Fort George has just dropped a forgettable banana stout, a pretty solid black lager and a straight up exceptional barrel aged barleywine. These are the breweries that I love.

It is too tall an Order to expect one place to just crush it at everything. It’s like a game of Sid Meier’s Civilization and places that drop all their points into a saison tech tree fascinate me. That lack of “swiss army knife approach” is weirdly a symbol of quality to me. Kuhnhenn and Pelican brewing warm my heart because sometimes they will release the absolutely god tier example of a style, then youll try their scotch ale and be like what is even happening here.

I enjoy Fort George’s 3 Ways and their hoppy offerings, if that’s all they did, it would be a nice Joey Tribbiani flare that doesn’t hold up over time but you appreciate. Failing at a ba banana stout is almost a win for me. In crafting a boring, muted, pithy fleshy potassium stout it tells me you have other priorities.

Their priorities, like most, are shifting to lagers which seem to be improving notable. Their Dismal Nitch enters territory as treacherous as its namesake, drowning Lewis and Clark in riparian blackness. It leans a bit too hard into the specialty malts and ends up lightly burnt, and has a lingering bitterness on the finish that feels more robust porter in a way than Schwarzbier but I like where their submerged head is at. It’s like when your least interesting friend starts talking about “PASSIVE STREAMS OF INCOME” and you know their podcast playlist is an absolute hellscape.

Etymology is very good. It takes adept blending, amazing base beer, and cask management to merge the dark fruit aspects to temper the English sweetness in a boozywine. The black barleywine component leverages what I didn’t like about Dismal and uses it for good, adding crazy depth to the hoppy Ology. Both would be deficient alone but it’s like when Blow Friend meets Day Trader friend at a Bachelor party. The prune and port has a fusel grape tobacco aspect that is pulled in line by beta acids and brownie edge pieces.

The synthesis is substantial, fruit leather Clarissa is redeemed against caramel Lovelace. Such is Fort George’s catalo

Oh man the new 2013 Parabola is a black licorice bomb and baby palates are about to be shook. In a world where glucophiles measure stout quality on the Robitussin scale, leaning hard into Good and Plenties is glorious.

To be clear, I really enjoyed this but I suspect A1C ballers will not. This is an icy page straight out of the Scandinavian playbook. Midwest and Floridian brewers hardly touch black patent malt and barely know what a sharpie smells like. Firestone pushes it so far English that is goes straight into Narke DUNDERSALT territory.

I like to imagine Matt Brynildson standing in front of the massive automated HAL brewsystem trying to input the parameters for what americans want out of a stout:

“Ok computer, the FG should be around 22 plato”

“ERROR: you have input the starting gravity”

“COMPUTER, remove pastry safety”

“ERROR: you will be creating batter not safe for human consumption”

Matt: “DID I STUTTER”

Parabola since its inception has been on the lighter bodied side of things in the current climate. However, this is such an intense blast of roast, fennel, wormwood, and anise. Instead of the brownie and chocolate the label touts, we are whisked away into a land of tarragon and this minty chill of camphor. The cask is gentle and structures this all lovingly.

In the car industry there’s this idea of “homologation car” where you have to build 2,500 street legal examples for sale to make a race car version. Parabola increasingly feels like their homologation car. It isn’t chasing some hype, it is widespread, probably made in Missouri under some other Duvel brand, and can be blended to create any manner of profiles with the endless number of stocks they can pull from. But this, this is intentional.

For every Dreamwood and insane Firestone component blend, Parabola is the old standby ripe for crazy modification. The Corolla GR of the stout world. Not the craziest in the lineup but furtively waiting for enhancement.

Most baby palates will get rocked by this vintage but it is a true licorice canary in the coalmine for who truly has that UK palate.

Kansas City Chiefs kicker, Harrison Butker, missed a field goal before the end of the first quarter at Super Bowl 2023. An unenviable job, simple and succinct. Put it between the uprights so we can move on with our lives.

