaq keyboards. It is a tasty crushable beer that will likely be enveloped in the folds of the ever expanding canon of beers from Trevor and the tillamook ballers.
You could probably find an analogue to this in the expansive Stillwater catalogue but since this bottle is probably like $3.65, might as well strike up a Faustian deal with the venerable John St Charles instead.
That face when people try to land De Garde beers at $4$
This beer represents the nightmarish deception and manipulation of beer ratings that take place in beer trading. Last Dark Lord Day, this beer was putting up solid perfect scores and being touted as THE BEST DERK LERD DEVIANT EVR MADE LOWERST BOTTLE COUNT EVR. If you trust a dipshit who is excited about a Dark Lord variant because they made the least of it, you are already starting out on a bad foot.
Your next massive red flag is right on the bottle: Dark Lord aged in a brandy barrel with cardamom, coriander, and cacao nibs. Let that sink in for a moment and try to imagine the desperate hellish reality that those adjectives would produce when exposed in and around your mouth. Sure, the writing was clear on the wall, but I had no idea just how much worse things could get, especially after trying the indefatigably horrible BA Cognac Murete Dark Lord. It turns out, when I removed that sticky stone from the Satanic altar of distaste there was a chamber of eternal hatred below, with dizzying self flagellating depths.
Let’s get to this review and never look back.
Three Floydenens, Munster Indiana
Zombie Dust Whales, 15% Russian Imperial Stout
A: Well, so far so good, this has carbonation and the platonic form of flabbiness on the pour. It cascades out like brownie mix or Nestle QuiK made with heavy whipping cream. The sheeting is so intense that it looks like someone mixed a bag of dried malt extract in at bottling to beef this sludgey muckwater up a bit. This is the best part of this unearthly bottle.
S: The smell takes things from a spine tingling glance to the crushing depression of realizing that you have over 25 ounces of this to reconcile with your body. On the front end of things is an almost passable York peppermint patty, that distorts and melts into images of your children dying in their cribs, intense jasmine, Downey, Glade plug ins, dryer sheet, Indian ice cream, dry cleaning solution and Christmas morning where mommy leaves daddy for tennis coach mommy. It is intensely saddening on so many levels.
T: This affair gets far worse when you actually elect to put this inside of your body. If the smell was serving in the Luftwaffe, the taste is being a prisoner of the Red Army in the most torturous Stalingrad detainment center. The oily heft substance rolls onto your tongue like mercury, it has a sort of adhesion to itself in oblong orbs, like how lava lamp particles flow. Each one shatters in an inky mess like T1000 and runs over your sweet and bitter zones imparting the worst disharmonious clanging on your tastebuds possible. It is so sweet that it tastes like straight wort at times, sickening fudge from eastern European countries with strange items mixed in like anise and wormwood mixed in because Hungarians don’t know any better. It is herbal and chocolatey, clashing at every opportunity, its like going down on the husky chocolatier at a humid Renaissance Festival and you are forever scarred.

