Professor Good Ales

Profiled for professorgoodales.net by Ken Carman

I was amazed. I have actually found Abita to be a ghost of what it once was years ago in the late 80s/early 90s: an innovator, ahead of the craft beer curve… for the east coast at least. But over the years, and perhaps due to many changes in brewers, they seemed to have become humdrum. For a brief while, after they moved the brewery down the road and kept the neat little building under the huge magnolia tree as a brewpub that brews on the premises too, they snapped back. But it was mostly down hill, in my opinion.

Vanilla Double Dog may be signs of an awakening, a resurgence. God, I hope so, especially on their 25th anniversary. This beer celebrates that event.

Plenty of pillow head mixed with rocky. Brown, probably in the SRM 24-28 range… (I didn’t match it up with my samples of that standard, so I’m guessing.) …and good clarity, VDD delivers a very distinct malt nose, perhaps Marris Otter? The nose has that Lager sulfur sense and not much else.

Mouthfeel: medium body with a slight sweetish tinge on the tongue and decent carbonation; not dominating, just right.

Vanilla in taste isn’t dominate but asserts itself well. The malt is the slight dominant taste; again with that Marris Otter like, caramelized sense… especially as it warms. Just a tad sweet and maybe a hint of hop bitter in the background. Very well balanced.

A few reviewers I’ve read get a “metallic taste.” I don’t, but I know that Abita brews with local water that was noted for its mineral profile and used for health: as in bathing, years ago. Perhaps its the minerals they’re tasting, but I think it more likely the few I read might be mistaking vanilla for mineral.

I recommend this brew. Packaged in 22oz bottles.

Profiled by Ken Carman

Nose wise you get almost a sweet milk chocolate sense. The head is lasting pillow. 10.25% and, yes, you can sort of tell, though maybe not quite 10.25%. Deep obsidian.

This is a Russian Imperial: no doubt. The malt sense is deep, the alcohol high; though that sense could be more background and the malt/hop sense higher. More hops and a bit of a deeper roast could help to balance it out. There’s so much here. So promising. But with balance… wow.

Worth a limited quaff. Balance it out and this would be an RIS fan’s idea of pure heaven.

Profiled by Ken Carman

Dog Fish Head’s Olde School
abv 15%
Milton and Rehoboth, Delaware

Damn. I hate to do this. Dog Fish has become such an icon as of late, and I’m a big barleywine fan. In fact, despite all the hoopla that usually turns me off, I like a lot of what DF does. Their 120 is magnifico. But this is just not right. I will let the bottles in the 4 pack age, maybe that will improve the taste.

The problem here is too little malt, too much alc for that amount of malt and a cloying sense that speaks of unfermentables and hops out of whack. Essentially: out of balance. The carmelized sense I get also seems out of place.

Has the taste of raisins. Liquid raisin wine. Says on site “fermented with dates and figs.” Well, that explains the raisin-like sense. But it dominates, in my opinion. Says, as it ages, the fruit will come out more. Please, no?

Yellow, light head: very promising. But it falls down to the taste. Am I getting acetaldhyde here? Not to the nose, but maybe to the taste: sour apples… perhaps. If not apples, definitely some inappropriate sour and just a wee acidic. And I do wonder if some of this may be a hop problem. There are some hops that could exacerbate the brassy, sour, apple-raisin sense.

The 15% would also be less imposing with more of a malt sense.

I recommend Old Foghorn or Bigfoot. This one misses the mark. If I remember, I’ll do another profile with 6 months of dust or so on the bottles.

“Making light lager beer is like going to the beach in a thong. You better have all your parts in place or it’s going to be ugly.”

-Tom Dargan, brewer for the Gordon Biersch Restaurant & Brewery in Broomfield, Colo.

“Because big American brewers really know how to brew BARF.”

You would think after so many years of the craft beer revolution big beer would know better. You would think after malt liquor got it’s racist image 30 years ago or so, they would be more careful. You would think after all the innovative craft fruit beer out there, big beer wouldn’t be to God d#@!$% %$#@! ) *(*&^%$#$@!! stupid.

Nope. Just make a Colt 45 version of a wine cooler? No wonder big beer keeps WHINING. You would too if you kept kicking yourself in the nutsack.

Continue reading “A Ye Olde Scribe Barf Beer Alert”

Written by Dan Murphy for the Press Register and al.com

Two beer dinners are planned along the Gulf Coast in January, and they both look very promising.

On Jan. 19 at 7 p.m., Seville Quarter in Pensacola will be hosting a NOLA Brewing beer dinner, a five-course meal that pairs various NOLA brews with some amazing sounding food. Don’t miss the cask-conditioned NOLA Blonde dry-hopped with Citra hops, a new and increasingly popular hop varietal that lends a tropical, mango-like flavor to the beer.
Continue reading “Beer Dinners Planned Along the Gulf Coast”

Posted by Eric Maza at weblogs.baltimoresun.com

A couple of weeks ago, when I reported that Flying Dog had sold its Wild Goose brand to something that referred itself as a “nano-brewery,” an incredulous reader snapped back on twitter, “WTF is a nano-brewery?” (Hi @ryan97ou!)

Who can blame him for the confusion. In the beer world, terms like nano-breweries and microbreweries and craft breweries are often interchangeable, so that’s it’s difficult to know exactly how macro some of these places really are.
Continue reading “What Should be the Standard for Craft Breweries?”

Written by Joe Sixpack for The Philadelphia Daily News

BEER DRINKERS are notoriously slothful when it comes to planning for the future. That’s why we’ve developed so many ways to crack open a cold one without a bottle opener.

But now that you’ve found a place to hang the 2011 furry kitten calendar you got for Christmas, take a minute to mark some important dates to remember.

Jan. 14-15: Great Alaska Beer and Barleywine Festival. Yes, it’s cold, but the high-proof ales (not to mention outstanding mead) will warm you right up.
Continue reading “Joe Sixpack: A Year of Big Dates for Beer-lovers to Observe”

Ken Carman is a BJCP judge; homebrewer since 1979, club member at Escambia Bay and Music City Homebrewers, who has been interviewing professional brewers all over the east coast for over 10 years.

We had to go to South Bend, Indiana, on business. So what do we do? Stop by brewpubs. Of course, being Friday night and Saturday, I didn’t get to interview the brewers, or see much of the brew equipment.

So many brewpubs have come and gone in this area. Nine G., Mishawaka Brewing… we were lucky to find the few we did.

The first target was Shoreline Brewery and Restaurant in Michigan City: seemed to be the only real brewpub in the close to South Bend area as far as we could tell. More on the “real” comment later.

Brick exterior, apparently an old factory or something that, on the outside, needs some refurbishing. A few blocks from Lake Michigan itself. The inside yellow-ish/pine like wood. Promising. They even had a barley wine in bottle. But I left without one.

You know that’s absolutely not a good sign, right?

Continue reading “Brew Biz: Werts and All”

Written by Danner Kline for www.bhamweekly.com

(Photo by Robert S. Donovan. For further editions of the regional series, please check Birmingham Weekly)

Last week I did an overview of dark beers, but that was a break from a series I’ve been working on, covering key regions for American craft beer. First in the series was the Southeast, second was California and next up is Colorado. Colorado is second only to California in the quantity, quality and fame of its breweries.

Continue reading “American Beer by Region- Colorado”