Next up in “Lets Go Visit Los Angeles Breweries Today, O K Fine” (LGVLABTOKF) we swing up the I-5 and travel to the mythical land of Burbank, home to an IKEA hive, the Martial Arts history museum, and Verdugo West Brewing Company. At the outset, some might be confused that this not only has nothing to do with Ryan Sweeney’s Verdugo, but there isn’t a Verdugo east, either.

The brewery is nestled in this forgotten area of abutting downtown Burbank that exists in the cold auspicces of the 5 freeway and the 2001 monolith that is the navy blue harbinger of homogenous consumerism, the IKEA compound. It’s not dicey, it feels more like a game without the resources to spawn NPCs. It is profoundly empty with the exception of the music spilling from the taproom and sheet metal plants and fish suppliers. The brewery itself is immaculate, down to business, with crowlers and bottles to go, knowledgeable servers, and a melange of consumers from locals, to beer nerds, to Toluca Lake dipshits.

The reasons this hit my radar last year were twofold: first, Chris Walowski the old head brewer from Smog City was running the hypothetical brewdeck and second, they came out the gates with a canned 12.5% american barleywine, Bear Temper. I respect that panache and gall to brave beer nerds by embracing a powerful, difficult style, in packaging out the gates. The lineup is decidedly Smogesque in its ironic clean focus, even down to the massive barleywine and the haze offerings. The barleywine is pretty solid and offers great malty structure albeit with the expected two handed wallop of warrior/chinook boil additions attendant to non barrel aged barelywine. I hope to god this is in casks because it would be a beautiful canvas to shoot ropey caramel loads upon.

One thing I have to mention, and I am serious, people believe this brewery is haunted. I am not fucking joking. There’s a news story about how some phantasm shows up and I feel like maybe he meant to lurk incorporeal at Phantom Carriage, or maybe the sheer amount of pornograpy being shot in Burbank has melted the brains of locals but, here we are, fucking brewery ghosts.

Their anniversary saison “Turning One” was dead fucking flat like tepid apple juice, but dont worry bottle conditioned bottles are available to go if that 5oz taster of uninspired floral juice and acidity weren’t enough for you. The quarterly IPA was their best beer and it was just pretty good, perfect body and creamy whip O Bang structure, but the taste itself has this crackle of insubstantial Theraflu and Sunny D. I could drink quite a bit of it, but that’s more of a longevity versus depth praise. They had IPAs both on cask and on nitro which was really rad, a page from the old Julian Schrago playbook and the variety is really cool. Their plum sour was shoulder shrug compelling and everything was unremarkable in the classic sense that I have no remarks. There’s cornhole, there’s pretty solid lagers, you can order burritos into the tasting room. What more do you want? LA has 65 breweries and I am sure this will fall somewhere above the median, but they are like 9 months old, calm your tits.

LGVLABTOKF LA Brewery Rankings, this sneaks in and knocks off the top competitors at present, taking the NUMBER ONE SPOT FORM THE FOUR HERETOFORE SUMMARIZED:

1. Verdugo West Brewing

2. Dry River Brewing

3. Boomtown Brewery

4. Indie Brewing Company

Also the floccboi shirt sale ends tomorrow

Teespring.com/floccboi

Next up on “Let’s Go Visit Los Angeles Breweries Today O K Fine” (LGVLABTOKF) we will travel to the Arts District/Wealthy Childless Professional Loft district to BOOMTOWN BREWERY. I have to admit that I accidentally ignored this brewery and their products for, conservatively, since they opened until now. Be it their name which reminds me of Lord Hobo BOOM SAUCE, to the $375.00 club AT OPENING, to the logo which looks like they took Modern Times and Rare Barrel logos to a fiver artist: I just disregarded these seemingly ubiquitous cans.

This tasting room is pure fucking chaos. When you walk up to a tasting room and there is a bouncer, you know that the four walls can barely contain the fuckery lurking within like a Mimic chest. The inside of this place reminds me of that scene in Pinnochio where Stromboli takes them to that island where the boys destroy art and turn into donkeys. It’s pure madness. Darts abutting shuffleboard, sandwiched in between cornhole, and IDK wood paneled walls and foosball. There could have been lasertag, I didn’t check. In the midst of all this waterparkesque disarray, there’s low tables and leather couches, wood accents and skylights. It’s jarring to take in.

