What is the Best Session IPA?

June 5, 2014 by Steve Leave a Comment

Best of Series: What is the Best Session IPA?

The Oxford Companion to Beer reminds us that one definition of light beer is “a beer with lower alcohol than most…” Which might make Joseph Owades ‘Diet Beer’ the first mass marketed session beer after Prohibition. A while back, while reviewing Lagunitas’s then new DayTime IPA we introduced the concept of a beer with the massive hop presence of an American IPA, without the higher alcohol content or heavier body. But is it the best session IPA? Since then, just as Gigapets displaced Pogs, higher ABV beers are slowly losing popularity to lower ABV styles such as sours, saisons, and heavily hopped ‘session IPAs’. With summer ever so slowly approaching through the indefatigable polar vortex, it seems time to pick which low alcohol beers are worth packing for a long, sticky day on the disk golf course.

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WHAT IS A SESSION BEER?

Who the hell knows. Lew Bryson who writes ‘The Session Beer Project’ pens fine prose, and is bit of a zealot when it comes to this session beer thing. For him, 4.5% alcohol by volume is the upper limit allowed by the style. 4.6% is right out. SEO wizards Beer Advocate offer up 5% as the proper ceiling. But these all seem to look back to dour old England, where the beer was nearly flat, cask conditioned mediocrity, chugged from 20 oz imperial pint glasses. In a modern American “craft beer bar” you are lucky to get even a 16 oz pour, as the cooler glasses and mendacious ownership trump traditions of the old empire. With unlimited ice water and a menu full of fresh, local, organic offerings of house made hummus, and charcuterie (You didn’t know we have our own butcher here?) getting drunk is more a challenge, than a inevitable problem one must plan ahead to avoid. So for our purposes here, if a brewer calls a beer an “easy drinking” or “session drinking” and mentions big hops, its a session IPA.

THE BEERS

Fat Head’s – Sunshine Daydream IPA: Hugely floral and citrus hop dominated IPA with great malt backbone to balance with a subtly bitter kick of a finish: 4.9% ABV
Stone – Go To IPA: Big hops on the nose of this citrus and pine loaded IPA with a thin body and crisp dry finish: 4.5% ABV
Founders – All Day IPA: Tangerine nose, thin body with a delicious mostly pine hop loaded taste, with significant bitterness: 4.7% ABV
Southern Tier Farmer’s Tan: Dank hoppy nose, decent pine and tropical fruit hop flavors, with some biscuit malt and bitter, dry finish: 4.6% ABV.
North Peak Brewing – Wanderer Session IPA: Smells of malt but taste is nearly all of grapefruit, floral and spicy hop notes, with some malt and bitter finish: 4.2% ABV
Ithica – Green Trail IPA: Soapy nose on this west-coast style leads to a sweet malt base finishing dank, oily and bitter: 6% ABV

CONCLUSION

All five beers tasted were capable of bringing some traditional IPA elements such as a bright hoppy nose, bitterness, or tropical or pine flavors. All are also thinner in body and dryer in finish than a traditional IPA or APA. Fat Heads, Stone and Founders all stand up well against Lagunitas Daytime. Southern Tier is similar, just not quite as flavorful. North Peak is quite drinkable, although the caramel malt taste is different. There are so many brewers doing this style I’m not certain if we discovered the best session IPA, but the top three are all recommended for the style as very hoppy light beers. For our money though, we will still most likely reach for a 6% ABV APA like Row 2/Hill 56 or Alpha King for our sessions.

Best Coffee Beer Part 1

January 14, 2012 by Steve 2 Comments

What Is The Best Coffee Beer?

Founders Double Oatmeal Chocolate Stout — FOUNDERS BREAKFAST STOUT

The Premise

Each winter brings back together old friends in North East Ohio for the Tri-City Beer Club’s Annual Christmas party. In its 15th year the TCBC is a small group of beer fans who gather to blind taste test beers in a category. Getting older, the group has turned in Nirvana for NPR, and Cherry Coke for coffee. To reflect the maturing tastes, for the first time we decided to take on a hugely popular craft beer style; coffee beers. So what is the best coffee beer? Round one of The Barley Whine’s research into this question puts some great beers up to the challenge.

Methodology

As always, we blind tasted brews of a similar style, rated between 1 and 10, with .5 as the only allowable decimal. The first beer was re-tasted at a random time to avoid position bias. Beers are ranked based on style, not their genetic closeness to Tim Tebow.

