Coming soon to a blog near you…

I mentioned in a previous post my plans for future beer tournaments, and while that certainly will be coming to you soon it occurs to me that this will be an extraordinarily boring blog between now and then unless your humble beer blogger takes drastic action – and I am no stranger to drastic action. 

Hence, I intend to continue reviewing beers, beer-related topics, breweries, and other delightful topics related to the finer things in life on a regular basis.  As the summer marches on and things get hotter, expect to see a lightening of the average beer reviewed (but I’ll never give up my stouts completely), and I plan to have a pumpkin beer extravaganza as October approaches.

Fear not, faithful readers (I’m going to go ahead and pretend there are more than 5 of you) – more beer will be coming your way, and tourney action will be starting again. 

Duff Out

Adventures of a pre-tourney beer knurd

Had to take a blogging break for a few days to stop feeling like a high schooler who just discovered the internet, but now that I’m back, there are a few matters of business about the tourney and the blog.

First – I do intend to keep blogging here, both about future tournaments and beer in general.  We kicked around ideas during the more sober moments of the tourney as to what we’d do next time.  Obviously, there will be a Tournament of Wheats.  There are simply too many absolutely lovely wheaty beers that are begging to be judged in convenient knockout form.  Will it just be a cakewalk for Weihenstephaner, or will a domestic craft pull it out?  It also stands to reason that we’d do a Tournament of Belgian-Style Ales.  We could do one that was entirely actual Belgians and one that was a tourney of American Craft Belgian-Style beers and then pit the winners against each other.  One of the more interesting ideas I heard was a “Tournament of Crap,” where we line up all the crap beers that are available at literally any bar in the US of A and pick out the best of the crap-heap so we know what to buy in a pinch.  One nice advantage of such a tournament is that it will be cheap as hell to put together.

I alluded to a story in an earlier post about the shenanigans that my old roommate and I got up to earlier in the day, so:

David drove in from Maryland on the night prior to the tourney with the rest of the beer we needed to finish it all up.  Naturally, when we got it all together we had to get a pretty picture of it all.

All told, we had about 1536 ounces of beer, which translates to 12 gallons of truly epic stouts.  We got a fridge pic too, but it somehow looks less impressive from the point-of-view of my iPhone.

 

Since David lives in Maryland, he took the opportunity to pick up a few beers from the Total Wine up at Brier Creek that he can’t get up in MD (because MD, particularly Montgomery County, has idiotic beer laws), such as anything by Founders, our tournament champion.  He naturally picked up 16 Breakfast Stouts for the trip home.  While we were there, we happened to notice a vanity plate that was sufficiently odd for me to snap a shot (and I don’t usually take random pictures).

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for being proud of what you do for a living, but really?  I mean, really?  BNK TELR comin’ through, bitches!  Oh yeah!  You wish you could be me.

Since he was visiting Raleigh for the weekend, I felt obliged to take him out to the Bavarian Brathaus, a totally sweet German restaurant in Cary.  He arrived Friday night and was leaving Sunday morning after the tournament, so we really could only do this on Saturday for lunch.  If you have German food without beer, you’re doing it wrong.  We had lunch at about 1:00 and the tournament got underway at 7:00, so we figured there would be no problem having a single good German beer at lunch and then going all out for the evening.

That was before we noticed a very interesting option on their beer draft list: you can have a small taster of all fourteen Bavarian Drafts for just $8.  David and I like beer.  Like, a whole lot.  What were we supposed to do, not take advantage of an awesome opportunity to have fourteen one-and-a-half ounce tastes of excellent German beer just because we planned on having thirty-two more one-and-a-half-ounce tastes of much stronger beer that evening?

Clearly no.

That. Was. Awesome.

Also, in case it’s hard to see in the tiny iPhone resolution pics, the tasting glasses were little boots.  My wife (our resident beer goddess) loved them.

We were surprisingly not drunk after all that, though Ashley drove us home just to be sure.  It may have had something to do with the copious amounts of awesome Schnitzel I consumed with my beer shots.

So, just to recap, we had 46 1.5 oz beers that day, and 30 unique beers.  That’s just under three pints each, which doesn’t sound particularly impressive until you recall that most of the beers we tasted that night were at or above 9% ABV, and the Germans were no slouch either.

Sometimes it’s hard for a day to get any more awesome.

The Results: Shocking upsets and narrow victories

My old roommate and fellow judge David decided to go on a CSS rampage and create an online bracket which ended up looking pretty sweet – definitely view source if you’re into the whole web development thing.  No HTML tables involved.  We ended up with 12 judges on the day, though the scores don’t always add up to 12 since judges were allowed to abstain if they couldn’t choose a victor.  This happened exactly three times, and they were all interesting.

