First and foremost, the ddb podcast, Malt Couture drops on 6/21/18, so pepper your angus.

Like some Sisyphean task, every year I overtrade for Dark Lord variants, and every year I go through the same crushing disappointment attendant to putting myself through Dark Wort deviants. Like Mercury in retrograde I constantly subject myself to this annual flagellation. Usually it is on the insistence of an increase in quality of Dark Lord from some self-interested dude trying to move his Brozerker before impartial opinions roll in. Every May I consistently make the absolute worst trades of the entire year and it isnt even close.

Bitter taste from perpetual hoodwinking aside, the beers themselves warrant comment. So let’s dig into these deviants that vary so wildly that one can scarcely generalize about the Dark Lord canon at all.

Greatest Teachable Moments

Jesus Christ this beer was a lemon pledge disaster. Some beer reviewers will reach for some top shelf hyperbole to drum up attention or grasp at relevance. I dont even need to engage in that pageantry, this beer is pure nightmare liquid. I have to address each component in turn like some dysfunctional underattenuated Megazord. First, if you have had Brandy barrel Dark Lord alone that already is total chore to consume. It is like those Mexican dulces that somehow become sweeter with each passing taste. Sugar begetting more sucrose like those brooms in Fantasia dumping Stevia at your doorstep. Next, we have verbena. They added fucking flowers and I can only assume it is lemon verbena because it is a complete furniture polish trainwreck. This may have been designed to temper the sweetness but it seriously comes across like CLR or some bathroom antiseptic. To further compound the problems, they added ginger. Ginger darklord practically writes the Kikoman jokes for itself. If they added wasabi you would already have the uni meets gross Airwick profile that I can only assume they wanted. No one needs to drink this. There is no reason for this to exist and beer as a whole is damaged for this exercise in punitive palate penance. As a garnish, they added orange peel because I mean, at a certain point does it even matter. If you rolled dads GTO into the lake, might as well spraypaint an orange cock on the side of it. You can’t get any more grounded. The entire beer is torturous from the olfactory to the taste to the long floorwax and tobacco finish. The teachable moment was that this 3:1 resulted in a strong contender for DDB worst beer of 2018.

2017 French Vanilla Militia

For the love of God, the hits keep coming with this wince inducing Muscat batterboarding. This beer was a notorious nosedive in quality and it concerns me that Three Floyds would even release a beer this fundamentally flawed in almost every aspect. The firesale evacuation in which dudes offloaded these beers last year was straight up shameful. Once people learned that this beer was not infected, but just intentionally executed in a way that would burn a QC sensory panel to the ground, it became infamous. On paper it sounds great: coffee, vanilla, cocoa nibs, oh but those baleful Muscat barrels. People know this is terrible and they still demand $200 for this AXIS IV psychologically damaging beer. It’s intensely sweet in the worst way, like drinking Torani pumps of iced wine. I don’t know many Indiana Golden Corral palate fucks who also enjoy port and massive dessert wines, but apparently there’s a huge market for them around Munster. Orchard rot and oversteeped espresso dominate with some astringent digestif aspects. Some people have fetishes where they hire escorts to destroy their most prized possessions. FVM17 is that experience in beer form.

SPACEFORCE!

This was the one beer I was extremely excited to try. I gave up Ardea + Duck Duck Gooze + Roll for Initiative + Jam the Radar for this, 4:1. The degree to which I overpaid for this tremendous letdown could visually be represented by a gaping glass buttplug. At least with other Dark Lord bottles you cup your backsack and just take the abuse. This is so much more hurtful because you come in with high expectations that grab the yoke and dive headfirst into Pineau Des Charentes mountain. It’s the exact same beer as FMV but it has another different fortified wine. Was there seriously any demand for this? The barrel profile is sickeningly tannic and cloyingly sweet in equal measure. Any hopes of vanilla or coffee bailing this out are roundhoused to the face by Mexican sweet breads with this saccharine grape jelly and a dry odd drag that just completely conflicts with everything else going on. This is the beer equivalent of Xzibit putting a fish tank in your Civic. What am I even supposed to do with this? I know it seems like I am taking the piss just to pander and boast and demonize these beers but I swear, I wanted this to be amazing and it was patently depressing. It’s less bad than FVM17 and Greatest Teachable Moments, but that’s like being the best behaved inmate in Arkham, it’s still completely fucked up.

