Whoops!  I’m a little late with my posts — didn’t realize how long it had been since my last Malt Liquor update (must be down to just a handful of brain cells left).  I’ve also exhausted all the Malt Liquors at my local brew pit, so I’ve had a harder time getting new dreck to review.  But I did get ahold of some St. Ides, from the 7-11 during a trip with the kids to buy a slurpee.  (And boy was that awkward, putting both of those on the counter…)

After taste-testing six malt liquors in the past year, I thought I was able to handle the typical malt liquor.  St. Ides didn’t at first appear to be anything special.  But this is a malt brew full of surprises.  And, needless to say, surprise is NOT what you want when it comes to beer this bad.  At every turn, in all respects, I shamefully underestimated this dreck, and it made me pay for my miscalculation.  Here’s the rundown:

*** Characteristic:   Flavor

My expectation:    “Probably terrible, but I’ve done terrible before… bring it on!”

Reality:    “Oh my dear lord!  We’ve hit an iceberg!   We’re going down!  Oh, the humanity!”

***  Characteristic:   Intoxification-ness

My expectation:    “I might be giggling a bit too much by the end, but I’ll be back to normal by bedtime”

Reality:   “Ehhhh?  … I’m only down about halfway, and I can’t see straight…  my toes are numb…  I can see through metal, I swear…”

*** Characteristic:    Hangover

My expectation:    “Eh, a little water before bed, and I’m fine.”

Reality:    “Could someone turn down the throbbing in my arteries?  I think I can hear my eyeballs moving in their sockets…”

Maybe for some reason I was caught off guard (did I give blood earlier?  do I have a tapeworm?), but this 40 knocked me on my behind.  It was just like high school all over again.  Late that night I happened to catch a few minutes of the kid’s show “Oobi”, where all the characters consist of human hands with googly-eyes glued to the knuckles.  That show is surreal sober, so you can imagine my discombobulation.  So while I don’t have much remembrance of the flavor, quality, or other characteristics I usually use to judge the beer, I will give this one a rating of 2 beers as a reward for reminding me not to be complacent.  I gotta start training better…  where was that Rocky 8-track tape?

This has to be the fiercest beer found in “regular-folks” circulation at grocery stores — you of course can get much odder, harsher beers at specialty stores and Trader Joe’s, but this is as far as you can go into dark cheek-biting beers that are stocked next to the baloney at Ralph’s. So I suspect that this beer is to potent stout beers as Avril Lavigne is to punk rock.  This beer is also the next in my Macarthur-Genius-Award winning series on Beers Whose Artwork Can Kick Your Ass.  And in this case, steal your soul and possibly lead to a communist revolution in your very home.  For those keeping track, this is Part 6 in the series, which includes four malt liquors, a viking, and now an indestructible quasi-priest with a serious beard.

And, I might add, serious cheek bite.  Holy mouth burn, does this beer bite!   You may want to go over your tongue with a pumice stone for a few minutes before drinking, just to warm up.  Certainly it’s not the biggest offender out there — specialty store stouts could bite your cheek twice as hard, I’m sure.  Somewhere, somebody is probably brewing some prototype Nuclear Stout that contains so much hops that not even light can escape, a beer that will blast your cheeks into next October, where they will suddenly reappear after you’ve learned to cope without them, reattach to your face and hurt like hell for the next twenty years.  But as far as beers that you can readily find during a trip to buy diapers, this is pretty sharp.  Not a bad taste, though — I do like stouts quite a bit (Guinness being my all-time favorite beer) and so it was definitely a good diversion from the usual horse pee I drink for entertainment’s sake on this site.  But I must ashamedly admit I bought it more for the label, once again suckered in by soul-less commercialism.  Isn’t that how Rasputin would have wanted it?

Recently I toured the Stone brewery in Escondido, and boy is it pretty. Anyone who lives in the area should take a spin in that direction. But this isn’t about the building, this is about the beer they make in it. I’ll be the first to admit, hoppy beers aren’t my normal drink of choice. And Stone beers are nothing if not hoppy. But I’m learning to appreciate quality beer even if it takes bitter beer face to the extreme. All told, I tried their Pale Ale, IPA, Arrogant Bastard, Smoked Porter, Russian Imperial Stout, and Old Guardian barley wine. The first four were part of a sampler that they offer after the tour. The stout and the barley wine we took home and drank later. All of their beers were good, but suffered from a bit too much flavor, text book 3’s all around.

When I finally got to the barley wine, it didn’t take long to get to me. With the word “wine” in the name, it seems like it could be classy. But at 11% abv, the 1 pint, 6 oz. bottle that they sell it in is more than enough to get me feeling… loopy. I got to admit though, I think Old Guardian is my favorite of all the Stone brews. It has that signature hoppiness that all Stone brews have, but it doesn’t kick quite as much. Maybe the high alcohol content and the high hop content cancel each other out, I don’t know. All I know is that I liked it.

Yikes! Whooo!!! As I write this, I’m about halfway through a bottle of Samichlaus, and I’m quite loopy — this beer is advertised as officially rated by the Guinness Book of Records as the strongest beer in the world, at 14% alcohol, more even than the malt liquors I’ve been reviewing. This is not a beer for the mild at heart — the flavor more than stands up to the bite from all the alcohol, and needless to say the alcohol itself will cause some complications in your life if you have one, say, on an empty stomach at the start of a business lunch. (”No sir, we didn’t land the Stevens account, because I burped up my spinach omelet into the salad bar…”) It has a licorice taste reminiscent of McEwan’s (or about eight McEwan’s distilled down into a thick slurry) to go along with the kick from the alcohol. All beers over 7 or 8 percent alcohol have a punch-in-the-teeth “Holy Crud!” bite to them, probably from the unexpected combination of beer taste and ethanol. I just dunno if it works, though — ale flavor can’t really stand up well to the alcohol kick as well as other boozy non-beer beverages in the same range, for example cinnamon schnapps (whose taste could overwhelm coal tar).

The label is strangely understated (though the font is so gothic and serif-advanced that I can barely make out the name), much as the champagnes that are superior have the bland labels — they don’t need lots of fuss and business for Jay-Z to know to buy them. Plenty of fuss goes into making this beer, however — it is brewed only once a year on December 6th (St. Nicholas’ birthday — “Samichlaus” translates as Santa Claus), then is left to age for ten months to age before escaping to specialty beer stores. Hardly needs to be said, completely wasted on me. For the average joe like me, this is the beer equivalent of $100 wine that you and 19 of your friends bought together just to see what all the fuss is. And for me, the fuss with Samichlaus turned out to be not much more than getting unexpectedly plowed on a Tuesday night…