I don’t know who can honestly open this and without hesitation enjoy their pour, even split 14 ways. It takes a very special type of beer drinker.
M: The mouthfeel is completely inexcusable and you would have to have a serious deviant palate to indulge in this fetish. Regular Dark Lord is sweet and toes the line of salinity but this is just bad, like Community College performance of The Iceman Cometh, unabashedly deficient in so many ways. The viscosity is so high that it feels like it was component blended with unboiled mash, this egg soup heft to it that creep to your molars like coffee phlegm. To close things out, imagine if someone mad dirty bombs using materials only found at a Bath and Bodyworks. Herbal disgusting cluster bombs detonating and taking out anyone within a partisan radius.
D: This could not be less drinkable if it were a solid object. The second you try it, you have had enough. I let this open up, I tried it cold, luke warm, there simply was no remedying this situation. It’s like, you can take all the underattenuated sips you want, it wont change the fact that you had sex with the busboy at Golden Corral. Some flaws are so apparent that they cannot be forgotten. This is one such beer like the 1982 Bellevue that is exceptional in its sheer harrowing Kafkaesque presentation. If you have ever drank too much gin one night and awoke the next morning with that juniper bush tingling your bile ducts, you will know this beer by the trail of dead it leaves in its wake.
In closing, the fact that this beer was receiving solid perfect scores from deceitful, capitalizing, landlocked traders is outright shameful. It is in many ways worse than lying about an infected beer and trading it, THREE FLOYDS MEANT FOR THIS TO TASTE THIS WAY. Please look at these reviews immediately logged in after Dark Lord Day and revel in the top tier shitlords attempting to hype this beer up, then watch the precipitous drop once the rest of the world was exposed to this hateful contagion:
http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/26/119203/
As much as I hate directing traffic to BA, that is where the top tier shitty content is generated and you simply must look at those ratings in cold consternation at the crushing pathos of the human condition. It is gut wrenching both figuratively and literally.
Hot on the heels of sifting through mountains of derivative garbage about the HARD WAY and PEACH PUMPKIN BEER, we have this week’s incendiary bullshit for the beer scene to address with baleful contemplation:
A verbose article groundlessly objecting to Gose, by an uninformed dipshit
Now we can already take it as a solid premise that Thrillist is THE go-to spot for hot beer news. It is undisputed that this isn’t some shitty newsletter turned clickbait factory that pushes the consumeristic drives of the late 20’s male demographic. This is a company that purchased JACKTHREADS to ensure beer nerds have nicely tailored vests, corduroy suits, and email services to refer/mine any user data to drive readers into purchasing more and more shit that they don’t want or need: We are talking a srs authority on all things beer.
So who did they get to tackle this hot-button issue of GOSE RUINING THE ENTIRE CRAFT BEER SCENE? Zarathustra himself, JOE FUCKING KEOHANE. Now if you know anything about the beer world, this guy is practically the Jean Van Roy of beer palates and the neo-Charlie Papazian of unbridled beer knowledge. Thrillist would accept nothing less for a matter of such grave ethos and uncompromising importance. GOSE IS RUINING AN ENTIRE MARKET SEGMENT AND A NEEDLESSLY LENGTHY SERIES OF SUBJECTIVE IMPRESSIONS WILL PROVE IT.
You knew Thrillist was serious, they don’t just toss content onto their site hoping to sell you shitty barware or gawdy apparrel, I mean, just look at the gravitas of this incredible exposé: THE 13 NAUGHTIEST THINGS YOU CAN DO IN ATLANTA
So we know the site has unimpeachable credibility in its intentions, but what about the monolith of authority, Mr. Joe Keohane, the master of all Cicerones?
Well not only does he have an extensive background in beer and beer culture (don’t worry, he doesn’t) he also has penned these gems:
A bunch of shit for Esquire magazine, none of which is about beer.
But we already know that Esquire themselves are the UNDISPUTED MASTERS OF BEER KNOWLEDGE
But enough about KNOWLEDGE and CREDENTIALS and EXPERIENCE, let’s examine why this one ignorant dumbass has predicated the death of all craft beer on hasty generalizations and opaque vapid observations. Let’s do that.
Alright so you get three solid entry paragraphs of fondant with a zero calorie breakdown of the history of craft beer, and then finally Mr. Keohane, grand vicar of all ales gives a sketchy history of the gose style. The entire article reads less like some derivative opinion piece and more like your mailman trying to tell you about this segment he saw on Hardcopy, and then does a shitty job of it. The author notes that he did some extensive research though, dont worry, “[he] went to three craft beer stores today in search of more varieties to cement (or rebut) [his] opinion, and the first two were completely sold out. The third had two left.”
Is the budget of the $1 billon Thrillist really that paper thin? IS the author really that fucking lazy? Then the entire article is drawn from a trip to three whole stores and then generalizations leveled predicated upon sampling TWO fucking goses? That would be like if I wanted to write a piece for Jezebel on male hegemony and privilege in the workplace and then I went to Barnes and Noble and looked at the covers of some Betty Friedan and Kate Millett books and called it a day.
At its core, the author lacks the one thing that you would expect from an article about, well, anything: authority. If this were a shitty livejounral entry entitled “TODAY I TRIED A SALTY THING I DIDNT LIKE” we could dual list it under homoeroticism and stupid uninformed rant that you could readily dismiss. Instead it is presented as a legitimate inquiry into an entire style of beer and the mechanics of destruction attendant to an entire economy and culture. Or wait, maybe it is a horrible broad generalization about shit that the author has not idea about. Maybe the title served to drive up referral links, responses, and watered down alexa traffic to pump this shitlord of a website trying to sell you tacky Ben Sherman messenger bags. NAH I AM SUER THAT JOE KEOHANE TRIED HIS BEST THAT’S WHAT MATTERS.
In case you couldn’t tell by his run on sentences, multiple independent clauses and irrelevant comparisons to other areas of culture: Joe Keohane doesn’t know shit about beer and his opinion is as irrelevant as a 9th grader’s stance on sub-prime mortgages.

THe thing you need to know about gose is, well, this is a Mumra toy. I trust you see the clear parallel.
So taking that with a grain of gose, you can read laughably faulty logic like “If Gose was that worthy of so much excitement and attention from America’s world-class brewers and drinkers, we simply would have gotten to it by now” with a wry smile like seeing a Nascar fan in the adult literacy school: he is just trying his best. Because that’s what craft beer is, a sweaty neckbeard with a clipboard just combing through old styles to revitalize, AND WE JUST DIDNT GET TO GOSE FAST ENOUGH. Shit why not “SAISONS HAVE BEEN AROUND FOR CENTURIES THEY HAVE HAD A CHANCE TO BECOME POPULAR BUT THEY ARENT AS POPULAR AS IPAS THEREFORE, HERE ARE 900 WORDS OF MISGUIDED BULLSHIT, MY OPINION PRESENTED AS LEGITIMATE RESEARCHED FACTS.”

Thrillist owner Ben Lerer discusses how to get people to buy shitty sneakers and how Joe Keohane desrves a raise
I don’t mind if someone is an ignorant dipshit, as long as they are entertaining. IF they are not entertaining, then at least be informative. If not informative, at least be well written. Joe Keohane is the furthest bottom right segment of the Punnett square of beer writing, comletely undesirable recessive traits: boring, unfunny, incorrect, shitty writing presented from a pulpit of stern earnestness. It really is as bad as the beer game gets.
I guess in being exceptionally shitty Joe Keohane can show us all how to draw tired irrelevant parallels to Prince and foodie culture, and in the sheer lack of merit, we are all edified by peering at how trifling beer journalism can be.
Ultra raer stout only $50, such a bargains for making the drain cleaning. Got those yankee candle tones, indian restaurant, escort spit and liquid shame.
highly recommends.