Review – New Holland Ichabod

My first experience with New Holland was their Dragon’s Milk Oak-Aged Ale, so Ichabod had some big shoes to fill on the expectations front.  The color is pumpkin standard orange-tinted copper:

There is a definite hint of pumpkin and nutmeg in the nose.  Holiday-themed flavoring is very present, but you still get an overall amber beer flavor, which is a bit of a rarity given the genre.  Ichabod has a distinct aftertaste that actually reminds me of a weaker and slightly more bitter version of Pumking.  I don't notice the cinnamon, but then again I rarely do. 

I'm very pleasantly surprised by this brew; it's low on the ABV scale (5.2%) and decently pricey (10.94 per standard six pack).  For some reason I had it in my mind that I had tried it long ago and hated it, but that wasn’t the case at all; it was quite good, and I rather enjoyed my glass.  If you're looking for the lighter side of pumpkin this might be the right way to go.  It doesn't have a sweetened flavor that I usually like in my pumpkin ales, but that tends to come more with the higher ABV ales, such as Weyerbacher (8%) or Pumking (9%).  There is a certain bitterness about the ale that grows the more of it you drink.

New Holland is a very interesting craft brewer from Michigan, a state that has one of my favorites, who sadly won’t be in this tournament, as I have yet to see a pumpkin ale from them.  Why not give it a whirl Founders?  Why not, I ask?  Anyhow, New Holland has a lot of cool-sounding stuff; sadly I don’t know them very well.  The only other beer of theirs that I’ve been fortunate enough to get a hold of is the aforementioned Dragon’s Milk, which is excellent.  It’s also widely regarded as their best (a statement it looks like they agree with). 

I have a mixed opinion on Ichabod.  It could do well in the tournament if the judges break the right way, but if I had to put money down on it I’d peg it for a very close first-round exit, again depending on the matchup.

Review - Blue Moon Harvest Moon

This is a light pumpkin ale, but it leans more toward the sweet than the bitter.  Blue Moon manages to get the nose right, if a little weak, and the aftertaste is pleasantly in line with some of the more powerful pumpkin ales out there.  It's not overly powerful (5.7% ABV), and is quite easy to drink. The color is pumpkin-standard orange-tinted amber ale color, though I've found few that stand out in that regard.

I'm not overly clobbered with pumpkin flavoring.  Some people may like this, but I prefer my pumpkins big and bold.  It claims (on the bottle) to be flavored with pumpkin, cloves, and allspice, but I don't really notice much of anything besides the title ingredient. 

I'm inclined to rank this as a mid-range pumpkin ale, but I could see it being popular for just having an easy, light-but-noticeable, sweet flavoring to it.  I wouldn't put it as going very far depending on the matchup, but I'm definitely hanging an asterisk next to that prediction.  I'm not the unique judge for this tourney, and the popular vote may end up sending this one on a streak.  This is the first ale I've tasted that didn't have nutmeg.  I can't say for sure whether or not I miss the flavoring.  I give this one a solid “B” as a pumpkin, which is what I've come to expect from Blue Moon.  Despite being owned by MillerCoors, they deliver consistently decent beers.  They have yet to deliver me a knockout, gotta-have-it, raving-to-all-my-friends beer, but neither have they put up many disappointments.  Well done, Blue Moon.  I'm a fan, just not a huge one.

Review – Shipyard Pumpkinhead

Unfortunately, this beer starts off at a disadvantage. I’m drinking it as my second pumpkin ale of the night, and the “warm up” was Weyerbacher’s IPA* (P = Pumpkin, to be reviewed later). All I can think is that this tastes like the Bud Light of pumpkin ales. There is no nose on this, and I’m drinking it out of one of those wonderful Sam Adams glasses. How do you miss the nose when you’ve got a well shaped glass, you ask? Well… open up a bottle of X Lite. X can be anything, so long as it has a light version. They all smell the same, which is to say they don’t smell at all. I want to give this beer a fair shake, but I’m just not a huge fan.

There is a faint pumpkin flavoring to it. The aftertaste is where it most came alive to me. It’s a very lightly colored beer, which is rarely impressive to me. One of the positives of this beer is that it does feel very light, so you could drink a lot of it and not feel weighed down. It actually does quite well as a second beer, in the sense that I had a very heavy beer first and just didn’t want to get extra hammered tonight.

Given what I wanted, it succeeds, but in so doing it doesn’t impress me as a pumpkin ale at all. I can’t get over the light taste of it; pumpkin ales are known for smacking you in the face with all the cinnamon, pumpkin, and nutmeg you can handle, and in that vein I can’t help but be disappointed.