Round 1:

The first round ended up decently close to the BeerAdvocate predictions with a few differences.  By far the biggest upset (IMHO) of the tournament happened here when Weyerbacher Heresy managed a 6-6 draw with Oskar Blues Ten FIDY and was able to advance over one of my heavy favorites by virtue of being cheaper – about a dime per fluid ounce.  Sam Adams managed to pull off a convincing victory over Allagash Black as well, winning 8-4, but this didn’t surprise me quite as much.  I happen to be a huge fan of Allagash Black, but it was certainly one of the most distinctive beers in the tourney.  Belgian stouts are almost unheard of, so it had a far different taste than most of the other competitors.  I thought there was a chance it would blow them all away with its delightful array of spices and flavors, but also a chance that it would strike out because it was just too different.  Unfortunately, it ended up being the latter.  North Coast Old Rasputin managed a convincing 8-4 victory over Oak Aged Yeti as well, which definitely surprised me.  We were able to go back and check our votes once the round was over and I found out that I had indeed voted for FIDY, Allagash, and Yeti, though in that round I actually didn’t recognize which ones I was tasting.  I would have thought that I’d pick out Allagash in a heartbeat, but with sixteen different stouts coming at me in rapid succession I didn’t notice it till it was gone. 

I was surprised at how close the voting was for Siberian Night over Sam Smith, Schlafly over Guinness, and Southern Tier Choklat over Youngs.  All three only won their matches by a vote of 7-5.  Founders Breakfast Stout won 7-4 over Hitachino, as one judge abstained (legal since there was a tiebreaker). 

What I thought would be the most interesting matchup of the first round was actually the biggest blowout: BORIS the Crusher beat Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout 9-3. 

Round 2:

The upstart Heresy had no trouble with Schlafly, beating it 9-3 to get into the semis.  I was surprised to find that I actually voted Schlafly on that one.  Similarly, Sam Adams was no match for Founders Breakfast Stout, and got tossed by the same margin.

The other side of the bracket is where things got interesting.  Old Rasputin eeked out a 7-5 win over Siberian Night to punch its ticket to the final four, and Southern Tier Choklat managed to tie BORIS the Crusher 6-6, knocking it out of the tournament by being the lower priced beer.  Choklat ended up being the easiest beer to identify by taste – it’s a very, very sweet beer and the chocolate flavor is powerful without being overwhelming.  I voted for it in the first two rounds, but would later regret my vote in its matchup against BORIS.  As it turned out, I loved it at first, but as the night wore on and I kept drinking more and more rich beers, the richest of the bunch (Choklat by a mile) became too much.  It turned my nose to taste it again.  I suspect Choklat is best enjoyed as a single bottle split amongst friends as a desert.  It’s strong enough that you don’t need much more and it’s hard to drink a full glass of it; the chocolate is just too sweet.  I voted against it in both of the later matchups.

Semifinals:

Founders destroyed Heresy 8-4, the last remaining blowout of the tournament.  I was happy to see my favorite go on, though sad I didn’t get to see it matched up with Ten FIDY as I had hoped.

The other side of the semis was decidedly closer.  Old Rasputin beat Choklat by a score of 6-5 (with one abstention).  It was a sign of things to come…

Third Place:

Bear in mind that the judges didn’t know the results of the semifinal matchups, so even though we could easily identify Choklat, we didn’t know whom it was paired with or whether or not we were tasting for the championship or third place.  Choklat pushed its way through for the victory with a 6-5 win over Heresy, earning it a solid third place.  I said from the beginning that this beer might turn some heads, and it certainly did so.  The third place matchup, though, was only a taste of what was to come.

Championship:

Founders Breakfast Stout versus North Coast Old Rasputin.  The top two beers in the tourney ended up being the 13th and 14th most expensive – one of the reasons I seeded by price was to see exactly how much the cost would come into play.  It certainly didn’t appear to be the case that the more expensive beers outperformed their cheaper counterparts; the highest seed in the semis was Choklat at 7 (though it very easily could have been the $0.50 per ounce BORIS the Crusher). 

Everybody tasted the samples and turned in their ballots and lo and behold, it was a tie, 6-6!  The cheaper beer wins.  We’re all surprised and excited that Old Rasputin managed to pull the upset… except… when I go to check how much cheaper Old Rasputin is than Breakfast Stout, I notice that they both have a 208 ppoz rating.  I seeded them arbitrarily (alphabetically, actually), as they were the only two in the tourney with the exact same price.  It’s $10 per four-pack of 12oz bottles.  Which meant that our tournament would end in a tie. 

