Tag Archives: wile ale

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Veritas 015 is Big Willey Style, Got @LostAbbey on that I Am Legend Tip

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Lost Abbey has around a 40% kill/death ration with the Veritas line, more than enough to keep you in the majors.  For every whaley V004 we receive, there’s always some oddball V009 stuttering and playing with a Leapfrog book.  By now people just treat the Veritas series like dropping a hot acid round in the revolver and spinning the chamber, because when it pays off it pays off hard.  This is one such instance where you not only don’t get lit up like Veritas 011, but this enters the ranks of the best Veritaseses ever created.

Let’s cut up this fruit AWA and get our Rachel Ray on in today’s review. Knife work gettin you promoted up from line.

Rolling up Big Willie Style of the Sour Game V15 I AM LEGEND

Rolling up Big Willie Style of the Sour Game V15 I AM LEGEND

Lost Abbey, San Marcos, North County Toolboxland Churchillsburg, CA

6.5% abv, American Lambic Wild Ale with Fruit, AmeriFoune

This beer showcases exactly what Lost Abbey does best: making the best fucking sour blonde ales in the game.  Whenever you hear them shutting the club down with some DDG or Cable Car joints, it is never centered around some sour dark ale or barrel aged barleywine. Lost Abbey blonde sours pay fat dividends like that unsplit Berkshire Hathaway stock.

When I heard the specs on this beer it sounded like an even more fruited version of Spontaneous Cheer, my micropeen was primed for a tart road trip.  The beer pours more radiant and bright than Spontaneous Cheer and looks outright radioactive in the glass, frothy carb bursting forth lacing the glass with intense pop rocks crackles, an appearance strangely similar to Duck Duck in many ways, or Cable Car 2013.  You get the jist, I dont need to draw it out for you like the plot of Sense8.

This beer get funky just like D.O.C. do

This beer get funky just like D.O.C. do

The nose is cut kumquats, highly acidic, unripe tangerines, honeydew, there’s a wheaty sort of grist to it that almost reminds me of a mineral character, with a fully lacto finisher to it that is almost too sour for my gentle nose holes. This isn’t as apeshit as Veritas 10 in acidic fruit, but this is def a serious american wild Desert Eagle with that oaky kickback.

The taste is straight sub-saharan dryness, the cankersores about to be budding if you dont have some water on hand from those receding cells getting bombed on with dehydrating goodness.  The only thing keeping this from being some insane ph-bomb is the presence of fruit as it warms.  The magnetic tangerine and clementine are buttressed by peach and apricot, it’s every shade of citrus Life Saver in the roll, oaky, puckering and intensely satisfying. There’s a sort of cheesy marmalade aspect that gives a bit back from the armed tastebud robbery that it commits in the process.  It’s like a roguish bandit that puts a carnation in a girl’s lapel after robbing the tongue stagecoach. THANKS FOR THE FRUIT VERITAS UR A GOOD GUY.

Overall, this doesn’t have the stumbling blocks of other american sours that attempt to hazard this level of intensity and has a certain degree of panache that keeps it from being a one dimensional acidic asthma attack. This should be well up on the top of your want list despite the cost of entry because unlike most stupid ass DDB reviews, this is one time where I can’t be like “JUST BUY DERP D’OR FROM CROOKED STAVE” or pointing to some Belgian analogue.  I had this the same day as Fou and both are stellar and completely different.

OH WE ON THAT PAGANI VERITAS SWERVE? Hode up, lemmie get to a save point.

OH WE ON THAT PAGANI VERITAS SWERVE? Hode up, lemmie get to a save point.

Before you ask, yes, this is way different from Stone Bu, Imperial Peach Bu, Bu Banger, Bu Bae, Jew Bu, or whatever 47 different stonefruit berliners are released this month. While those might be easier to land, this doesn’t have much in common with many of the De Garde fruited offerings, and no it doesn’t taste similar to Fen Tao, due to the ratcheted up acidity. No disrespect to any of the foregoing, this just isn’t quite on the same scene, blowing seaweed green out that Pagani sunroof, cutting up them pitted bricks on the passenger side.