It’s the tasks where you “have one job” that are the most maligned. Show up, review some beers, provide adjectives, “bUt diD yOu liKe iT” and give a numerical score. The thing missing from simple tasks is context.

This straightforward beer from Modist seems, on paper, to be transparent. DDH New England IPA, the descriptors practically lining up in a perfunctory way. But in failing to do this “properly” Modist made something exceptional.

There is an inaccessibility to tastes. I don’t mean just subjective experience, the “thing in itself” or anything like that, I mean communicating how a thing is. This beer isn’t hazy. It doesn’t feel NE and leans into this liminal space of IPAs occupied by the likes of Bissel Swish and McIlhenny Muntz where, in failing to adhere to set guidelines, it exceeds the genre it occupies. It’s a shaded penumbra, a rhizomey venn diagram.

Just kick the ball. Just provide the adjectives. On a long enough timeline every descriptor will be reused and tumbled enough to be smoothed down by the endless waves of appraisal. How many times do we have to hear “JUICY” and esoteric citrus imagery until using those words is in itself performative. This beer isn’t that. It’s off-base and unknowable in the way that we no longer have a shared experience. Modist screwed this up in the best way.

It’s not green or resin driven, it isn’t orange gelato or belini, there’s no cribbed terms from Untappd. The average NEIPA fan is the type of guy who finds out about Jesus during a Superbowl commercial. The shared fetishism of pulpy tribalism. Modist instead here made some halfway house of silky oatmilk, Cuties, rosemary, Hi-C, split kindling and dried apricots. It finishes with sandalwood and lavender. In disappointing the vapid NEIPA enthusiast, they put it right in my uprights.

The only interpersonal access we have is context. I can barely contextualize this unique hybrid but it is delicious. We all use birth control on Valentine’s day to prevent polluting the world with more Scorpios

PLIGHNEY SEASON IS UPON US. Once groundhog day hits, every bottleshop employee winces in pain as the Men’s Health and Esquire magazine shitdetorials come sliding down the ten-cents-per-word chute.

“No I’m sorry, we don’t have it. Yes it is on draft. No probably not here in Omaha. No we wont be getting bottles. Yes you did see a bottle. Oh Forbes told you it would be sold online, no we do not carry it. Have you ever shopped at this store before?” CLICK

A tale as old as time. Inaccessibility breeds eroticism. Your crush has a filthy apartment and nudes of their ex backed up to the cloud. Sometimes though, the hype shines through those sad clouds of hype and warms your heart like a Midwest mom with a Karen cut when she gets deep into extreme couponing. Pliny the Younger continues to impress.

My rose tinted goggles of the past remember more resin, more crystal, a pang of malty sweetness. The problem with false nostalgia is that it devalues the TIPAs of the present. Nipples were once erect for Avery Maharaja, now it is mandatory for a brewery to have a slushee machine. Reconciling the two is rough.

TIPAs are flawed from the inception. The increased fusel note has to be offset by ::checks notes:: increasingly resinous C-hop additions /turns page OR quad dry hopping. Ah the perfect springtime sipper. Pliny the Younger does this masterfully. Instead of amplifying Pliny the Younger, which is better, it feels like Super Soldier Serum Blind Pig, which is better than both.

You get the clean crushability of double digit abv negligence. The company car is revoked. Paternity tests are ordered. It’s like a evergreen scavenger hunt to make your life more difficult. But in the mid palate alcohol burn is this magical zested clementine, Polo Sport clean pine, a lit grapefruit peel garnish and this raked foliage aspect to the closer like a crisp rocket and mandarin summer salad. The merger is bad for you emotionally, socially, but edifying as a ritual.

You sit and press cntrl+shift+N and suddenly the rest of the clean lager beer world slips away into a furtive incognito mode of massive west coast desires. No one needs to know how the firewood is split. PTO is made to be used.