2017 CHEMTRAIL MIX

Alright, finally THIS BEER, this beer has to be the one to grab the reigns and drive this stagecoach to TastyTown. Oh, and it absolutely does. I drank this side by side with BA Abraxas for some detached palate calibration to grind my cinnamon stick. It’s better than BA Abraxas, but here’s the issue, I don’t like BA Abraxas that much either. Chemtrail is easily the best Dark Wort Deviant I have had outside of Handjee, but it’s still markedly overhyped, overpriced, overvalued, overpraised, and its merit doesn’t come within a country mile of its $500(?) asking price. But is it fair to push an epidermal into this beer’s perineum due to the shittiness of the surrounding fans? Not entirely. Three Floyds absolutely killed it and stuck the landing with the balance of cinnamon, sweet casks imparting the structure of caramel and mallow to subdue the tobacco and roast of the base beer. It all works exceedingly well and this is an example of what Dark Lord innovation could and should be.

The pink peppercorns are more of a garnish that imparts a light crackly dryness that could be overlooked without the intensity of most mexican style stouts. I almost never get to praise FFF for balance and nuance, especially not in the Dark Lord context, but this is masterfully done. My gripes are the relatively oppressive cinnamons aspects but they seem laconic compared to the Cinnabon cunnilingus that is BA Abraxas. God old DDB deepthroating that churro, mascara running and mixing with confectionary sugar. Five bills is just too steep to drop on theme park sweets.

2018 Marshmallow Handjee vs. 2013 Bourbon Vanilla Dark Lord

Both of these are so god damn good and represent the simple pinnacle of what the recalcitrant base Dark Lord can be manipulated into. This year’s Handjee is so unwieldy but it provides the massive scope and range that the hamfisted delightful vanilla beans impart. It’s almost one dimensional in the waffle cone Coldstone realm but never dips its wick into the Yankee Candle zone. The way it weaves between that turbinado sugar sweetness, deep roast, char and tobacco, with a ribbon of Dreyers seamlessly integrated is phenomenal. Here’s the rub: 2013 was even better.

2013 lacks the sweetness and offputting aspects in the fresh MHJ but somehow maintains such a vibrant vanilla character. I rag on 8th owner Vanilla Rye owners peddling their sad impressions of “HAS NOT FADED AT ALL” from dudes who got into beer three years after VR was released. This is not that. This is so substantial and sewn together lovingly that it’s almost like Whoppers or Kit Kat wafers. I can’t imagine Dark Lord being massaged into any finer form and the 2013 BVDL represents the pinnacle of not just Dark Wort, but pastry stouts in general. It is the standard bearer of split bean excellence. From insane experimentation to demonstrating the absolute ceiling of what stouts are capable of, three Floyds runs the entire spectrum.

Man part of me regrets leaving Catador every time someone busts out one of those @cigarcitybrewing barleybangers. Then I remember how many licorice porters and barrel aged pumpkin ales I had to trudge through. This though, the hoppy, bitter meets split lumber and brown sugar profile is always on point and falls just below Leon in competing with that Wambles catalogue of other awesome and overlooked gems. We live in the best timeline where lines for incredible barleywine remain small and flavor approximating dessert stouts are still the rage with blunt palate dipshits who stumbled wallet first into this hobby straight out of undergrad a couple years ago. I can only hope that barleywine remains a foxhole financially unaffected by the battle between batterbois and salad dressing connoisseurs. I just want to drink endgame Life and make dank shit.

Well I finally get to dig into this award winning slice from arguably the most Life forward state in the Union, apologies in advance Cook county and Michigan. I really enjoyed the non barrel aged version of this with the cringey and terrifying label, so it stood to reason that this would organically be exponentially better. It’s more a question of whether you consider 1.5 to be a noteworthy superscript. It’s good, it’s very well done, hits all the marks and lands somewhere exceedingly close to Arctic Devil but below mother of all storms in that odd blend of sweet and bitter oak. It has this cinnamon Babka and yeasty kind of allspice that almost reminds me of a boozy winter warmer that I once knew on some Usher shit. The finish is cut lumber and dusted cocoa powder. It takes some expectation calibration but as it warms I enjoy it more and more. I simply can’t believe Alaska keeps consistently dropping staggeringly well done barleywine without exception. It’s becoming the Pajottenmalt leading the stylistic excellence. Im tryna pet a moose and avoid the Palins.

