Alright, lest you think DDB has turned into some kind of LA brewery pimping mechanism let’s just get this out of the way off the top: This beer is good, but it’s not MINDBLOWING. However, it is certainly worthy of your contemplation as there are not many clear analogs to this unless you happen to have Black Currant Saison, SHBRL or Imperial Black Raz Bu falling off the shelves.

Go buy this shit here: 600 bottles, 3pp. So of course proxies are allowed.

So from the get go, this beer is fucking beautiful from the regal purple satin robes that drag across the fuchsia marble, to the crackly clouds of autumnal sunset capping the stillness.  Nana’s blush was streaked across your shoulder, that rosy farewell of sweet hibiscus and orangeblossom. She kept a bowl of hard semi-sour candies, berry and plum, adorning her oak table in the foyer.  How many afternoons did you watch those cumulus cirrus strata slide unceasingly into the horizon, cotton candy and Lisa Frank binders, glass tubes of rubaeous neon flicking imperceptibly at the roller rink?

Feel free to drag your fingertips across the glass of the fragrance counter, you belong here, flowerbomb and juicy pressed boysenberry. The stark produce arranged in tiny crates, that rush of red 5 attendant to fruit leather, smeared jelly, vines that make the air feel colder and more vibrant like fruit scented markers.

A touch of discomfort sets in along the bicuspids, the crackle of teeth whitening trays, acidic to basic interplay with the receding flesh, that electric pang in the canines, the dryness of gauze dripping with sticky juicy goodness.  A Tantalus paradigm is created, each sip pushing the vinous tide out further, depth creating the mild sharpness of an acidic undertow.  These are the things you endure for the squeezed goodness, tannins kicking like a Rockford Fosgate sub in a berrybandpassbox. The swallow is long and clean, no residual sweetness to the adolescent memories, just that crackly morning air of anticipation.  The first day of school for your next sip, endlessly, each sip warranting reflection but working against the impulse for being present in that farmers market moment.

It’s fucking sour and that kinda detracts from how well done the fruit profile is. While it is certainly no Southampton Black Raspberry Lambic, it is undeniably finely crafted and I cant think of many comparable entries that run a soft palm on your back while digging currant nails into your skin. If that’s the kind of Backpage action you are looking for, then go get ur berries stomped on tomorrow morning. Who am I to tell you how to live your life?

We all know people are just gonna say I have gorilla tits and that my toaster is shit and that DDB is a sellout for writing about anything and that being needlessly cryptic is a soft dodge for actual ciceronic insight.

I’ll be doing naked burpees on my balcony if anyone needs me.

If your memory goes back a few months in DDB time (eons for most cellar dwellers) I reviewed a series of Other Half beers and they were bigger firestarters than Prodigy.

So time passes and I wanted to check in on those old rakes to see how their philanderin ways were progressing, sadly they are not swinging haymakers in the first round like they usta.  This round is a series of sloppy, oddly placed jabs.  A lot of hits to the collarbone.

So the hopmasters enter the stout game and, suffice it to say, it is with mixed results.  This is certainly dialed in, cleanly attenuated but with enough residual malty body for the hops and mouthfeel to tapdance upon; but the dance is super offputting.  It’s like bumping and grinding with pelvic thrusts of phenolic nose, tobacco, Copenhagen, black permanent marker, fresh tagging, and the aftermath of a Mikkeller Black Hole tasting.

This is no syrupy bomb with brewing flaws, it lies in the conception of the beer.  Some people love this ultra continental European execution, dank meets leathery, like the back row of a Type O Negative show.  The Sepultura taste lingers with this overextraction of black patent malt tannins or someone intentionally oversparged this for an intentional bitterness.

when a brewer try to sell me sharpie stouts, they bout to catch this fade.

alright moving on to some hoppy shit, their classic wheelhouse, no way they can fuck this up:

Spoiler alert: they fucked this up. Unless this is the year 2008 and that isn’t supposed to be an Amber ale, that IPA looks like shit even by late 2000s east coast standards. Alright but even Just Outstanding still sometimes looks like that, how does it taste tho? You get this vegetal/arugula/shallot/baby kale sort of business that certainly shows no expense was spared in the hop bill but…where the fuck is the majesty from my prior review? This is THEIR THING. This would be like Kuhnhenn fucking up an Old Ale (except that sour one from last year which we dont talk about, remember.) The mouthfeel is creamy and FEELS like it should bang on 808 drums but it gets oily and patchouli-esque real quick.