American wild ales are justifiably maligned as they currently stand. They are too god damn sour and even places that start out elegant push morphology to its limits and end up with absolute piss vinegar cultures after a few propagations.

Like Daisy’s dock, there are still a few incredible examples of hope pushing my boat towards that lead me to utter those binary, coronating words: I finished the entire bottle. With most AWAs you can’t get close to drilling a full bottle. The GERD and dyspeptic reflux hits and the gelid sting of retracting gumlines sets in well before you go back for seconds. Just blame the fruit, then release a double fruited version.

Jester King enjoys this calm hill country repose. The brim of a tattered trucker hat surveys an entire amusement park of Texas devilry and bemusement, goats and rock climbing walls and bachelorette parties and triple wide strollers, lifted Tundras, insufferable techie transplants regaling onlookers with tales of how much square footage they NOW enjoy and well once they got the renters out, I BOUGHT IT AND MOVED TO AUSTIN RIGHT AWAY. So there’s this bat bridge-

But god damn it, this beer is magnificent. I used to rail against regular Nocturn because it was slightly too puckering. This blast of cool mint and jasmine in the gin barrels polishes these berries like some gorgeous garnet stone. Six pounds per gallon is so absurd, but the JK cultures ferment to BELOW 1.00 so it never feels flabby or acetoney . They made 600 bottles of this and I shook my head when I saw it in a massive 750ml bottle for $40. Then I crushed the entire thing instantly.

I swear this is a typo but this was…11 bottles per person? Maybe they just knew how refreshing these sour patch kids mixed with raspberry mojito would be, it’s a spa day and preserves are pressed against your supple skin. Finish is Barrolo and rose petal with currant and English-comedy dry and lingers like your unemployed friend who starts her day at 3:30 p.m.

I used to prefer Grim Harvest and this blows that out of the water, a style defining accomplishment in a field I was losing faith in. Run over these Texas berries with your Bronco Raptor, Texas daddy.

Normal Coppercraft is fairly trifling, NAS, forgettable huskwater. It’s fifty bucks and they take 4 year astringent corn solvent and add a teaspoon of 11 year bourbon, the classic Little Book 4 strategy. It’s not good and you can completely ignore it.

When I heard about the single barrel cask strength I was like oh good an even more powerful worse version that costs twice as much, sign me up, stomp on my stave.

I was completely wrong, this bottle goes off like a middle aged man when you add automatic gratuity to a table of 5. It’s MGP, but it’s not stepped on, 110 proof, and 9 years for $80.00.

There are 9 year picks that are far worse that cost more. Widow Jane is complete dogshit at this level and not remotely as good. Tiktok has been accused of “heating” and manually boosting mediocre content, well this is the opposite of that, taking things you thought were janky and are actually good.

The bottle for no reason at all weighs as much as a telecaster. You have to actively push to knock it over so don’t use it as a decanter in that Junior High stage play filled with iced tea. Branding is stock and as wince inducing as the “laugh” in Final Fantasy X. But the content itself is good and no one believes you. Like Chrono Cross.

This has so much Bit O Honey and round woodwind tones to the nose. You get Teddy Grahams and wafflecone with a touch of coriander. The taste has such a robust and loving embrace of honey biscuit, feeling on those sculpted warm black pepper and raspberry lats, the most neglected of muscle groups. There’s a reckless intensity to it like people who are legitimately mad about Splash Mountain closing, but you feel safe.

The swallow is a bit short but intense, crack of Dr. Pepper and latticed crust. It should cost more than this but who is actively seeking out some mid tier Michigan bourbon? The same type of person who thinks the interior of a Pagani is nice and fancy. It panders to ignorance but this time pounded out on every distilled cylinder.

One of the burdens of creating something amazing: you are fated to compete with your own work thereafter. Success is a gilded cage. There are 9100 breweries in the United States that would love to be held as the god tier standard for anything, let alone then be judged against their own catalog.