Earlier in the night one of our judges decided he didn’t want to drink quite so much in a night, so he dropped out of the judging.  We had to have a victor, so we drafted him to be the kingmaker: one taste test to rule them all!  It wasn’t 100% blind, as he knew the matchup he was judging, but he had never before tasted either of the beers and of course he wasn’t told which was which when I poured them.  He carefully went back and forth between the two disposable plastic tasters, one with a green dot and the other with a yellow, first getting the aromas.  He took a sip of each, swirling each one around in his mouth to get the feel of it.  The room went silent as he carefully considered his options.  He raised one cup and declared “Green’s the winner!”  Just like that, in a double-overtime decision, Founders Breakfast Stout defeated North Coast Old Rasputin 7-6 to take home the title.

What a night it was!  Congratulations to Founders Breakfast Stout, and indeed to North Coast Old Rasputin for taking them right to the edge.  My favorite to win it all ended up taking home the title, but not by much.

This definitely won’t be the last beer tournament we host, so stay tuned. 

Duff Out

PS – I’ve got a lot of pre-party pics and interesting shenanigans to post soon!  I’ll get them up here as soon as I can.

It’s here! It’s here! The day has come! Also – Introductions.

Today (edit – yesterday; took me too long to post this) is the day.  No holding back; leave it all out on the floor and let the hops fall where they may. 

I sincerely wanted to review all of the beers before the tournament started, but circumstances (and time, to an extent) prevented me from doing so.  Specifically, I couldn’t get enough of the following beers to taste one prior to the tourney and still have enough in case they made it all the way through.  I do plan to review them afterwards (Never fear, my fine readers.  The blog will go on.)

Southern Tier Choklat: (Thanks to Nathan at Southern Tier for the graphics)

This is a damn good beer.  The only problem is that I haven’t had any in a few months and I don’t have enough spares to drink one to review it.  It clocks in at a nice, heavy 9.5% ABV, so this is one of many that’s going to give the judges a wonderful time this evening. Both from the BeerAdvocate reviews and my own personal recollection, I think this beer is entirely capable of pulling off a string of victories and winning the whole thing.    It all depends on the tastes of today’s judges.  You should definitely check out Southern Tier’s stuff – they make what is regarded by many as the best Pumpkin beer every fall, Pumking Imperial Pumpkin Ale, and they have a whole lot of others that I’m a fan of, such as the Heavy Weizen Imperial Unfiltered Wheat and the Krampus Imperial Helles Lager.

Also, Nathan gave me another cool Choklat graphic.

The draw for Choklat is tough – they’re in something of a World Cup group of death.  I think they’ll handle Young’s Double Chocolate in round 1, but then they have the misfortune of facing the winner of Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout and BORIS the Crusher, both of which could win it all.  Choklat is fully capable of making it out of that grouping to the final four; time will tell.

Speaking of BORIS the Crusher:

Thanks to Fred at Hoppin Frog Brewery for giving me permission to use graphics from their site.

BORIS (Bodacious Oatmeal Russian Imperial Stout) is a killer, killer stout.  It’s decently pricey (clocking in at $0.50 per ounce) but worth it.  I’ve had this plenty of times, just not since about February and I felt odd reviewing it without a fresh sample.  It’s good, fully capable of winning it all, and sitting down there in that group of death with BBCS and Choklat.  For my money, the best matchup of round 1 is the 2 v 15 match between BORIS and BBCS.

Also not reviewed was Weyerbacher Heresy Imperial Stout. 

I know I’ve had this one, and I know I liked it.  As with the two above, it’s been a little while.  Weyerbacher has a lot of fantastic brews, and this one is no exception.  They’ve been around since 1995 and are located in Easton, PA.

I’m going to skip the predictions hereafter because (commence dirty secret) the tournament occurred before I was done writing it, and I know exactly how Weyerbacher did.

Just a few more:

Schlafly Reserve, whom I’ve been dreadfully misspelling for this entire blog.  Somehow, every time I saw the beer, I read it without the first L and made it into “Schafly.”  Schlafly Beer is a small craft brewer in the St. Louis area.  Note – they are in no way responsible for the humongous abomination of a beer-like substance maker also located in St. Louis.  They opened in 1991 and have a fine selection of nice looking beers.  I must confess I’m not too terribly familiar with the brand, though I look forward to picking a few more up.  Their tournament entry, Schlafly Reserve Imperial Stout, is the 2008 version of that barrel-aged beer.

