The beers of New River: Argus Brewery's Clyde's Ale ESB

This is one of the beers Hilgar gave me last month. It was brewed in Chicago by Argus brewery, who is set up in the building that was once the stables for Schlitz beer's horse teams. Argus started brewing in '09 to supply a number of house beers for local restaurants, but began producing their own labeled beers soon after. They focus mostly on traditional British styles and the names of their beers tend to have an equine theme due to the former life of their building, such as this one being called "Clyde's ale" (get it? Clydesdale), though this is not an absolute rule as they also produce a beer with Walter Payton's son Jarret Payton called Jarrett Payton All-American Wheat Ale. They currently produce at 2,500 US barrels a year, at 31 gal/ US barrel that's 77,500 gallons of beer. considering the average American only drinks about 21 gallons of beer a year it would take a single person over 3,600 years to drink all of the beer this brewery I've never heard of is producing.

The bottle has this to say about it's contents beer: "Clyde's ale is made for those who work hard and require a bold brew to relax at the end of a long day. No lightweight beer is going to cut it. ESB is a type of strong ale rooted in British tradition. Argus Brewery has created this ale using primarily British malts, hopps & classic British style yeast culture. Expect a deep copper color, full malt flavors & a robust hopp character. It truly is an Extra Special Bitter. But honestly, if it's good enough for Clyde, it's good enough for you." it's 5.5% abv, which is the lowest abv I've ever seen in and extra special bitter. It has a Clydesdale on the label, and the Argus brewery symbol, which I think is gorgeous. But enough talk, let's pop this sucker open and check out that nose.

Nose from the bottle is hoppy, not overwhelmingly though. It has a little bit of malt scent.Not much else to say on that, time to pour it into the super traditional Orion mug.

It does have the deep copper color, and a little life inside the mug, not a great deal though. It had some white fluffy head, but that rather quickly dissipated. Nose from the mug is the same as from the bottle. It's certainly hoppy, I don't really taste the malts. It's all just grassy hopps. Mouthfeel is sort of straight medium bodied with some acidity.It's kind of unremarkable. you could have called this one an IPA and nobody would have noticed. I know ESB is very similar to IPA but I would expect enough difference in a beer for even an amateur like me to tell the difference in a blind taste test. It's not bad, but it's nothing special. Maybe that's why it's not listed on their site? I'll let it warm up a bit and see if there is a change.

So my longtime friend, coworker and roommate Kingsley is out of the Marine Corps now. I have the room completely to myself, but for the first time I'm not really happy about that. While I can play Ska music at all hours of the night now (a fact that I am currently taking advantage of at this moment), not even awesome 3rd wave covers can fill the hole left in my life. This isn't the first time I've been separated from a good friend, but this time it has an odd sense of permanence. I suppose Kingsley represented the last connection to the old shop, and now I'm just a sad relic of a group that doesn't really exist anymore. It's time for me to go, there's nothing left for me here now. At first I was apprehensive about going to Japan, I actually wanted to avoid going, now I just want out of here and Japans a means to that end. They say you don't know the good old days until they're gone. I don't think that's always true. We knew back then, and I think we made the most of it, we all knew it wouldn't last. Now is no time to live in the past, now is the time to acknowledge that they were good times and to look forward to the good times in the future. I suppose that's all I can really do. Damn, I need a girlfriend or something.

Nothing really changed when the beer warmed up. It was OK, I wouldn't bother picking it up again if other things were available.

The beers of New River: Bell's Brewery Third Coast Old Ale

This is one of the beers my buddy Hilgar gave me. It was bottled on the fifth of September back in 2014 by Bell's Brewery at their Comstock Michigan location. Originally Bells was called Kalamazoo brewing Inc and was a homebrew supply store from 1983-1985 when they started brewing their own beer commercially. They've gotten allot bigger since then. They have two different brewery sites, a brewpub, a homebrew store, and their Two hearted pale ale (which I'm a huge fan of) was rated as the second best beer in the entire United States. But tonight we have a different one of their beers, the Third Coast Old Ale.

 Now this ones a barley wine, a style I haven't had on this blog yet and I have only recently been introduced to. Barley wines tend to have very high alcohol content for beer, this one is about 10.2%, and this lends to their extended shelf life. Typically you want a barley wine to age for at least a year, this one is almost a year and a half, but I cannot get a solid answer on when they peak.  I'm afraid I'm not in a situation where I can keep an individual bottle that long, so I might as well have it today. You are supposed to serve Barley wine in a snifter, however I do not have one. So tonight we are substituting it with the room temperature super traditional Orion mug.