Thankfully the beers will not draw your attention to their quality, so you are free to take it all in. Lime Light was gently carbed and perfect for drinking while putting together Gundam models or any activity where you don’t need to focus on what you are drinking. There are innumerable riffs on this lightly malty, mid 2000s amarillo and CA ALE STRAIN WLP001 MOTHERFUCKERS. Nose Job is the same, except a touch more watery instead of crystal driven, with simcoe tonez instead. Neither will make you look up from your Dan Brown novel or whatever boring people do. Mic Czech was very very good and oddly the least “noteworthy” style on the board was absolutely captivating. I almost didnt pay attention to the mealy mouthed kid who sent Jenga pieces akimbo towards the drunk USC bros. This was exceptional and it made me think maybe they have some kind of Highland Park chops but the rest of the catalogue felt so phoned in, that the recipes may have been procedurally generated by a cicerone scraper bot. The valley beyond is the same thing. It’s all pretty good. A Nissan Altima is pretty good. The Baltimore Orioles are pretty okay I guess.

I always see people crushing these cans. Michael Gabriel loves this shit. I never understood it, now I do. This is for people who dont give a shit, but dont want to be perceived as not <i> knowing </i> shit. This is their market segment, feigned lack of indifference.

This sneaks in solidly mediocre between our two prior contenders, which is wholly appropriate. Here’s the LAeaderboard:

1. Dry River Brewing

2. Boomtown Brewery

3. Indie Brewing Company

Also the floccboi shirt sale ends tomorrow

Teespring.com/floccboi

Next up on the “Let’s Go Visit Los Angeles Breweries Today Ok Fine” (LGVLABTOKF) Journey is Dry River Brewing. This taproom is located conveniently across the street from Indie Brewing Company in a part of LA by the dry canal river that resembles something akin to Gotham City meets Blighttown.

Dry River Brewing has a dangerous ass entry with a step that surely someone has eaten shit upon before and you are greeted like a Myst game: shitloads of doors in a 300sf tasting room. I seriously counted seven doors to various places, Resident Evil houses have more logical layout. It feels like you snuck in somewhere you aren’t allowed. It’s wood paneled with all kinds of doors and sliding apparatus and empty bottles with flowers in them. The marriage of rustic cabin and “boiler room couture” is odd. Let’s get this out of the way, this brewery is fucking expensive, and it doesn’t really make sense.

I ordered a hibiscus saison Michelada and two tasters and my bill was like $24. I got those sweet WordPress clickbuxxx tho so I am not tripping, no expense is too much for me to experience middling tasting rooms. There is nothing standard occurring here. Usually that’s some superlative being lauded out like a dollop of sour cream in cold borscht but I mean this literally. The tasting board reads like a parody of beer nerd browser stroke material with no harbor for normal palates. Here’s an example, I ordered Jagarundi, a $10 pour of stein beer with cocoa and cold brew. None of those elements were a muted aspect of one another, it was a Walmart shouting match between the three elements. It was like A1 steak sauce and bitter oversteeped PEET’S classic burnt roast and edge brownines on the finish. It was bizarre and not in a fun Ale Apothecary “LOL PAUL ARNEY IS SO WACKY” kind of way. William Guayabo was a mouth shattering sour guava beer.

My salivary glands were getting bombed like tropical Dresden and burned out along the mandible. I think this was like a $4 taster so I pushed through it. My $12 saison michelada was legitimately excellent. It was beautiful, perfectly balanced, super refreshing and the tartness matched the Lucas and tamarind flawlessly. I would return to this hot, wooden tasting room just for this radical mixology. Bridges was a pretty solid IPA and ultra refreshing. So their misses coupled with their hits gets them on base. The entire feel of the place is super welcoming and the staff is ultra genial and you feel as though you could strike up a conversation with anyone there. Instead I was a futrive prick sweating in his Rag and Bone shirt and got into my M and left with my stupid fucking judgments, my myopic determinations, ready to serve them up to tens of thousands of people based upon a total of 30 ounces consumed. That’s how I get down, dripping in sweat and latent cowardice, pumping impressions from on high with zero accountability, like anyone gives a fuck about DDB.

So this brewery unseats Indie as the BEST LA BREWERY BY WAY OF LIMITED SAMPLING:

1. Dry River brewing

2. Indie Brewing Co.

Making myself less welcome everywhere I go, with each passing post.

People criticize old DDB for not leaving the house enough. The trappings of living in an ivory tower and emptying the dump bucket of ferm privilege out the window of conceit has its shortcomings. So to change this, I am embarking on a bold new initiative to go to Los Angeles breweries, known and unknown, and complain about them, with mild shellacking of praise as an offset.