Like Ulysses, I took a few sips of this and put it back on the shelf so I could be conversational about it but not have any real depth, but I will maintain like I finished the whole thing and now it is beneath me, but secretly I know that I don’t have the greco-classical/biblical/middle high ages background to appreciate…this…IPA.

But, thank god, this beer fucking rules:

Talk about a match made in fucking heaven.  The precision of Other Half, the gristy turbidity of Tired Hands, this beer is practically already foraging and making condescending comments about oyster sourcing.  The look is great and the oaty creaminess looks like Quaker Dabs.  The retention leaves a bit to be desired but, who gives a shit, this beer rules.  You get so much depth and a blast of Orange Julius, lemon meringue, sliced kiwi, there’s a classic grassiness like amarillo/simcoe but then it veers off into ultra-post-modern-hop territory with dactyllian hexameter pumping out ga AL ax EEE, and mo SAY eCK. EPIC STRUCTURING TO BE SURE.

I could drill this like a Megaman 3 boss and still get Wily. The mouthfeel is on point and coats like Chobani or tzatziki sauce with an oily finish that flexs on even the Trilliums and Treehouses of the world. If you don’t lock this beer down, you are the type of dude who does modified diamond pushups.  Get your shit together already it isn’t that hard, get off your hoppy knees, this is real ticker shit.

Some people get their shit together in waves.  dont judge, dont hate.

So whatever, 2 weak beers, 1 phenomenal beer.  Other Half has a .333 batting average, I dont even think Kirby Puckett had that

OH SHIT HE CLOSED IT WITH A REFERENCE TO KIRBY FUCKIN PUCKETT I TOL U DDB THE REALEST THEY IS WHO ELSE LIVE LIEK THIS!?!?!?!?!

  
The dbr doesn’t even have adjuncts, not authentically Floridian.

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.

  
While it’s tough to call this a hot deal at $90, it is a delicious, age stated, cask strength rye that is incredibly well integrated, tons of menthol and evergreen, it feels both more mature and more refined than the label would indicate. On par with that Willet 7 yr rye.

 So well done, Anjou pear and melon, dry Brett imparts a hay and lavender sort of melange.

I could drink gallons of this.

  
While these are both good, it’s tough to justify the cost of entry on the family preserves when the fruit stand is damn near equal.

Both exhibit that ultra clean juicy must of fresh pressed grapes, wet carpet and squeezeits on the nose. It is like purple Gatorade meets this light salinity that makes it wildly drinkable.

Avery Brewing has been a solid pillar in the craft beer scene for ages.  They boast a solid historical portfolio of classic mainstays, some solid wild ales, and largely accessible massive beers that convert pre-Cicerones (precerones) to hard fermented strains.  But historical relevance aside, what have they done for DDB lately? Usually they are the brewery that saves my ass when I have to go to a restaurant and they are my lifesaver in a list of predictable macro/boring craft options. They haven’t been acquired, they don’t have some apeshit aims to flood the world with mass produced wild ales, they haven’t tried to get their fans to finance a new brewery in Cologne: SO WHAT IS THEIR DEAL?

First and foremost they made a widely distributed BA Vanilla stout that costs like fucking eleven dollars. I added the nucleation. However, if you are expecting like madagascar flavored TWEAK or something, slow your roll.  This is pretty solid and low hanging fruit for the type of casual beer guy to get hooked: typical Avery shit. This is thin relative to the style, has a slick mouthfeel more akin to a big porter, little cling and sheeting and finishes with a minerality that boosts crushability but makes it less nuanced.

This reminds me more of like A&W cream soda than those mallow and brownie bombs you read about in last month’s Barrel aged vanilla stout shootout.

