Well since I drank a one week old Lagunitas bottle, why not bookend things with a 19 year old barleywine from the Clinton administration? Man I have so many questions about this barleywine, but I’m sure that much of the finer points have been lost to time. I called the number on this bottle to ask if they pasteurized in 99 and it actually connected to the Petaluma taproom(!) Mad questions tho: For example, when this beer was made, Arrogant bastard had only been made for two years, so what were they using to hop an aggro american barleywine? Since the likes of Warrior/Tomahawk style and high alpha acid hops weren’t in vogue or available then, they probably used a shitload of english or C hops to hit that then-staggering 65 IBUs. Here’s the rub: those hops have a shitload of beta acids. As a result this unexpectedly held up way better than expected. The twist top cap is adorable and this must have been stored impeccably because all the malty grool looks oddly appealing, the carb is on point, there isn’t that smegma around the water line on the neck. Things could be much worse. The nose is chanterelle mushrooms, record store, and thrift shop leather jackets. If you have fucked with old John Barleycorn or JW Lees you already know what kind of breakdancer cardboard that can be expected. However, there is a port sherry and charming muddy cognac thing that only comes with age.

I’m your Hume Cronyn this is my Jessica Tandy: this is candy. The taste is much much better than you could expect and it blows me away that this is not irradiated tampons at this point. It has a hoppy structure that is a faux wood character, old varnish, like when Gratitude slides into AARP status and gets that crushed conifer aspect. This should be far shittier, but it isn’t. For everyone polishing their pearl over how lambics age, I have had straight up red wine balsamic and this Life has stayed the course amiably, dumping its Zubaz pants with tootsie roll and old year book pages. The entire affair is just dripping with old toblerone and cybering on the family Gateway 2000 in the living room.

Jesus this @cellarmakerbrewing foeder saison is way better than it has business being. casey and HF regularly have shown how to reconcile the American acidity of Faux wild mixed ferm saisons with the gristy yeasty character of the old world and this marries those concepts beautifully. There’s a dialed in body with great Chablis and cut melon on the nose, wispy frothed 50/50 bar, and an intensely dry lemon verbena finish. While the rest of the Bay Area is still trying to get their toddler hazelegs gems like these silently snipe from the SOMA weeds with a .300 knockout OP AF. If you enjoy the simple clean and intensely drinkable white label series from @sideprojectbrew cf. the “unleveraged” offerings, you’ll love this funky gristy Citrine.

One of the rare instances where Lager is Life. Kuhnhenn already herds goats on the reg with BB4d and bbbw canon 🐐 🚨 but this takes things to an absurd new level of toffee caramel booze soaked indulgence. At $50 for a 12oz bottle, the index for fucking around was registering empty. I usually wouldn’t bother to try and chase down a 90 bottle release a second time but god damn this was so good that I had to smash twice. Huge shout out to Brian Borger for letting me dip my sticky caramel wick in this bourbon inkwell again. This was on the ddb top 10 in 2016 and I been thinking bout thos beans ever since. 🐐

For the love of rhizomes. The idea of a quadruple dry hopped beer sounds like some self parodic Cringey UNILAD shit. LOLOL funny or die lampooned beer culture so hard, written by someone who only knows shit tangentially about the subject. But honestly, this take olfactory tones to “seventh grader bedroom” levels. This beer should come with a black light TOOL poster. It’s so Danny and resinous that it clicks into fucking arugula and shallot territory. It’s so god damn loud. One of those beers you open at a concert and you get knowing raised eyebrows from people who hit that milky cloud you just wafted. It’s that pungent. Not tropical, not hype slurry, it’s old school resin knife hits off the electric stove. The taste is so god damn dry, the oily profile has this like sauv blanc thing that’s not refreshing at all but Jesus I can scarcely imagine a west coast IPA that is this disruptive. It’s not elegant or nuanced, it’s a fucking 60 str wielding requirement that just pancakes your palates with dual handed alpha acid swings. Some dudes pay to watch people defile their cars. There’s a fetish for everyone even with drippy comes. @mondaynight continues to stay weird and I don’t know how to deal with it.