First up we have Indie Brewing Company, which is a name so generic that it sounds like a company in a sitcom or a trifling romc with copyright litigation averse lawyers. The logo is like a hop with a mowhawk or something, so maybe it is music driven. On that note, the music in this place is blaring and fucking terrible. I know music is subjective but this wasn’t like “oh I dont prefer U2” this was like they played stock music from early 2000s Cinemax films or something. Extremely loudly. Everyone there seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely. There’s TV’s and like a little lounge area, and inexplicable astroturf on every surface. The beers take that same threadbare co-opting of hip hop lyrics that is endemic to everything west of Monkish and east of J Wakefield. FIND THAT JUICY DOUBLE/ DON’T CALL IT A COMEBACK, etc. you can cite any fragmentary rap lyric from the Clinton administration and apply for TTB approval. How about “NOW IM SWITCHING MY MIND BACK INTO FREAK MODE” altbier bc LOL remember “regulate?” We fill growlers.

Anyway, the beer is fine. It hits that type of GPA that will keep your parents off your back and get you into a brewery State College where you can major in like polisci or something equally uninspiring. The barleywine is Bad n’ Boozie brutal from every angle. These unbalanced TIPA tier hop bombs of malty IEDs are exactly what give busted myopic palates a disfavorable conception of barleywines. Those instarones who are always like “WELL I HAD HOG HEAVEN ONCE SO I THINK I KNOW WHAT I-” Haus of Haze was fine. If you’ve had any innumerable bag cereal versions of god tier haze, you know what to expect, lack of depth, wispy carb and sustain. It’s a Pass/Fail grade and doesn’t affect anything. Pacific Kolsch Highwya was the best thing I had from them and it was fucking great. I would drink gallons of this, but I’m sure people just pass right over that one in lieu of other yawn inducing beers like Get Wit It.

The coolest part of this taproom was this dog.

This dog was just chilling in the heat, enduring, living his best life. I felt a strong connection with this dog while I was trying to just stumble through 5 painful ounces of lysol barleywine. Each of us enduring this journey together watching as no fewer than five dudes wearing Dragon Ball Z shirts sat at a picnic table. He understood me more than Indie Brewing Company ever could.

I will be ranking all of the breweries in my “Let’s Go Visit Los Angeles Breweries Today Ok Fine” (LGVLABTOF) journey, as a result of being the first, Indie Brewing Company gets to claim the top spot. The best brewery in LA. You heard it here first folks, by way of default:

1. Indie Brewing Company (Blighttown, CA)

My relationship with Florida at large is exceedingly complicated. It’s like how I feel about literature from Philip Roth: there are so many aspects I find offputting or culturally backward, but then there are so many pockets of pure brilliance. The two aspects are difficult to reconcile. That dystopian waterphallus penetrates the lapis lazuli folds of the Carribean and in the everglades, the teeming shaft contains the cultural DNA of the absolute worst and some of the finest. Scale downward to Miami, enhance, punch in on Odd Breed, enhance terroir. I know some will spit their Swamphead or Saint Somewhere on their Compaq keyboards, but this brewery has the best wild ales that Florida has to offer at present. This is so far from kettle that it is a patient inverted pot, which none may call black, a collander of brett complexity. Let’s look at two beers from Odd Breed:

We just looked at Funk Factory’s trashfruit blackberry recycling program saison, so let’s look at Odd Breed’s Goodwill Salvation Army saison of reanimated produce: Moritas. My hardpour notwithstanding, this beer is intensely carbed with frothy Logsdon sustain. The color is almost a relief because it connotes a tempered fruit quality and delivers with a firm farmhouse handshake first a light tingling of sour ropes along the mandible. This is far more refreshing than the Funk Factory doppleganger and I suspect it is due to the retrained fruit profile, lower acidity, the unfermentable spelt contributing to the whip and heft of the body preventing things getting to that “Sarah Hyland” thin body that draws concern and ire. This is crushable without pausing for pH turbulence, but lacks the complexity and showmanship of the FF offering. The swallow is neat and tidy, punches the landing with a smattering of tropical skittles and Blaugies.

