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  woolwine 7:03 pm on January 28, 2011 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: blueberry, cherry, Dark Horse ( 2 ), Flying Dog, Lagunitas, local ( 18 ), New Glarus ( 2 ), porter ( 5 ), raspberry, sour ( 2 ), stout, Summit ( 5 ), Surly ( 8 ), Twin Cities ( 10 ), winter ale ( 2 )   

  The back of 2010, the front of 2011 

  Recent beers in roughly ascending order of recentness…

  New Glarus Unplugged Old English Porter: Oh my god, this beer made me do a dance of joy. Thrilled that I have one more bottle, sad that I have ONLY one more bottle. It’s recognizable as a porter, but so sour that a warning sign was posted next to it: “This beer is SOUR!” Flavors that I don’t even ordinarily like throw a party in my mouth: black cherry, wood, kombucha — and I’m dancing despite myself. It’s really kind of like listening to Girl Talk for the first time.

  Surly Furious on cask: Delight. I remembered how good Sam’s was at the Happy Gnome and jumped at the chance to order one at Ngon on the evening of the winter solstice. Grapefruity, endlessly smooth, so great, even Meghan liked it. If my girlfriend likes an IPA, then that IPA is an IPA that everyone should put in their mouth.

  Lagunitas Brown Shugga: Baby’s first Lagunitas. I didn’t chill mine nearly enough the first time I drank it. Candied piney hops? No thanks. But in a frosty mug? Fresher and not too sweet. Yes, actually, I think I will, thank you.

  21st Amendment Fireside Chat: Surprisingly kinda weird! I figured the brewery that knocks watermelon wheat ale out of the park could do no wrong, but I found Fireside Chat bitter and clovey.

  New Glarus Raspberry Tart: Cracked on the occasion of my thirty-first birthday. Oh yum. Like their Belgian Red, sweet and tart but still recognizable as beer. I heart raspberries and the raspberry flavor here is just as real as expected. My only complaint is I’m now spoiled for Lindeman’s Framboise.

  Kasteel Rouge: Wow, and this one is like a Belgian Red spiked with concentrated cherry juice. Good and sour and intensely juicy-sweet. I wasn’t sure about this at first, but it grew on me. Alternated sips with a Bell’s Best Brown Ale, while I was at it.

  Dark Horse Tres Blueberry Stout: I’m into it. I think this has exactly the right amount of blueberry flavor. What I really need to do, FOR SCIENCE!, is make a clafouti or crême brûlée or something to eat alongside it.

  Flying Dog Gonzo Imperial Porter: Very nice indeed, though maybe not quite as sublime out of a bottle as I remember it from a tap at the beer fest last summer. But this is nice and robust, and as it warms I detect a little bit of the sourness I adore in New Glarus’s sour porter. I have a barrel-aged version of this too! Exciting!

  Summit Winter Ale: Number one with a bullet my new Summit favorite! Dark dark dark, thick creamy head, the smell of faraway woodsmoke in cold snowy air up top and creamy vanilla on the bottom with toasty malt sandwiched in between. Nice with ice cream.

  And a discussion question: What do you pair with macaroni and cheese? Common Roots has had a delicious truffle mac&cheese for the past month or two. I’ve tried it with a brown ale, a cream stout, and most recently Finnegan’s Irish Amber. None objectionable, but none perfect either.
   

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  woolwine 8:27 pm on September 8, 2010 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: beers of the month ( 4 ), stout   

  Lancaster Milk Stout 

  There’s a little bit of fall in the air and I made creamy dal with smoked salt for dinner. I’ve cracked an older beer-of-the-month as a tiny celebration of my having enough energy to even think about dinner after work. Smoky! Woodsmoke and pipe smoke, smoky aroma and smoky flavor. Now that it’s warmed some, the other flavors are just coming out: blackstrap molasses and a hint of plum. I’d call this one pretty good, with a damn good aftertaste that hints at maple syrup.
   
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  qtrnca 9:12 pm on April 22, 2010 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: chocolate, harpoon, malt ( 2 ), stout   

  Chocolate-y! 

  At a wedding last month, I enjoyed the Harpoon Chocolate Stout–thanks again to the groom for his superb taste in stocking the bar. It’s the first chocolate stout I’ve had that lives up to the name: not too heavy, quite malty, with a strong semi-dark chocolate flavor. I had it during the cocktail hour, but I’m sure it would be fabulous paired with strawberries and angel food cake.
   