It comes in a sweet box with a nice explanation on the back about the origins of barrel-aging strongly flavored, high proof beers, which actually makes for a good read and gets extra points for using the first sentence to beautifully dump on the T&A beers of our day.

Last of our too-close-to-press-time to review beers is Hitachino Espresso Stout.  I’m particularly excited to have this in the tournament as it expands the reach of our tourney across the Pacific: Hitachino is in Japan (warning – website uses a ton of Flash).  The brewery’s roots go all the way back to 1823, when they were established under the name “Kiuchi Brewery,” in Kounosu village.  The rebranded Hitachino Nest Beer was created in 1996, and has made quite a bit of noise on the international brewing scene.  Most Japanese beers that I’ve come across have been light pilsners.  Hitachino has a range of styles and flavors; I’m not a fan of all of them, but the Espresso Stout in particular left me very impressed.

They also have a sweet owl logo.  I like this beer, and I think it has a fighting chance in the tourney.  The first round matchup with Founders Breakfast Stout, though, isn’t going to help.

Lots more to post in the coming couple of days, including results!

Duff Out.

Introducing Contestants – Samuel Adams Imperial Stout

What can I say about Sam Adams? I’m actually very pleasantly surprised by this beer.  My first impression wasn’t the best (note: unlike most of the reviews, I’m not tasting this beer live.  Took notes while drinking it at the Flying Saucer last night so I could post during my lunch break) – Sam Adams, like almost every beer with a large distributorship, has practically no nose.  I get nothing when I take a nice big whiff of this.  However, the flavor is… pretty damn good.  You definitely get the caramel and licorice in this guy, and that’s a hard thing to get right.  It’s labeled as “just” an Imperial Stout, but you usually end up with a chocolate, caramel, or vanilla overtone; in my experience everybody who leaned towards caramel or vanilla did so too much and it was sickening.  Sam Adams gets it just right.  The malt doesn’t come out quite as much as I’d like, and the aftertaste vanishes like most large-distributorship beers I’ve had, but while it’s in there you get more of a treat than I would have expected from a big brewer.  The feel is smooth, not particularly stingy, though this isn’t a nitro.  It’s just not overly carbonated.  It does pack a decent punch, though weighing it at 9.2% ABV.  Color’s a nice, solid black as well.

Do I really need to introduce the brewery?  It’s freaking Sam Adams.  Makers of pretty decent beer and commercials about said beer that take the radical step of not using breasts to sell their product.  I’m torn as to whether or not this is a good thing, incidentally.  They have a whole lot of different beers, most of which are pretty decent.  Their Imperial Series (of which the Imperial Stout is a member) is a little newer, and is intended to be for “big beers,” a goal I think they hit pretty well.

As far as predictions – I think this beer has a fighting chance.  I don’t think it’ll make it out of the first round, but that’s only because they come out of the gate facing Allagash Black, one of my favorites.  I think they could pull off the upset against quite a few others in the tourney, though I don’t know how many I’d list them as favorites against.

Best of luck to Sam Adams on Saturday (tomorrow!!). 

Duff Out.

Introducing Contestants – Allagash Black

This beer is different.  Lots of the beers in the tourney are flavored, but mostly with coffee, chocolate, oatmeal, or some combination of those three items.  Black is very much not like the others – it’s delightfully Belgian, and the spices and aroma hops punch you in the nose with that Belgian smell and don’t let you forget it as you’re drinking it.  It is on the light side color-wise for the beers in this tourney, but not much more than any of the others.  It does have a very stingy mouthfeel; there’s carbonation a-plenty, which actually does detract from my enjoyment of it a tiny bit.  Clocking in at “just” 7.5% ABV, this is one of the less potent potables in the brackets, but it still packs a punch if you try to down a bottle.  After having a few sips I’m getting just a hint of coffee, but mostly it’s just the malt with the taste of the traditional Belgian sugars.  I’m a huge fan of Belgian beers and that style in general, so it’s possible that’s the reason I’m much higher on this one than the gents over at BeerAdvocate, who ranked this one 14 out of 16 for the tourney), but I still think they are just plain missing something.  This is an absolutely lovely beer, and I would easily put it in my top five, possibly top three, of those here assembled.  FBS and Ten FIDY are firmly planted in the top two spots, though I don’t know the order.

Allagash is a terrific brewery up in Portland, ME.  It has a pretty large variety of beers, but there’s a good chance you’ve only ever seen or tasted Allagash White, their flagship beer.  Most of their stuff can only be found in 750 Ml bottles, such as Black:

Much thanks to Rob Tod, owner and founder of Allagash, for the nice shot of the bottle of Black. 