The bottle says "An ale for those who appreciate complexity and vintage character. fill a snifter and enjoy it now or commit some bottles to the cellar to test you patience" It should be noted that that in America, a barley wine being called and old ale means it is British styled, while in Brittan it means that it's a dark beer made to have an extended shelf life.
It makes an audible hissing sound as I open the bottle, always a good omen. It has a heavy, fruity, malt nose from the bottle. The nose also has characteristics similar to wine, which is part of the reason these are called barley wines in America. The other reasons are that they, like wine, have very long shelf lives and as previously mentioned have a high alcohol content for a fermented beverage.

It has almost no head, but at the same time is a beer so alive that you can actually hear it crackle. The color is like mahogany with stained oak trim. Nose from the mug is fruity like a Trappist strong ale, but not figgy, its like concentrated grape juice, like those frozen tubes of Welches concord grape juice concentrate that almost always have a little sign next to them that say they are a WIC approved food. I can smell the alcohol in the aroma, time to taste. The flavor on initial sip is extremely malty, with molasses tones. I held it in my mouth for a moment to get the mouthfeel, and I got this tingling sensation around my tongue. There was no acidity, just a tingling feeling. And then I discovered that the alcohol had put my tongue to sleep. There isn't an alcohol bite, but it definitely makes it's presence known. It is certainly a heavy beer, I haven't had one with so much gravity in a minute.
I just realized I have been sitting here for about five minutes with the same mouthful of beer, just churning it around my maw. I suppose that's a good sign for this one, you can just sit back and enjoy a single sip.
I need to hunker down and get serious about my academic projects. I have and entire shelf of half finished books I've got to polish off. I was thinking about starting on Lex Rex by Rev. Samuel Rutherford, but I haven't finished Russo's Social Contract, so I should probably hold off until that's finished. The Social Contract is probably one of the most insightful books in regard to politics outside of the Bible that I have ever read. but it is ultimately one long, detailed, empirical argument split into sections. Because of this, it can be quite hard to follow some times and does not lend to being put down and picked up again later very well. If I stop reading that book for so much as a couple of days I have to re-read about half of the previous chapter so I'm not completely lost when I get back to the part I left off at. The one book I'm actually making good headway in finishing is Louis Zampanelli's book "Don't give up, don't give in" which partially follows his life, but is mostly his outlook on life in general, using elements from his life to give examples to points he is trying to make. Other than that is my on again, off again attempts at learning Japanese. At least that's going better than my lifelong failure to learn a stringed instrument. I suppose my most faithful academic endeavor is the one regarding my faith, I do study the Bible on a near daily basis and is has been no end of help to me.

I need to go to sleep now, I wish I had some way to save the rest of this delicious barley wine, but I'm afraid I do not. If you ever come across a bottle of Third Coast you should pick it up, put it somewhere safe, and drink it on a day where you have all of the time in the world to yourself to think about whatever comes to mind. I could spend all day with this beer. I give it my blurry seal of approval.

The beers of New River: Mother Earth Brewing Sisters of the Moon IPA

This is one of those beers I got at food lion about a month ago. It's from Mother Earth Brewing out of Kinston NC. As I'm sure you probably figured out from the name, it's run by a bunch of Godless Hippies. The brewery started in 2008 and had their first batch on the street in 2009. The brewery is obnoxiously environmentally friendly, if you can think of some off the wall green hoodoo, they are doing it. These people are insane, I love it, I want their beer. Fortunately I have their Sisters of the moon IPA, and if they have put in half the attention to detail into their beer as they have to not polluting the local area, I think this is going to be a good one.

It's a nice looking bottle, I like the painting with the three girls dancing in the moon. I like the symbol for the brewery as well. It looks like Hanoi Jane in the initial scene of the 1968 film Barbarella, the one where she's floating around naked. Visually fascinating film, Barbarella. Good music as well, terrible in every other respect. But I digress.

The sexiest traitor since Ethel Rosenberg

(You have no idea how hard it was to find a picture that conveyed the message I wanted but wasn't rated R)

Bottle says it has all American hopps, light copper color, intense hop aroma and strong hoppy bitterness. It is also Hoppbacked, where you have hot wort flow through fresh hopps to give the beer back the hopp oils that are burned off in the boiler. It's similar to dry hopping, but at an earlier stage and for a much shorter amount of time.

Anyways, lets pop this sucker open.