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  woolwine 6:27 pm on March 4, 2010 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: coffee ( 2 ), local ( 18 ), stout, Surly ( 8 )   

  Surly Four 

  

  Yay hooray, another picture taken in candlelight at Common Roots. I actually like that when they tap a special beer, it comes in a cute little stemless wine glass. At first I feel a little grar about paying the same for less beer, but then I get near the bottom and remember that I’m hard put to finish a whole pint of something tasty most nights, especially if dinner and dessert are happening at the same time. Anyway, this is Four, a double espresso milk stout that Surly’s brewed for its fourth anniversary. They’ll be bottling it later this month and I thought I’d try it last night to see if I want to move heaven and earth to secure some bottles. I’m still not sure. It’s a nice beer, desserty and just a little creamy with a sweet yeasty aroma. Smoky. In fact, when I started out drinking it along with my mushroom ravioli, it tasted entirely of woodsmoke, and that was a little much. The macaroon pictured was a much better fit, but if I’d had the means, I’d have paired this with just straight-up chocolate. Obvious, but it really does work best. The coconut half of the macaroon brought out an intense ethanol booziness, which I guess is cool if you’re Sam and you like rubbing alcohol, but I found it not so flattering. The chocolate half gave me the dried fruit notes I was looking for. Date, mostly; nothing too sweet or complicated. I like this beer, but am not sold on driving all over creation to get it. I think stouts and I are on the outs for the next little while; they were a nice gateway, but lately I seem to be heading for less chewy pastures.
   
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  qtrnca 9:38 pm on February 24, 2010 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: stout   

  Stockyard Oatmeal Stout. Very pleasant, with none of the bitter afterbite I associate with Sammy Smith’s. Three thumbs up!
   
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  woolwine 5:38 pm on November 17, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ale ( 21 ), Bell's ( 4 ), Dogfish Head, stout   

  woolwine leaves the house! 

  I have a serious backlog of material hanging around in assorted places. I went to a party last Saturday where a number of magical beers were passed around, and here, for starters, are some notes.

  Dogfish Head Midas Touch. The birthday girl swears by this, particularly for initiating people who say they don’t like beer. People, if by people I mean drunken nerds, seem to love the golden yellow color. Up front it’s sweetly mellow like a mead; then it gets sharp and pointy and leaves behind a vague memory of lemons and green grass. I like this, but if I had a choice I would rather drop the pretense and drink an actual mead or maybe a barleywine, depending on if I wanted to get lit or not, about which more later.

  New Belgium La Folie. Dark dark red, pretty. Dried fruits, mostly tart cherries. Something roasted and sweetish. I liked this very much, and if this is what sour ales are like, I’ll try some more.

  The one with the bourbon barrels. I believe it was this, or something like it. Very black, and both delicious and sneaky! I got none of the cream stout flavor from this, unless by cream we mean Harvey’s Bristol Cream. Does that sound contradictory? Very well then, this Bell’s contradicts itself. No straightforwardness but in its tastiness.

  smole is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    smole 9:45 pm on November 17, 2009 Permalink | Reply

    Awesome beer list and good post. I like the comparison to Harvey’s Bristol Cream

    For “historic recipe” beers from Dogfish Head, I like Pangea more than Midas Touch.

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  woolwine 11:05 am on July 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: stout   

  Young’s Double Chocolate Stout 

  No pairing this time; I stuffed myself full of vegetable lasagna and ordered this for the dessert course.
  
  This ludicrous picture is brought to you by the crappy lighting at the Chatterbox. In the background is Gregg holding up the little blue lamp in our booth at an angle so you can see that there’s an actual beer in the picture. Posted just for lulz, but I had to make the attempt, because this one’s got an interesting head, for once. It’s got the consistency of meringue, the color of a latte, and the flavor of a dark maple syrup. Love! The rest of it isn’t quite as exciting. A little smoke, a little roasty malt, frankly not nearly as much chocolate as I was expecting. I nursed this beer a good long time and I don’t think it ever got warm enough for all of its stouty goodness to come through. Brrrr, air conditioning. I’m not writing off Young’s, but in hindsight it was a silly choice at a place that brews its own beers (around the corner from my house!), one of which I’ll be trying for sure next time.

  Mike is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Mike 9:36 pm on July 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply

    Dude, this is one of my all-time favorite beers… they have it on tap about down in Golden, my old officemate and I used to make regular pilgrimages down there to get it. Now I bring my roomie, since aforementioned officemate is in Boston.

    (And I’ve ordered it at a local brew-pub before, it’s a regular guest beer during stout month, aka the best month of the year.)

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  woolwine 12:41 pm on June 8, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Bell's ( 4 ), local ( 18 ), Schell ( 3 ), stout, Twin Cities ( 10 )   

  Bell’s, Schell’s, a pairing machine, and breaking the rule 

  First off, I must call myself out and confess that I drank a mixed drink a couple nights ago, with an umbrella in it and everything, as I’d unofficially resolved not to do. It was technically free; there were no non-mixed drinks available; and the citrus juices in it were tasty, but the citron vodka wasn’t all that. Also I stuck the umbrella in my hair afterward, as you do.