It is relatively svelte and presents some Dr. Pepper meets waffle cone type of notes. It isn’t a paradigm shift, nor does it have any discernible issues either. Then again this doesn’t go for like $800 on the secondary market.  Cost, availability and overall execution makes this a solid buy without clear analogue until Stone catches up in 2019 with the BRAND NEW VANILLA STONE IRS OMG SUCH INNOVATE.

You probably have had this a billion times or seen it for like $30 in some $$$ restaurant as their CROWN JEWEL in the reserve list next to like, Velvet Merkin or some marked up shit.  It is a massive boozy blast of rum and caramel with this tiny Cinderella pumpkin sidecar tacked on to reduce the power/weight ratio.  This is massively fusel when cold and had a thin body not unlike TWEAK that makes things unbalanced at first.  This is like if Bruery and Southern Tier had a forbidden love child, it would be this oddball that is hard not to appreciate. It is a fun adventure, like once or twice, but I don’t know who this beer is for.  Halloween fetishists with srs drinking problems. I can get behind that. Dat price point tho, yeesh.

This beer is a liquid nightmare crafted in the deepest recesses of your REM stage 4 insecurities. What is this?
“Barrel-aged Mexican-style barleywine that will use Agave syrup, chile peppers and malted smoked wheat.”

If you “NOPE” siren isn’t blaring, then strap in for the ride. The body is “Christian Bale in the machinist” thin, so the adjunct elements get to run rampant and fuck your mouth up without restriction.  The chili throws a flashbang and deadens all the bittering zones that could appreciate things, then agave syrup rolls in firing an SKS of sticky oddly syrupy turbinado sugars/rock candy/maple at all bystandards.  A touch of smoke lingers while you are trying to figure out what just happened, the gaunt “barleywine” aspect saunters through in a khaki jacket cleaning his fingernails, totally detached.

It was almost like someone thought Huna, except using Leon as a base would be a good idea, and also put his two weeks notice in while writing the recipe as a final swan song to the beer world before drowning himself in a britetank. It is unquestionably “original” but like that 1979 Japanese film HOUSE, it’s like WHAT IN THE FUCK IS GOING ON WHY IS THIS HAPPENING.

Ah this fucking classic gem. I loved this guy back in 2012 when I had it at the Blue Palms anniversary, suffice it to say the cans are still legit, but not as good as the draft version from the past.  The biggest difference is this KOOLs menthol/Vick’s Vapor Rub thing accompanying the wheaty gristy fruity fun.  It’s like everyone is having fun at a Jamba Juice co-op and your chain smoking uncle shows up talking about how “jet fuel cant melt steel beams” and dampens the mood.  This is a no brainer for the price point, mobile format, accessibility, and a welcome shredding on the White Rascal prototype.  This is such a logical extensive of what Avery does that I could see so many of these being crushed on Eliminator boats, in movie theaters, at High School football games.

This is beer made for patently irresponsible behavior.  The sweetness of the fruit and creamy whip of the wheat makes these so drillable without ever giving you pause: THE IDEAS JUST COME TO YOU. If someone bigleagues this and suggests something ridiculously different like OH WELL CASEY PEACH FRUIT STAND IS BETTER, that dude has a thumb dick and you dont need to listen to people like that.

I braced myself for this one thinking it would be the habanero mother of all agave noted above but this was SHOCKINGLY FUCKING TASTY.  This is essentially an old ale, aged in bourbon barrels, with ginger added.  But get this: THE GINGER DOESNT COMPLETELY FUCK EVERYTHING UP.  This is like if you made a Moscow mule with cane rum instead of boring vodka.  There’s all the booziness attendant to the old ale base with oak, leather, sugar daddies, but then OH SHIT CANADA DRY ROLLS UP.  The wasabi ginger opens up the nostrils like Blenheim’s ginger ale.  I can’t think of anything exactly like this in recent memory and this shines in any tasting as this beautiful chimera of palate stretching.

It feels more cocktail than beer in many aspects and if you ever wanted to drink an old fashioned on a sick day, here’s your hot toddy.