The Beers

Founders – Breakfast Stout: #1 . Smelling of coffee and sweet chocolate, pours a khaki strong head with good retention. The taste is cold pressed coffee complexly combined with semi-sweet chocolate. Finishes with a bitter chocolate, hoppy bite. The mouthfeel is thick but slick from the oatmeal, and well carbonated. A world class blending of flavors, brewed to perfection.
Southern Tier – Mokah #2. Huge roasted coffee and chocolate nose. Do the Tootsie Roll! Milk Dud candy dominates the flavors. Lots of great chocolate, followed by the coffee, with cloying sweetness. The body is thick, less smooth than the Founders brew probably due to less oatmeal. Almost no bitterness in the finish. The 11% ABV is buried. The non-coffee drinks all gave this top marks.
Tröegs – Java Head: #3 . A dark chestnut pour with bubbly tan head. Smell is surprising mix of malts, coffee, and hops. Some sweetness, coffee, and hops with biscuity malts. Lots of astringency from the oats and hops. Coffee is mostly in the finish. Body is creamy, smooth and thick.
Surly – Coffee Bender: #4. Burnt coffee nose. Sweet coffee taste, dark chocolate, espresso. Very tasty!
AleSmith – Speedway Stout: #5. Guess what? It’s black. Potent caramel/toffee nose. Taste is of a great imperial stout, with subtle java and chocolate, a bit of soy sauce.
Bell’s – Java Stout: #6 (tie). Day old coffee grounds and vegetable smell. Lots of nice roasted malts, milk chocolate and burnt coffee hit the palette. The mouthfeel is nice and think. True to a stout but better with coffee, this beer suffers against sweeter, less chocolaty beers.
Samuel Adams – Black and Brew: #6 (tie). Dark brown color. Caramel nose with subtle coffee. Taste has a creamy coffee element, with only very little malt or hops. Body is a bit thin, well carbonated. Drinkable, but just too one note and bland to stand out against others.
Midnight Sun – Arctic Rhino: #8. Coffee and caramel notes with some alkaline odors. Tasted of roasted malts, mild coffee and a bit astringent. The body is really thin, with decent carbonation. Not as strong a java flavor, and much less thick than the others.

Conclusion

With stouts and porters, roasted malts, coffee and chocolate are a natural combination to play out in dark beers. If you like coffee, the addition of it to a good stout can make for a more complex, satisfying, even phenomenal brew. Chocolate is a very popular addition to dark beers and for those that do not like coffee’s bitterness, chocolate and a bit of additional sweetness turns them around on the style. Some of the best stouts fall in the coffee beer category so even if you’re not a 6 cup a day Starbucks addict, give any one of these a try in place of your Guinness or Baileys and you will be joyously surprised.

Southern Tier Choklat

January 11, 2012 by Steve Leave a Comment

Southern Tier Choklat Review

Chocolate beer! Sounds like a better way to market craft beer to a broader audience than patronizing gimmicks like putting light lager in pink packaging. Sure, stouts and porters often have roasted malts that impart flavors of chocolate (e.g. chocolate malts) and coffee. But can brewers apply actual chocolate or cocoa nibs as adjuncts to make beer better? This is what we will try and resolve in our tasting of Southen Tier Choklat.

Southern Tier's Choklat Imperial Stout

A part of the ‘Blackwater Series’ of imperial stouts, this beer comes in at a high 11% ABV. Known perhaps best for their Pumking imperial ale, Southern Tier makes a number of huge stouts that appeal to those who like sweetness with their roasted malt, booze bombs. This beer gets a 100(!)/100 on Rate Beer and a 95/100 on Beer Advocate so beer geeks think the combination works. But is this any good? Well yes, yes it is.

TASTING NOTES

Steve’s Take: Dark as night, pouring it less than three weeks after bottling produced a strong tan head that lingers longer than one would expect from an 11.0% brew, with no lacing. This beer smells like Yoo-hoo and roasted grains. Other chocolate based beers do not capture the scent the way Southern Tier has. Candy-like sweetness which along with the heavy dose of chocolate gives this a dessert like quality. Might be a bit sweet for some with allusions to Tootsie Rolls coming through (though this is less pronounced than in Mokah, ST’s combination of Choklat and Jahva a sweet coffee stout). The body is semi-slick with good carbonation keeping it from being heavy. Slight coppery finish along with a sufficient hop kick for balance with almost no hint of the high ABV. None of the soy sauce elements that can characterize unbalanced imperial stouts, Choklat goes down easy.