  Onward to the real stuff: I made an ill-considered pairing choice at a party the other week. I drank a Schell’s stout from the bottle and ate baba ghanoush, hummus, and salad. Blech. It improved with baklava and tasted truly awful with strawberries. I imagine that if I’d done it right, the beer would have had some nice coffee flavors.

  The old yeast and sugar sensitivity has been coming back some lately, so I’ve had to lay off drinking whole beers for a little while. Over the appetizer course of a delicious Thai dinner the other night, I had a couple of sips of Gregg’s beverage, which was a Bell’s Double Cream Stout. Yum! I’ve had, I think, a Bell’s Two Hearted and maybe an Oberon before; I remember both tasting just OK to me, but that was before NMD and my realization that I’m not about the hops. The stout was very creamy indeed; I think this is the first beer I’ve had in which I perceived toffee flavor. I wouldn’t say I paired it with anything so much as I had my couple of sips in pretty close proximity to a cream cheese wonton, a labb salad with tofu, and some drunken noodles. I’d order one with the noodles, I think.

  Speaking of pairings, NMD readers (who am I kidding, that’d be you guys who post here) might be interested in the Beer Sommelier, brought to me by Metafilter. My take is that it’s a neat idea with a slick interface, but that the food part of the database needs a lot of work for the app to be really useful (and usable).
   
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  woolwine 10:00 pm on May 25, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Dark Horse ( 2 ), drunk ( 2 ), stout   

  Dark Horse Too 

  This is a cream stout, the second in a series of five stouts from Dark Horse. (Apparently they were all on tap at once here recently, at Acadia; I wish I had gone, but it was on a Tuesday and I’d have been asking for trouble.)

  

  Dark Horse Too

  Typing as I drink (posting several days later): It pours dark and syrupy with a brown head that doesn’t stick around. Smells of molasses. The first sip, cold from the fridge, tastes like smoking a bowl of coffee ice cream, and if you know me well, you’ll know I mean that in a good way. I actually just had a cup of cappucino Heath and chocolate from Sebastian Joe’s for dinner (because I am a grown-ass woman and it’s my turn to decide what that means), and despite my experience with Lake Superior, I think the Dark Horse would have worked alongside it.

  The smoke persists as it warms, and so does the tasty molasses aroma. Wheeee the alcohol goes to my head a little because that’s what happens when I have ice cream for dinner. Carbonation’s sparkly at first, fading to a shimmer, which I like. The rest of the flavors are…uh. Dark and sweet and hard to peg underneath the smoke, honestly. I enjoy this, though, and would really like to try One (oatmeal) and Tres (blueberry). Fore is a smoked stout. More smoke than this? I dunno if I can really pull that oar.
   
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  woolwine 9:51 pm on May 16, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Lake Superior ( 2 ), local ( 18 ), stout   

  Lake Superior Oatmeal Stout, espresso gelato 

  

  Lake Superior Oatmeal Stout, espresso gelato

  I almost ordered this at lunch in Grand Marais, much closer to Duluth, where it was brewed, but it was just a quick stop before a long drive. Instead I picked up a bottle at Zipp’s, one of a few different places I could call “my local,” in a moment of “ooh yes I’ll go to the co-op with you if we can go to Zipp’s and look at beers.” I was pretty excited about pairing it with some coffee ice cream, but it turns out to taste like…beer and coffee ice cream. Very good coffee ice cream, but still. Not so much with the coffee in this beer, more with the vanilla caramel, plus I’m realizing that “coffee” is just ok as a descriptor for beer flavor since, duh, coffee also has many flavors. Lake Superior’s is brighter than I’m used to, more yirgacheffe (still tasty) than Sumatra (my very favoritest of coffees).

  Some other bottle of oatmeal stout told me to try it in a tulip glass, and anyway my pint glasses have yet to show their faces since I moved, so I tried one of my weird little stacking wine glasses. No head, as you see. I knew this beer would prompt Meghan to say “that looks like a flat Co-Cola,” and I was not disappointed. (N.B., there are no syllables missing from “Co-Cola”.) It actually felt a little overcarbonated. Does that mean I would like it better from some kind of tap? Not sure. I sat with it for a while as my gelato melted, figuring the stout would get more stouty-delicious like stouts do when they warm. It did, but toward the end the stout deliciousness curve seemed to take a little downturn as the smoky/sweet/roasted maltiness started to give way to a little bit of sourness. Not my favorite oatmeal stout, but might be someone else’s.