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  Walt Liquor 9:17 pm on May 16, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Okocim’s Mocne: Polish for “Works Every Time” 

  In a move that has the stockholders in a tizzy, I’ve managed in this review to combine my heretofore unrelated themes of Nasty Malt Liquors and Imported Oddities.   Today, we consider a product of the Polish brewery Okocim, a brew they named “Mocne”, which I presume is Polish for “Malt Liquor” and not some sort of slang contraction involving acne and some other body part along the lines of “bacne”.  Now before you start cringing at the anticipation of Polish jokes, let me assure you that I won’t go there — I’m Irish, and I’m rating beers, often quite bad beers, so I really can’t throw stones.

  As for Mocne, I can’t decide if I’ve been duped or not.  They’ve gone ahead and put “Malt Liquor” on the label — does this indicate a foriegn-brewery lack of knowledge about the stigma associated with Malt Licka’s here in the U.S.?  Or have I purchased Poland’s equivalent of King Cobra, thinking it was a fancy import, despite them giving me fair warning on the label?  The fact is, it’s not nearly as bad as domestic Malt Liquors, but it’s not nearly as good as the specialty quintuple-boch-uber-malty brews that must technically be called Malt Liquors because of their alcoholic content, but nevertheless are quite tasty.  The flavor has a faint whiff of whatever domestic malt liquor reeks of.  The head had that same super-fine-grained soapy bubbliness that you see in cheap 40’s, industrial solvents, ocean foam in Newark, but never in a decent beer.  I have to conclude, therefore, that this beer is to King Cobra what Harp’s Lager is to Budweiser — an imported, better-quality yet essentially in the same family of beverage.  Since being the Best of the Malt Liquors is a distinction akin to being the professional bowler with the fastest 40-yard-dash time, I’m not sure what the point really is for this beer.  If you were somehow constrained to the world of malt liquors forevermore, this is your best beer choice, but if you’re in this situation then you really have more pressing problems to deal with…

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    Szymon 9:20 am on July 19, 2009 Permalink

    “Mocne” means “Strong” in Polish, and you should avoid anything with that word in its name. It usually means “we added some industrial-grade spirit to reach the promised alcohol content”. We actually do have some decent beer brands here in Poland, but this is definitely not one of them.

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    Admin 12:24 pm on July 20, 2009 Permalink

    Thanks Szymon. Yet another example of Walt sacrificing his taste buds to keep the rest of us safe.

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    Walt Liquor 7:57 pm on August 3, 2009 Permalink

    Hi Szymon, and thanks for confirming that once again I made a bad choice in beers. (I’m used to it, as you can tell by my review of Budweiser-and-clamato…) I’m the typical american sucker who thinks that it must be a good beer, if they bothered to import it. Well, it was much better than the domestic malt liquors here…. nevertheless, next time, I’m looking for the *good* beers from your homeland!

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  Walt Liquor 3:28 pm on December 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  St. Ides, patron saint of shockingly bad flavor 

  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?

   
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  Walt Liquor 6:23 pm on July 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  Old Rasputin — Take my wallet, just don’t hurt me 

  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?

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    Frosty 10:18 pm on July 17, 2008 Permalink

    Oh no! I so could have warned you. I remember drinking this once and pretending to like it cause I wanted to feel like I was cooler that just drinking Natural Light.

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  Hops-scotch 9:41 pm on March 31, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  Barley Wine sounds classy but… 

  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.

   
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  Walt Liquor 8:11 pm on March 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  Samichlaus (Merry Christmas! I’m drunk!) 

  

  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…