It’s a unique benefit and curse. Right when DBVSOJ was announced people were already pissed off. PROXIES ALLOWED BUT I LIVE RIGHT OFF KEDZIE IN AN INDUSTRIAL WAREHOUSE. This is a beer flipped by people who don’t even drink barleywine who are upset that other further away people will get barleywine. Then people were gobsmacked to learn it’s hard to buy something online competing against thousands of other people. Then they were mad they would sell it at the brewery itself. Then they were mad that a few ounces hit Tavour. It’s all sweaty palms being wiped on Tilly’s cargo shorts all the way down.

The real problem is sequelitis. How can you improve upon the masterpiece that is VSOJ? In this instance, we have a Godfather II/Empire Strikes Back/House Party II situation where the sequal somehow surpasses the original. One of the only flaws of VSOJ was its pure unwieldy cask profile that was fusel gatekeeping for baby palates.

If you are a casual haze enjoyer setting down your Fidens to see what this barleywine craze was about, you got sweet barrel chin music that floored you. I figured DB treatment would exacerbate this issue. I was wrong. The additional rye casking for ANOTHER 18 months imparted so much spice, fruitcake, Golden Grahams, Hot Tamales, and marble cake that is offset the fury of the bourbon casks.

The body usually feels thinner with extended casking and people complain. This isn’t the case, it breaks in Twizzlers PullnPeel waves of Sazerac Bananas Fosters, the intense heat tapering into a worn baseball mitt filled with Raisinettes. More is both more and less.

We have children and hope they surpass us and are ultimately humbled in all that they do. DBVSOJ has generational wealth but imparts a comforting rub on VSOJ’s leathery shoulders. He walked so DB could run and face all the complaints of entitled Chicago resellers, with dignity.

At least it wasn’t born Ann.

3 Sheeps Brewing Company released Deeply Rooted, and it is not good. They also released Triple Barrel Wolf, which is absolutely amazing. The old Wisconsin compromise.

The biggest issue with Deeply Rooted is the adjuncts: orange peels and Ecuadorian vanilla. I know beer nerds with 3 roommates suddenly become experts on geographic bean sourcing. But like that surfboard in your Milwaukee studio apartment: you truly don’t need it. This is a case of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

3 Sheeps is clearly gifted in barrel aging and this grand marnier wafflecone derails all of that. The underlying beer is likely very good and then they hit up the taste equivalent of Auto Zone and just ruin this stock barleywine. The result is pithy zest vents on the sides, sticky marshmallow seat covers, tacky pastry spinner hubcaps that entirely distract. Barleywine as a style almost never needs additives and it is almost never improved by them.

When I see adjuncts on a barleywine label it’s like seeing “SEE CASHIER” on a gas pump, I am straight up leaving.

Imagine my surprise when the triple barrel wolf enters the picture and picked me up lovingly by the nape of my neck and made me a part of the “you’re getting nothing done tomorrow” pack. This beer is so tightly balanced, excessive but with traction control. Sometimes, multiple casking feels like the Reply Guy of the beer world like, damn ok you want our attention fine you have it.

This doesn’t need to bank on its multichambered experience. It leans into this “Wisconsin Svelte” execution you see from Central Waters. At first it feels insubstantial, but then you realist how much macaroon, lava cake, Jordan almonds, and Monkey bread is occurring. It is a kick to the obliques how many waves of cask massaging are occurring here. I love that disbelief moment where you taste this and then re-read the label like some idiot who threw the package away and there’s more microwaving instructions.

It is extremely spicy, hot, warming, molten ganache in your chest, chocolate rejection to the Sadie Hawkins dance. I don’t know how this same brewery made both of these beers but I want to shear this sheep again.

Canopy is fine.

3 Sheeps Brewing Company released Deeply Rooted, and it is not good. They also released Triple Barrel Wolf, which is absolutely amazing. The old Wisconsin compromise.