Makes a nice hiss sound when you open it, usually a good sign. Nose from the bottle is faint, but has malt and citrus qualities to it. Time to pour it into the super traditional Orion mug and see how it heads. 

oops

On initial sip (admittedly, it was all head, my fault) it tastes more of malt than of hopps. After getting down to the beer proper, it is much more bitter. They got the description of the color right, it is a light copper. Intense hopp aroma it does not have. Nose was slight from the bottle and almost non-existent from the mug. It's not really a "strong hopp bitterness", more of a mellow hopp bitterness. It's a mid bodied beer, almost no acidity. While ill described by it's brewer, it is quite the pleasant IPA. The hopp biterness lingers for about five seconds after you've swallowed the beer. I imagine this is due to the hopp oils that were re-introduced. There isn't much activity inside the mug, but there is a great deal of sediment suspended throughout the beer (there's a word for that, but I can't for the life of me remember what it is). 

 

I finally saw Hateful Eight. Another Tarantino bloodbath with a multi-leveled story. That's not to say it wasn't new, exiting, and surprising. It kept my undivided attention from start to finish, loved every minute of it. Be forewarned, it is probably his most gruesome film. It's a bit like reservoir dogs, it largely takes place in one small location, and jumps throughout the timeline of the story to give you a full perspective of whats going on, but with a bit more skill than in reservoir dogs. I like the fact that it goes back to western noir, in that, while innocent people are brutally murdered, it's not really about them. It's about evil people, meeting terrible ends at the hands of other evil people, because that's what happens to evil people. It's a fantastic, well told story and if you're not particularly squeamish you should go see it. 

 

That's it for this beer. For my final thoughts, I loved it. It was easy to drink, it was hoppy, but it didn't punch me in the face with grassy flowers. I loved the fact that the mellow flavor stuck around so long. Well done you crazy hippie earth children, well done. I give this beer my blurry seal of approval.

The beers of New River: Oskar Blues Pinner throwback IPA

I recently went on a pub crawl in Ashville with my lifelong friend and fellow beer nerd Chris Hilgar. We had many fantastic beers at some great brewpubs, but the one that sticks out for me was the Thirsty Monk Pub where I was re-united with my star crossed lover Rochefort 10. This beer was so good I was almost brought to tears. Someday I shall write a blog post about it, but today is not that day.

 No, today belongs to Oskar Blues Pinner throwback IPA.

As you all know, I like to talk a little about any brewery I haven't featured on the blog before.Oskar Blues was started as a bar and grill in Lyons Colorado in 1997 and started brewing in 1999. They are notable for being the first craft brewer available nationwide to use cans. In 2013 they opened a satellite brewery in Brevard, North Carolina where the following beer was brewed.
According to Oskar Blues site: "How do you cram as much hop & malt flavor and aroma as possible into a beer but make it crushable too? That's the challenge we answered with PINNER Throwback IPA. At 4.9% ABV and 35 IBUs, this drinkable IPA uses several varieties of hops to target the ever-evolving flavor. With tropical fruits, citrus juices, pineapple and spice berry up front in the aroma and flavor, the biscuit & toasted bread at the back balance out all the hops and make a great finish to go on to your next can of PINNER. It's the perfect beer for a little sip, sip, give." We'll see about that.
Nose from the can is citrusy, like grapefruit, maybe a little pine. Time to pour it in the super traditional Orion mug and see how it heads.

It has a nice golden color and a frothy, porcelain white head. Good activity on the inside of the mug, allot of big bubbles on the side. Nose from the mug is the same. flavor on the inital sip is mostly pine, with grapefruit citrus afterwards. Body is medium, not a particularly acidic mothfeel. A little of an alcoholic aftertaste. I'm ganna let this warm up a little and see if it changes.

I'm a little dismayed that I wasn't able to see the Hateful Eight roadshow, but it's out in regular theaters now so I'll probably see it tonight. I wanted to see that 70mm CinemaScope so bad. But I'm sure it'll be good in regular digital. Star wars didn't disappoint. Death stars were destroyed, masked family members were revealed, people who lived as bumpkins in middle of nowhere were allowed to pilot interplanetary spacecraft, central characters were killed with lightsabers, crazy looking robots and creatures were everywhere in an intergalactic cantina, dialog was terrible. It was a new hope over again sure, but it was pretty good. 

The pine flavor becomes much more pronounced after the beer warms. I don't know what the after taste it has gained is but it's not great. Mouthfeel has become even more mellow, also has more alcohol flavor. I'm out of beer now. It was a tasty one, not exactly nuanced, but it was good. If given the option, I would seek this one out again. I give it my blurry seal of approval.