I wanted to address Derivation 8 and OWK as a sort of Nilla apoetheosis of sorts, the two uniting as the varying sides of a bean flicking coin as the universal and actual currency of the stylistic limits. I wanted to, but then I was ruminating on the fact that I had these 3oz pours in 96 degree weather and I actively wondered how to scale the experience. If DDB is here to present some modicum of standardized experience, then it makes me wonder if all these different experiences can have a throughline drawn between them. On the other hand, with bottles like these anyone who actively dropped the $700 to $2000 to land them either 1) will never open them or 2) will be so emotionally and financially invested that impartiality isnt possible either. This is to say nothing of the serving size the average dipshit will enjoy, so perhaps some leniency on my own failings is permissible. Both of these beers are the pinnacle of what is possible in the wafflecone realm, but for differing reasons. D8 is coffee/coconut/vanilla but the heft of the body almost belies the roast and coffee. It works in tandem to integrate everything until just the bobbing of the vanilla pokes its tip above the obsidian waves. For such an absurdly excessive stout, the end result is something that is the closest to “balanced” under scaled malt economies. In wanting more of any one element, it becomes evident that a careful wrist was applied to that throttle to not slip the bean clutch. That is a remarkable dance and it’s like when you have the deep attraction to the poise of a male dancer how effortlessly strong he can mitigate gravity and you wonder what it feels like to be held and oh sure your friends all act like they dont know what you are talking about but they would drink it themselves.

OWK is something entirely different. On paper this checks every box to draw in the most toxic of profiteering shitlords 1. onsite only 2. no public takeaway sales 3. private club bottle only 4. $5,000 of vanilla beans 5. separate recipe 6. commemorative bottle/one off 7. an odd AKC pedigree of the inimitable Derivation 2 in the double helix. Add that up and some stretchmarked manchild who wants to play malty stock broker immediately literally fills the tasting room. We have already examined how people were attempting to raffle 2oz vials and the furious “LOL TROLL” backpedaling that came from this, and we are just getting started. This is a dual handed greataxe that just crushes with overhead waves of all things vanilla. Sit down in this ugandan sharper image chair and gets waves of cervical Whopper massage, waffle cone, an oily almost waxy mouthfeel akin to Twinkie frosting, Kit Kat wafer, and a swallow with a mild heat and residual sweetness that thankfully reigns it back in with a drag of Marlboro Red and Little Debbie brownies. It’s singularly the most over the top expression of vanilla as the zeitgeist of vanilla. Years from now we will view OWK as a 1982 Rush “Signals” type of decadence where you wonder where artistry can proceed. It took D2 which was 20% better than Vanilla Eclipse and then improved those margins by another 20%, cumulatively. Which is to say for 23 times the cost of entry, your bean throbs a scaled 12.5% harder. You can check the euphemism math on that.

Well well well, what ratios are we discussing here? By way of recap for this infamous Life banger: b1 was a stupid 340 bottle SCHNUCKS [i didn’t make this up, that’s a real grocery store in Missouri] exclusive. It was incredible and a sort of bb4d to the massive bruiser that is Anabasis/bbbw. Batch two was frustrating because I love the dialed in body but it lacked in a substantial barrel presence so everyone came to stomp every inch [fn1] of my dick for their impressions of a completely different beer. [fn1 sizes and participation may vary.] so now we have b3 and they amped up every aspect. It’s better than b2 but too aggressive to best b1. In seeking to remedy the lack of barrel profile they went completely fucking Xyauyu nuts to the wall. It’s waves of completely bonkers muddled raisins steeped in Sherry port. It’s not sweet it’s more intense wafts of bitter cut lumber, bakers chocolate, black cherry and Dr. Pepper pruney concentrate. It’s this ramped up abv and bigger body and a wholly different rye barrel treatment that changes so much. The swallow finishes foreverrrr for a beer that previously was nerfed for its “thin” [read: Sucabaesque] mouthfeel. It’s straight up too much to wrangle at once. I very seldom complain about complexity and depth, especially in barleywines but this is that overwrought Phillip Roth [rip] indulgence in that regard. Thankfully, if you love that post modern malty panache and don’t shy away from one of the most complex big beers from the last year. This is an excellent problem to have and I will peel these apart and listen to the criterion collection commentary a million times before I settle for the innumerable waves of cashgrab bullshit I usually have to wade through. More Orenstein less Smough.