They have a pretty wide variety, but you’ll find a Belgian influence on them all, which suits me just fine.  If you want a beer that’ll absolutely blow your mind, I suggest picking up a bottle of Confluence, a “wild ale.”  I love it, and it’s the first beer I ever had where I took a nice sniff of the nose and came back with the distinct impression of a smell of bananas… and it didn’t ruin the taste.    I’ve had the good fortune to knock back a few fine Allagash brews with Rob Tod at some events in the DC area, and I have to say it’s a real pleasure to chat with a man that just plain lives beer and loves sharing it with others.  My sweeping stereotype of people in the beer industry, particularly at craft breweries, is that they are all nice, very cool people.  Rob absolutely enforced that stereotype.  The only other head brewer from any of the tournament beers I’ve met is Mark Ruedrich from North Coast, and he was pretty cool too.  When I do my tour of US breweries, and I sure plan to do it before the wife and I have any little ones tying us down, it will include a stop in Portland, Maine.  It’ll probably also include a stop in Portland, Oregon as well, but that’s for entirely unrelated reasons. 

As for predictions… hmmm… this one is tough for me.  The key here is that this beer is really, truly, damn unique among the beers in this tourney.  I’ll be able to pick it out without even taking a sip.  I think this is easily a top-four beer.  That being said, I don’t think it’ll make it to the final four because it needs to knock off Founders Breakfast Stout to do it, at least as the seeds stand, and my gut says the panel won’t vote that way.  They could – they absolutely could.  We’ll see.  This is why they don’t play the games on paper, as they say.  This beer absolutely has what it takes to go all the way.

Best of luck to Allagash Black on Saturday.  Who knows?  They could pull off the upset and win the whole damn thing.  It could happen.

Duff Out.

Introducing Contestants – North Coast Old Rasputin Imperial Stout

Old Rasputin tastes far more pure than some of the other non-flavored stouts in the tourney.  The lack of sweetness is almost surprising after doing so many other tastes for this tourney, but it is by no means disappointing.  This is a medium-bodied beer, not as light as the Guinness/Young’s/Samuel Smith crowd, but nowhere near the weight of the Ten FIDY group.  It has a fair amount of carbonation, and it maintains its espresso-colored head fairly well.  Despite some other reviews I’ve read, I’m not getting much in the way of hints of chocolate or coffee.  It’s entirely possible that I’m just not tasting the subtle additions after having so recently tasted things like Founders Breakfast or Brooklyn Black Chocolate where you couldn’t miss the flavors if you tried.  This is a pretty pleasant stout, very good for relaxing.  The aftertaste is slightly more bitter than I’d prefer, but still very satisfying.  I might be imagining things, but the malt almost tastes a bit toasted in comparison to the field.

In any case, a solid beer from a solid brewery, North Coast.  North Coast makes a lot of wonderful beers, from the delightfully wheaty Le Merle (a Belgian farmhouse style ale) to a handful of pale ales and even a few more stouts (definitely check out Old No. 38 if you’re a fan of the genre).  They also make Brother Thelonius, a fantastic darker abbey-style ale.  They’ve been around since 1988 and have won tons of awards for their craft – I recommend giving them a try.  If you’re in the Mendocino Coast area of CA, stop by and see the brewery itself. 

The bottle itself is quite cool.  Thanks to Mark R. At North Coast for sending me some nice graphics – this is actually a photo I took that was a little easier to format for the web, but I appreciate all the help I get.  I also totally dig it when I get emails from brew masters, one of the most fun parts about putting on this tourney.

Now for the prediction: this beer certainly deserves to go far.  In fact, if I were as to rank them by personal preference, this would easily be in the top half of the standings, maybe even top five (BeerAdvocate ranks Rasputin 5th overall in our tournament).  Unfortunately, though, as the seedings stand, Old Rasputin has a date with Oak Aged Yeti in round one – talk about a bad draw.  I just don’t see it beating out one of my favorites to make it all the way into the final four.  To be fair, the gurus at BeerAdvocate agree with me – they have Oak Aged Yeti at 3rd.  Had we seeded the tourney by the BeerAdvocate ratings, Rasputin would get a matchup with Schlafly that I think they’d win, and then have to face Southern Tier Choklat in the next round (most likely).  That one would be pretty close to a toss-up, IMHO.

Anyhow, best of luck to Old Rasputin, and sorry about the killer matchup.  We’ll see how they do on Saturday!

Duff Out.