I don’t think this will be a big winner in the tourney. We haven’t yet set the pairings, though I do plan to feature this for lighter fare. I have my own biases towards the powerful and heavy, though, so we’ll see how the jury votes. Sorry, Shipyard, I’m just not a fan of this one.  Looks like the Beeradvocate review agrees.  I don’t expect this one to go very far, but I’ve been surprised before by a jury of my peers.

Shipyard is a craft brewery in Maine, and it appears they have a fairly broad selection of seasonals.  I wish I could have gotten hold of their Smashed Pumpkin, but alas, it was nowhere to be found in the Raleigh or DC areas.

Announcing: Tournament of Pumpkins

[Farnsworth voice] Good news, everybody!  [/Farnsworth voice]  We’re getting the tournament back together – but this time it’s a battle royale of fall seasonals.  This November 20th, my friends and I will gather to decide the best pumpkin ale we could get our hands on in full bracket-style glory.  Eight pumpkin ales enter, only one reigns supreme.  It should be a good time for one and all, and just as I did with the Tournament of Stouts, I’ll be posting to the blog, reviewing the contestants and musing other beery* thoughts. 

We learned a few things from our first tournament experience, and I’ll list them here for your reading amusement/benefit, should you ever choose to do a tournament of your own. 

1. The first and by far most important lesson learned from the Tournament of Stouts is that there is such a thing as too much awesome beer.  Sixteen beers is too many to review in bracket-style in one night.  By the 20th or so taste, what I wanted to win changed drastically.  Take the case of Southern Tier’s Chocolat.  I voted for it enthusiastically for the first two tastes, and it did indeed make it through to the semifinal.  I regretted that last vote for the rest of the tourney, as the smell of something so rich actually got to be sickening.  Cutting the field to eight beers cuts the number of tastes in half (yay exponentials), and allows you to be able to appreciate each beer in the same state, before your taste buds start telling you to lay off the dark stuff.  Seeing as how everything we’re reviewing this time is pumpkin-flavored, this is a very important lesson to have learned.

2. Two-ounce pours are easier to judge with.  A one-ounce pour is just too little to properly appreciate everything about a beer.  Given lesson #1, this is an easier rule to apply.  Wider cups help you to get the nose of each of the samples as well.  I recommend white mouthwash cups.

3. White or clear cups are very important – but be consistent.  We started with some white cups, then went to smaller wine-tasting clear cups.  Switching was a mistake.  You definitely want something neutral; drinking out of a blue cup will change your taste perceptions.  It’s true.  Switching from white to clear didn’t really damage the tournament, but it somehow threw me off. 

4. Have a bunch of neutral snacks.  Crackers, pretzels, or just plain old bread are great for cleansing the palate when you’re doing a lot of tasting.  Wine tastings will also usually have something of the sort; it helps to feel taste balance, not to mention gets something in your stomach to soak up all the delicious, delicious beer.

The list of contestants for the Tournament of Pumpkins is actually up for some discussion at the moment.  I know that the following are in.

1. Southern Tier Pumking
2. Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin Ale
3. Dogfish Head Punkin
4. Blue Moon Harvest Moon
5. Shipyard Pumpkinhead

As for the last three, they could be…

1. Heavy Seas Great Pumpkin
2. Heavy Seas Greater Pumpkin
3. Cottonwood Pumpkin
4. Wolaver’s Will Stevens Pumpkin Ale
5. Hoppin Frog Frog’s Hollow Double Pumpkin Ale
6. anything else that catches my eye in the next couple of weeks

I would love – LOVE  - to get Hoppin Frog, but unfortunately their distributor in North Carolina doesn’t deliver to anywhere I can easily get to.  And while I’m at it – I actually spoke to the guy that (allegedly) was in charge of getting stuff to the Raleigh area.  He told me that all Total Wines in the Raleigh area had it.  I called every single one of them, and absolutely none of them did.  Most hadn’t heard of it.  Seriously, Hoppin Frog – what’s up with your distributors?  And why don’t you ship to MD?  You make a pumpkin ale that wins the gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival, but you won’t ship it to all your fans, even the ones that usually have access to Hoppin Frog beers.  Total Wine has plenty of BORIS the Crusher (which is awesome).  But no Frog’s Hollow (which is probably also awesome).

Anyhow, I’ll get that list solidified and the reviews out in the next couple of weeks.  Stay tuned!

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.