The biggest issue with Deeply Rooted is the adjuncts: orange peels and Ecuadorian vanilla. I know beer nerds with 3 roommates suddenly become experts on geographic bean sourcing. But like that surfboard in your Milwaukee studio apartment: you truly don’t need it. This is a case of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

3 Sheeps is clearly gifted in barrel aging and this grand marnier wafflecone derails all of that. The underlying beer is likely very good and then they hit up the taste equivalent of Auto Zone and just ruin this stock barleywine. The result is pithy zest vents on the sides, sticky marshmallow seat covers, tacky pastry spinner hubcaps that entirely distract. Barleywine as a style almost never needs additives and it is almost never improved by them.

When I see adjuncts on a barleywine label it’s like seeing “SEE CASHIER” on a gas pump, I am straight up leaving.

Imagine my surprise when the triple barrel wolf enters the picture and picked me up lovingly by the nape of my neck and made me a part of the “you’re getting nothing done tomorrow” pack. This beer is so tightly balanced, excessive but with traction control. Sometimes, multiple casking feels like the Reply Guy of the beer world like, damn ok you want our attention fine you have it.

This doesn’t need to bank on its multichambered experience. It leans into this “Wisconsin Svelte” execution you see from Central Waters. At first it feels insubstantial, but then you realist how much macaroon, lava cake, Jordan almonds, and Monkey bread is occurring. It is a kick to the obliques how many waves of cask massaging are occurring here. I love that disbelief moment where you taste this and then re-read the label like some idiot who threw the package away and there’s more microwaving instructions.

It is extremely spicy, hot, warming, molten ganache in your chest, chocolate rejection to the Sadie Hawkins dance. I don’t know how this same brewery made both of these beers but I want to shear this sheep again.

Canopy is fine.

I will give you a moment to pick yourself up after falling out of that time machine to dust the pacman yeast off of your JNCO jeans. What a god damn ancient oddity we have here. Rogue’s flagship beer for 3 decades, a Maibock, now pivots to…a west coast IPA.

We can dunk on Rogue donut beers, or wince-inducing Sriracha Stout, but there’s something enduing about picking an obscure style as your flagship beer and sticking to it for 30 years. The IPA oddly merges the old caramel backbone days of the Bush administration with the dystopian Citra, Mosaic, and Belma present. Scooby Doo rhizome tones.

I do love their refusal to bow to customer demands. Having a Maibock as a flagship beer is amazing and that’s why I enjoy the OG Dead Guy Ale. $14 a six pack, old school west coast IPA in the modern era is bold in a world of RTD cocktail domination. This has that resinous aserose aspect, tangelo pith, Duraflame log and Green Polo cologne thing, with a sweetness underlying to add balance.

This pivot is fascinating and I love this Glass Onion disruption. Give us more Dead Guy styles from the crypt. Zombie Roggenbiers in 2023. This beer rolls over and asks “SO WHAT ARE WE?”

It’s for people just getting along in their day who have a bit of mental bandwidth to seek out a moment of peace. It’s not their entire life. It’s a danky cord of firewood and Tom Selleck in Blue Bloods. I like how Rogue is zfg, doesn’t date its beers, doesn’t price them to try to undercut anyone else and still sells insane volume. They sent me a single can in a tiny coffin filled with dirt. Insane decadence.

The smell is a Dead Guy callback, little earthy meet pepper flakes hop presence, taste leads with a McDonalds biscuit meets McGriddle grist, middle body is stripped like its watching its macros, grapefruit pith, the hop presence feels more spice/pine driven to allow the malty midswallow to shine.

It’s for people who say “im entering my villain era” and then just play Draft Kings and order Wingstop. Don’t think, it’s just thin crisp malt and warming hops. It’s the FF9 Tropical armor that lowers your stats, but you still seek it out.

Happy Dead Guy Day, Manny Calavera.