Let’s look at the even stranger side of Odd Breed ales with this anomalous iteration of wild Life: Upper Case Poems Marsala barrel. Strap in for some apeshit conceptual strong wilds. This is a double barrel barleywine, tight let’s ge- THAT WAS INNOCULATED WITH BACTERIA, wait hang on what are yo- THEN AGED IN HEAVY CHAR no pls wait AND THEN IN ITALIAN MARSALA that is the side of barleywine mountain, pls pull up we are GOING TO CRAS- Breathe a sigh of relief because this beer, somehow, against all odds…is strangely delicious. I don’t know how they did it. First and foremost, this is a barleywine through and through, the base is malty and thiccc and ribbons caramel through merlot, toffee and black cherries, an oud bruin and lightly acetic waft that finishes like burnt toast and strawberry preserves. This shit makes no sense. Let it open up to 60+ degrees and the clipping is turned off. It is a merger of two things I never knew I wanted, but it somehow works. It’s not a classic barleywine, more akin to the likes of Be Still from Ale Apothecary or Nightmare on Brett/Sentience. Hell, even a touch of OG Cuvee du Tomme is in there right down to the almost completely languid carb and ineffectual mouthfeel. The sum is better than these components that work together to create something fascinating that on paper looks like a total fucking BRUERY FIRE SALE type of conceptual Terrieux merger of odd casks. It’s very well done and I continue to follow this weird brewery if only to see where they are going because they are very much ahead of the audience’s palates, but hopefully not their wallets in these cascading punchlines of sublime wild ales.

Also there’s 3 days left to buy this ddb floccboi shirt:

Teespring.com/floccboi

Funk Factory has a catalogue of beers that are narrow in scope, but harrowing in depth, like the confines of a congressional investigation. You won’t see banana porters, or even gentle english milds; what you will see is every swatch of acidic wild ales possible. Now if you sat in the Home Depot paint aisle for an appreciable amount of time, you would be able to distinguish the nuances between “apple core” and “arctic linen” whereas some bluntsighted interlocutor would just call them all WHITE or ipso facto SOUR. What happens when them swatches are painted and repainted in a second use? Here we have a “second runnings” beer of sorts, not in the petite sense, but in the provincial produce sense. Funk Factory made Framzwart and then racked this beer to those insane 4lbs of blackberries per gallon TRASH BARRELS. One man’s spent trashberries are another man’s smoothie. I was expecting a pale rose glow like Grim Harvest from Jester King, but boy was I fucking wrong. That is an insane amount of fruit and I beat up on Black Project for using that much fruit in the past. It’s sheer excess from a Jamba Juice perspective. As a result, you would expect the handmedown version to be tamer but think again, this is a bucking acidic bronco and you gotta grip those tannins for a full 8 seconds. It is intensely drying like a full bodied Lirac/Gigondas, long deep syrah meets vaporized smuckers. The juice is long gone and all that remains is the violet husks of these etheral fruit skins to walk the staves seeking solace. It is puckering but has an immense farmhouse complexity underneath to counter balance the nearly punishing gum defacement within the musky comte cheese swallow. The swallow lingers like your mother in law on a Holiday weekend. The flavor to abv ratio on this is dizzying but I don’t know if someone could tank this entire beer solo. I will say that the acidity is far more manageable north of 55 degrees and it transmutes into a kind of arid berry mars rover mission for your tastebuds. I enjoyed it, but couldn’t finish it. That “Tree of Life” seal of approval.

Also Malt Couture batch 4 is live now on iTunes, stitcher, Spotify, Google play: everywhere basically stop complaining

It’s pretty fukn disrespectful that @funkfactorygeuzeria keeps improving and making the rest of the American wild cf. MT cum de pLam scene worse by contrast. Furthermore, they send me these bottles to review full well knowing that they aren’t shitty. No one wants to read a glowing review, this brewery is just making me less interesting by default. That’s a well I don’t need to pump any further, I been pumped so hard. They could at least put scantily clad ladies on the labels or name them after some Wedding Crashers shit, this is too god damn refined and it’s destabilizing things for everyone else. It’s not okay.

http://bit.ly/MaltCoutureBatch4

Batch four is live now on iTunes, stitcher, Spotify, Google play and whatever your Jitterbug uses! Michael dives deep into Canada and Scottsdale culture. Stephen gets into that UK pub life. We have our cask and eat it too.

Please subscribe and leave a five ⭐️ review!

Those old goofsters @heybeerme and @moksabrewing know me so well, loading old ddb down with pastry stouts and haze. It’s like that old saying “the way to a man’s heart is through his amorphous gorilla tits 🦍 “ .

Teespring.com/floccboi

You love Conan, you bathe in London Ale III, if 20% of the grist bill isn’t straight up oats then it isn’t worth your time: you are a true Floccboi. Now you can stand in line for trubcans in style with this hazy streetwear for the discerning slurry sipper.