There you go.  That’s what Avery is up to.  Their anniversary beers are consistently a complete fucking trainwreck of dizzying proportions, but they constantly chamber the cartridge and pop china lake rounds on people below. They serve an unwavering function in the beer world that, unlike Rogue, hasn’t gone to total shit over the years.

brb fielding all these DDB IS A FUKN SELL OUT accusations for this falsely glowing review. typical shit.

Well, the time has come to finally wrangle this wayward brewery and take it to task under full halogen examination.  For those of you who aren’t apprized of the background of this brewery, it has a dicey history of sorts completely unrelated to the actual quality of the beer itself.  They had a bottle share fiasco that was met with much derision, Yelp reviews to accompany it, a general circumspect cloud of speculation concerning the clear Macro-esque/Golden Roady sort of goals of this brewery, the oddly huge brewing system with no brewer for a notable period, competition with the Full Pint 8th anniversary event, and a coin purse allegedly financed by marijuana dispensary cash.

All of that shit is before the doors even opened. No one had tasted a drop until last weekend.  So let’s set all of that speculative bullshit aside and let’s look at the place and the beer itself. IF YOU CANNOT FORGIVE YOUR PREJUDICES THEN I ASK THAT YOU DO NOT SIT ON MY BEER JURY.

The space is in this leaky industrial area of LA that could lovingly be termed “Gotham District” or “I AM LEGEND zone” or “Triad meeting place.”  The space is undeniably beautiful and one of the most polished tasting rooms that SoCal has to offer in terms of rich history, attention to detail, and a massive brewing system placed front and center.

Another item of note is that the fanbase is wildly diverse and there was little in the way of cargo shorts, beer work shirts, crocs, and fedoras.  This is not a beer nerd’s haven, this is a spot for normal angelenos with no Fedex accounts and perhaps no Untappd badges. That is refreshing as shit and the energy of the place was great.  The event was run smoothly albeit NO TASTERS and every serving was a 16oz plastic cup. I get it, lines are shitty and that would be a crazy amount of glassware, but man many of these beers I simply didnt need a straight up pint, but that’s really an issue with my own self control I suppose.

There’s all kinds of wacky dick tracy shit going on and people at the event seemed interested in having a fun time instead of actively contemplating the middle of the road fermented offerings.

From a beer perspective, there simply isn’t a lot of meat on the bone for DDB purposes.  All of the beers are pretty good.  I mean if you enjoy every sleepy iteration of a 001 CA Ale strain then, sure, you will like this place.  The beers are dialed in without discernible flaw, but while sipping their american barleywine I felt it was unremarkable in medical parlance: I have no remark.  In some circles merely avoiding DDB ire would be enough to celebrate, but the wares probably don’t seek to cotton favor with the soulless husks that DDB services.  The brewer from Maui Brewing unquestionably knows how to brew simple/soporific beers of this scope and does it well, they hit every benchmark for the type of Golden Road demographic that they undoubtedly are catering towards.

My favorite beer was, fittingly, the least assuming, the most simple/straightforward Iron Triangle ale.  a sub-5% abv melange of predictable yeast and two row. Maybe like chinook, but it is was appropriate that a brewery playing to such a wide crowd would make an inoffensive beer that I loved because I could forget about it like my copy of Nintendogs 3DS.

One eerie aspect was this feeling like the whole place was erected merely as a vehicle to be sold faster than a DotCom startup.  There was this detached inauthentic execution, like I was being present a procedurally generated bill of goods that was crafted for some corporate purpose.  It is a difficult zeigeist to explain.  I think this is the best way to explain it:

No sooner did Iron Triangle open their doors than they signed with InBev subsidiary distribution. The public barely had a moment to utter the words “Craft br-” and they were already posturing themselves for an expedited Golden Road cash grab. This is to say nothing of the panache and aplomb of the PR moves.

In sum, sure go have a pint here, or don’t.  I don’t really give a shit either way.  Chances are if you read DDB this isn’t an issue you were actively contemplating anyway.