Seek it out, and be sure to offer up X-Mas Bomb or some shit so we can have some LULz in the process.

Here’s a handy Veritas chart of jankrank scaled from most trifling to next level shit:

V009 – most jank

V001- second most jank

V002- trifling

V011- moderately trifling 

V013- pretty deece

V008 – pretty legit with time sans tea

V010- tasty fun times

V014- damn I’m sweating 

V007- Shit is getting real

V0012- no jank, all body high

V006- it’s kickin in, I feel it

V004- can’t handle the club right now

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Speedwale from 2009: @newbelgium Bottleworks X Anniversary Ale

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Today we have an aging matriarch from the days of the Speedway Jim top 100 white whale list aka them extinct speedwales. If you are a johnny come lately to the beer game who covets King Henry and thinks that Sr-71 should trade on par with Zomer, chances are you have no fucking idea what this is. To those people, Bottleworks is that one store that sometimes sells Deviation, and that’s it. To everyone else Bottleworks is the proto-City Beer model of classic bottle shop meets beer culture hub from the old tymie days. This is the tenth anniversary bottle brewed by New Belgium, 1400 bottle one off released in 2009.

It might even pull a single bottle of Vanilla Rye if you are lucky.

washed out label, needs more contrast, cool pic

washed out label, needs more contrast, cool pic

New Belgium, Colorado

American Wild Ale, 6.5% abv

For some reason Hair of the Dog also posted up hard in the trap and brewed Matt for Bottleworks X that year, so this old gem is often forgotten under the sands of ticker time. This bottle represents something larger for New Belgium as a ubiquitous ultra micro giant, the end of a non-pasteurized, brewery only fun times era. Now you usually hear about them when your drunk stepdad tells you about how he loves “Fat Tire Brewing Company” and you nod in sad reflection, thinking of Caged and corked la folies past.

This beer is foeder fermented la folie, la terroir and a golden ale blended together and bottled live, un pasteurized, rolling monocultures all raw dog.

The pour immediately looks more beautiful than both Twisted Spoke and 2009 cage and corked la Folie. You can hardly pull your penis out on the metro without someone mentioning those two beers next to this one. The pour is a ruddy burnt orange and light amber that radiates like a turbid blood orange cocktail, with the carb still billowing flawlessly with determined cling. It isn’t that dark auspicious deep mahogany of its contemporaries and it looks great.

Oppressive Portland sun ruining everything for all the white people in that city.

Oppressive Portland sun ruining everything for all the white people in that city.

The nose thankfully doesn’t exhibit any of the acetic red wine vinegar aspects of the 09 la folie and instead has tangerine zest, Brie cheese rind, clementines, sliced honeydew, oak and pencil shavings, a touch of light construction paper oxidation and a red berry closer that lingers. The whole affair puckers the bunghole air tight and there is no seepage, no weeping. For all the things that time could have denatured, it has unquestionably improved this beer to a level without contemporary analogue. There’s a degree of musk and earthiness that only time can accomplish, despite what some kettle souring Colorado charlatan may tell you.

The taste is a touch more acidic than the nose suggests but the creamy mouthfeel with ultra fine jacuzzi bubbles offsets the acrimonious effect. It pushes a raspberry and grapefruit pith, there’s a bit of vanilla and Chardonnay staves, white grape that is equally moscato sweet and tart like rainier cherries. The whole experience is a many faced God and a ticker never forgets.

No salad dressing tones detected

No salad dressing tones detected

I feel like the aging grampa in the 80’s complaining “they don’t make ’em like this no more” and referencing the non pasteurized, aged, meticulous Detroit steel beers from the past. This is truly a magnificent, highly drinkable gem that stands in stark contrast to so many of the ultra acidic offerings clouding today’s lacto and ultra Brett L focused market.

Yet another entry in the ever expanding journal of “this near extinct beer is great, seek it out” annals. DDB is a useless resource, I need to switch to 140 char UNTAPPD reviews for the millennials with short, heavily-medicated attention spans. SOMEDAY