Corpsair. Even the sacred source of Life, barleywine, is not immune to pastrification. Leave it to New Jersey to kick what was once perfectly fine right into a Sarlacc pit. The lactose already had my brow furrowed, then I saw “conditioned on cacao nibs and Abdon Quilla Ochochoque coffee from Rojo Roastery” and the visions of endless barista hellscapes flooded my mind. This is how you lose ground, it always starts with coffee. What is a seemingly innocuous flavor profile is always the gateway drug that leads to full on bastardization of styles and excess. Everyone knows what classic roast tastes list and it is approachable, to a fault. Look at the arc of how Speedway took this parabolic dive like a V-2 rocket into Boxcar territory. Gravity’s Rainbow aside, is this beer good? It’s pretty fine, provided you do not like barleywine at all. I am not saying this in a Calusa sort of way. Calusa, and Mash n Grind both did this, except the core experience was still a barleywine. This might as well be a Golden Strong or a Tripel base, just fucking look at it. Helldorado is darker than that. The mouthfeel is extremely thin and this is after lactose is applied. The coffee profile dominates and it ends up that like other New Jersey problem child, Carton’s Regular Coffee. Augie’s issues notwithstanding, this beer treads new territory but it’s like Ni No Kuni 2, I don’t think we need this. Just stick to what we all wanted in the first place, fetch quests and endless obsessive Japanese grinding. My biggest issue is the long dry swallow to this and the odd struggle for power between bitter acrid roast and a sweeeeet Coffeemate profile that just feels like waiting for an oil change. The experience would be complete if I drank this out of a styro cup with Tucker Carlson on in the background.

Last year Wren House dropped a straight up Illmatic classic with Who Hit John Grand Cru. The multiple BALs and complexity from the mead cask finish was absolutely out of pocket and made the DDB top 10 list. So now enter this Shasta, marshmallow mateys version, JUST mead barrel. I love that we exist in a timeline where ONLY a mead barrel aged stout seems somehow lackluster. No matter what you do, people are going to inherently compare this to the tectonic shifting predecessor. Young Solo is gonna go through the same struggles. This beer is good, it has legit carb for the abv, nice sheeting, the residual sugars are balanced and surprisingly the mead aspect never grips your shoulder in demanding manner. The nose is grape hookah, raspberry preserves, Granache, and tootsie rolls. The mouthfeel is a bit thinner than I was anticipating but it never drops a fusel trap card, despite all the honey rope play. The end result is a beer that is good but simply can’t swing on its ex-military Longshoreman mead father. It’s a good problem to have as a brewery that you made something that people wont shut the fuck up about. Most places want to have this issue. Except prolly IDK Flossmoor station.

When I was a kid we had this game in billiards called “Crazy Balls.” It consistent of standing on two sides of a pool table and throwing balls down airhockey style, resulting in many smashed fingers from colliding hard spheres on their way back down. The point is, we could have just been getting better at pool, but that endeavor was oddly painful and satisfying. Now enter this shit, Airbrush Daydream. It’s like your de jure hazy, milky, light bodied IPA with almost zero resinous swallow except: it’s sour. For some reason. Crazy Balls. It’s interesting and pretty good, but part of me wonders why they just didn’t work on their nine ball because the base seems pretty legit. The body is dialed in, the retention is solid, the hopwork underpinning this is gentle and reminds me of the soft hand that Creature Comforts employs in their non_paradiso.exe framework. I get that this is a Kenny Powers type of joke about what I can only presume to be weapons grade doucheculture in Myrtle Beach but, this shit didn’t need to be modified billiards. The sour mixed with the lovely tangelo profile gives it this odd acidity meets brackishness like a water park, or chlorine. Maybe it’s a subtle nod to Seadoo farers, slathered in lobster skinned tourism excesses. In that case, nailed it. The end result is like when you get a Rush song that can stand alone and then, oh wait, here we go a six minute interlude, is that a theramine?

@cellarmakerbrewing fukn my head up because they floss so much. Everyone knows their hop prowess and the love for their coffee and cigs lineup needs no articulation but their saisons go in. The fact that they collab’ed with @highlandparkbrewery on a fodder farmhouse already has me at full attenuation. Them cans WE GOT LONDONNNNN [III] on the trackkkkkk

Breaking in the toaster2.0 with barleywine. The more convections change the more they stay the same. @cigarcitybrewing is and has been a fucking world class purveyor of strong ales and barleywines. Look at any apeshit BBBW tasting and you’ll see any innumerable examples: Leon, church on a hill, Roosevelt, the list goes on and on. American, English, Madeira, bourbon, port: they tear this shit up. It’s such a fitting end for most dipshits to stop their exploration with ingredient pounded huna riffs. They don’t deserve the Loren Ipsums and Error Establishings. This beer like most of their best beers doesn’t leverage any baking class nonsense and just saturated your BALs and juices that stave. It’s a tighter less bitter more almondy Perfect Storm sort of affair that takes the often sweet aspects and tempers them with this golden Aristotelian mean of deep oak and walnut meets bananas fosters. It’s great but that’s not fucking news. The dryness and completely tailored experience that demonstrates with glaring acuity that barleywine isn’t subject to the same “LOLOLOL beetus” ejaculations that dudes two years deep into craft beer like to lead with and make themselves look like myopic rones. This is a super enjoyable beer that I’m confident people will continue to overlook, and I’m extremely content with that.

Someone in the Barleywine Is Life Facebook group felt bad for old ddb because I have had the same shitty toaster for a decade so he straight up bought me a nicer toaster. What in the name of urethral sounding.