Frosty Goodness

Posts Mentioning RSS Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

• 

  Walt Liquor 10:13 pm on March 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Young’s Double Chocolate Stout, for when you’re in a minimalist mood 

     So, this is what I get for daring to exercise.  A while back, I got the running bug (as I do every decade or so), ran a road race, overdid it, aggravaged a long-dormant case of asthma (not seen since high school), wound up on medication, and had to give up nasty petrochemical-brew malt liquors for a few weeks.  As my return to form, I decided to try a beer as close to Easter candy as possible.

  So — a stout, and a chocolate stout, to boot?  What’s more, a *double* chocolate stout?  I doubled up my life insurance before drinking, just in case.  Despite the implicit intensity, it turned out to be a fairly routine stout.  In that venn diagram of flavors that includes dark beers, coffee, and dark chocolate, this beer is pretty much in the muddled middle.  I’m not sure I could tell if there were chocolate in this beer in a blind taste test.  It’s not particularly bad, just didn’t live up to the Hershey’s-and-bubbles that I had been anticipating.  I really should have aimed higher, for my first beer back from sabbatical.  Then again, “aiming high” sounds dangerously close to exercise, and I don’t want to go through that again…

   

  Reply Click here to cancel reply.

  Name (required)

  Email (required)

  Web Site

   
• 

  Walt Liquor 4:42 pm on January 24, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Heineken Keg Can — Makes your hand look really small 

  

    In keeping with my pattern of either drinking 1) leprous domestic malt liquor or 2) run-of-the-mill imports, I recently tried out the Heineken Keg Can.  As you might imagine, it failed to live up to the hype — it’s essentially just a 24-oz can o’ beer with a little slope to the shape near the top and bottom.  About all it did was give me the illusion that I had somehow been shrunk to 2/3 my original size, and was now having a hard time getting my hand around a standard can of beer.  Perhaps I’ve lost the right to be snobbish given what else I’ve imbibed, but a can makes every beer taste like Coors Light to me — I suppose I could have poured it into a glass, but I decided to drink straight from the can as nature  intended, and of course I wound up imagining that I tasted aluminum with every sip. 

      Now that I got that complaint out of the way, I will say the can would be excellent if put to use for other purposes after you finish off the beer.  If you’re a little handy with tools, you could make yourself a nifty pencil holder, bacon-grease storage can, or a truly horrible-sounding addition to a drumset if mounted on a cymbal stand.  Not being handy myself (it once took me 5 hours to replace the leaky toilet hardware innards in my bathroom, true story) I’ll have to settle for a night of imagining I’m some sort of troll stealing brews from a regular-size human.  Hmmm, maybe I need to get out more…

  Swill Jockey, and Frosty are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
  • 

    Frosty 5:17 pm on January 24, 2009 Permalink

    3? 3????

    Wow Walt, those Malt Liquors have done a number on you. If I see a positive review of Keystone or Natural Light any time soon, we are going to have a serious conversation. Go have some stout and purge your system.

  • 

    Swill Jockey 12:53 pm on January 25, 2009 Permalink

    Drinking stout will purge your system, but not in a good way.

• 

  Walt Liquor 3:45 pm on December 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  Simpler Times Beer — for when men were men, women were women, and beer was room-temperature 

  For Halloween this year at the office, a few of us got together and did the old Saturday Night Live skit “Da Bears”, except for “Da Chargers”.  You remember, the big fat stereotypical Chicago bears fans with mustaches and oversize sunglasses.  This gave us the great excuse to drink beer out of giant mugs during work hours.  One of my fellow Chargers Superfans brought in “Simpler Times Beer”, a canned brew from Trader Joe’s that probably fit the bill of being 1) cheap, and 2) cheap.  It’s purpose was primarily to be a prop in a costume rather than to be enjoyed for beer as such, and it served its purpose mightily.  I can barely remember it having much of a taste at all, no mean feet considering we drank it lukewarm (as, of course, proper refrigeration took backseat to prepping the costumes).  It literally went down with nary a comment, neither being good enough to say “hey, this ain’t bad”, nor being bad enough to even warrant jokes.  To this moment I couldn’t tell you a distinguishing feature aside from the name, the central interest of which is guessing whether the nostalgic theme is intentional or some hip subtle ironicness that I’m now too old to get.  So a thoroughly generic beer, devoid of any positives or negatives in any way.

  By the way, the costumes went over pretty well, although I think we didn’t exactly pick an audience who would fully appreciate the humor.  Here’s what it’s like working at a science-tech company — after all four of us come in wearing charger’s gear, pillows for guts, fake mustaches, aviator sunglasses, and hoisting beers, one of our coworkers asked, “did you guys coordinate this?”  Next time, we’ve got to paint our jokes with somewhat broader strokes…