I have had a sordid past with @uplandbrewco from loving some of their lambics in the early 2010s to ripping on 🥝 and their member society to praising the hell out of their barleywines, it’s gone on for years. In the past year I have heard from no fewer than ten people that Upland has completely overhauled the acidity and focus of their wild ales. So it is only fitting that I remain abreast of the tart Indiana ongoings and see what these hucksters have been up to. We shall see.

Alright so attention seeking nonsense aside, I feel compelled to give @morebrewing S’More a fair shake, milk or otherwise. The culture surrounding this beer and the RAM lineage vacillates between wholly irritating, genuinely enthusiastic, or straight up manipulative. Whereever the consumer landed in this RAM spectrum, they checked all this emotional baggage and it was a connecting flight to More. Before this Beer was even released the Shaundolotry was already in full swing with dudes burning sleeves of graham crackers in solemn reverence. The hyperbole was lock step from “the best non ba Beer I’ve ever had” to “doesn’t need ba” to “shouldn’t trade for less despite no barrel.” The qualifiers were hilariously defensive and weaponized. But how does the beer taste? Henna is extremely well done across the board. The nose never pushes a Floridian confectionary syrupy aspect, the body shows restraint. It’s in the flawless strike zone akin to Parabola with cling that doesn’t overstay its welcome. It provides enough screen time to showcase the various kinda obvious hamfisted adjunct characters but you don’t get sick of any aspect, so basically, Infinity War.

The nose is easily the best part and it is absolutely magnificent. The chocolate and mallow wrestle for dominance like a Zero bar with the cracker serving more of an ancillary healer role with grist to temper the sweetness. The sheer extreme nature of this beer hits its marks but in a shallow expositional I AM A DESSERT declarative way. As a result taking down the entire bomber is a chore and it’s like listening to an entire Dragonforce album that is so grating that it become beleaguering by the end. It’s almost like on paper this was strictly designed to be spread around by mouth breathing dudes quoting Anchorman and Jeff Dunham in a Joliet backyard. Even having wasted half of it in immature flavor infusions, half a bottle was more than enough. If the short amusement and playtime doesn’t irk you, then you will dig what this brewery is up to as they clearly have talent but this suit is tailored for a certain aesthetic frame and it isn’t slim fit with a long attention span.

San Francisco has had this throbbing pearl over coining their own “style” of IPA lately. They already got Anchor Steam, it’s like FFS what more do these techies want. I wish they could just enjoy their $2m 420sf palatial estates in peace. When this new BRUT STYLE IPA was announced, it was immediately picked up by every corny shitty food blog this side of the Mission and heralded as some second coming of the hazecraze. I immediately got PTSD and thought of the yeast in Brooklyn Black Ops and then shifted to Deus/Malheur that no one is fucking buying anyway. You can go find some siiiick vintages of Brut beer caked in dust from a bygone era. So I have an open mind is that I am trying to say. I am super stoked to try the Grisette and 7S continues to push the envelope with this hype can series.

Golden Strongs are a weird beast to wrangle. On one hand you want to just cast them straight to the Tripel realm but that coat has estery sleeves ill tailored for the Golden frame. In other instances Golden Strongs can fall in this weird Guulden Draak zone that half of my readers have never even tried, inherently throw back. This is equally weird and leads with that spicy phenolic martinellis and prosecco thing that makes me long for other styles. If this were drier it would lean closer to the honey and white burgundy present in Curieux, but instead it’s fusel and too boozy for its tiny frame. It’s that aesthetic of saline DD’s tossed on a 00 body creating dissonance that is hard to reconcile. If you want to go further back, Captain Lawrence Golden Delicious is the best way to do this. This is kiiiiiiinda like that, but again it’s both too sweet and intensely wafty and you’re left with this Tyrant with one arm. I took half this to the Umbrella corp drain. I unlocked Jill’s alternate costume and I was almost a Jill sandwich. I still got mad love for @sevenstills tho.

Cellar pro tip: Moms love candy and hazelnuts