CONCLUSION

This is a fine beer. A tad more saccharine than I would prefer in the style, the sweetness is never cloying and pairs very well with the chocolate to make a multidimensional imperial stout. Bottled in late December 2011 Southern Tier Choklat is available while it lasts. A special thanks to Brad at ClevelandFoodandBrews.com for the recommendation.

9/10

What is the Best Pumpkin Ale?

October 8, 2011 by admin 3 Comments

Pumpkin Beer Tasting 2011 Part 1

About the beer

Pumpkin ales are a species fruit beer brewed to taste of that familiar American spice mix associated with pumpkin pie and mulled rum. Fall is the season for these foods as well as harvest time for pumpkins. Although many pumpkin ales contain canned fruit as they are brewed well in advance of the pumpkin harvest.

For our first pumpkin tasting of the year, we selected a wide variety of interpretations of the style. From the traditional Ichabod Pumpkin Ale by New Holland and Punkin’ from Dogfish Head, to the bitter end, Smuttynose’s offering. On the strong side we selected Heavy Seas Great Pumpkin bourbon barrel aged Imperial Pumpkin Ale at 10.5% ABV, a West Coast interpretation, the Autumn Maple at 10% ABV, yam based brew with pumpkin spices, molasses, vanilla and Belgian yeast from The Bruery, and from Hoppin Frog, Frog’s Hollow Double Pumpkin Ale at 8.4% ABV. Also included was a favorite from New York, the Southern Tier Pumking, another imperial at 8.6% ABV.

What is the best pumpkin ale? — A few of the contenders

Methodology

For the first round of pumpkin beer tasting we sampled seven beers blindly, no more than two at a time.

So what is the best pumpkin ale?

Southern Tier – Pumking: Splendid from first wiff to the sweet sorrow of the last sip. Pumpkin pie with whipped cream. Caramel corn with cinnamon and vanilla rainbows. This beer was in limited supply in 2010 but seems to be more available this year. Buy it now!
Dogfish Head – Punkin’: A traditional favorite of The Barley Whine, this time our samples lacked a lot of the pumpkin and spice that we remember. A solid showing but a bit dull compared to what else is out there.
Smuttynose – Pumpkin Ale: Smutty brings an assertive hop presence to everything they do, and this is no exception. For people who dislike the sweetness of fruit based beers but like pumpkin spices, this is a good alternative. Good pumpkin presence.
Hoppin Frog – Frog’s Hollow Double Pumpkin Ale: A mix of pumpkin spices, molasses and ginger. Not much gourd flavor, and a bit flat in the finish, but not a bad brew. The ginger is a unique touch and reminds us of their winter offering.
The Bruery – Autumn Maple: Dark in color, the strong maple flavors are up front on the palette. A lot of sweetness, with some of that funk that people love or hate in certain Belgian yeast strains. Super complex brew made from yams. Well worth trying if your glucose levels are in check. Steve loved it. Dave was ‘meh’.
Heavy Seas – The Greater Pumpkin: Big cinnamon/nutmeg nose. Very sweet, which helps cover up some of the 10+% ABV. Lots of vanilla/oak flavors coming from the bourbon barrels this guy was aged in. One of our favorites. If you see this one, pick it up.
New Holland – Ichabod Ale: Classic pumpkin pie smell (cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg) and solid malty sweetness. More spice than fruit but finishes cleanly and has great balance. This one was a real surprise and compromised what most people expect from a good pumpkin ale.

Conclusions

What is the best pumkin ale? Pumking! — Pumking: More popular than the wine at a recent wedding

Pumpkin beers are generally brown ales with pumpkin spices added along with some pumpkin, but a “typical” pumpkin beer is becoming harder to define. The style has a lot of diversity in the craft brewing world, and each of the beers we sampled were interesting and enjoyable on their own.

As far as the best pumpkin beer however, so far nothing for us has topped Southern Tier’s Pumking. It tastes like pumpkin and so much more. The high alcohol is well covered in the creamy nutmeg, clove, cinnamon medley. The sweetness is subtle, not cloying. Among this tough competition, Southern Tier comes out on top.

Update: Part II here