DAMN YOU SEASONAL BEERS!    Normally I don’t care for autumny seasonal ales, they tend to be a bit overly roasted for me.   But when the resident beer mistress (Wife) and I were beer shopping yesterday at Zupans, the Late Harvest Autumn Ale from Red Hook looked good, especially since it was only $6.99/6-pack.    This was the last one on the shelf, so either it had been cheap for a while or it was good.   I decided it was worth the risk and I didn’t feel like paying $8-$10 for a six pack of some other questionable offering.

Last night for dinner we made “Thai Coconut-Chili Clams” for dinner with some local bread we picked up at the Beaverton Farmer’s Market.   I was worried this beer was going to be one of those roasty, harsh, burnt tasting amber-y winter/cold weather beers, so I was sampling with some trepidation.   I was truly surprised with my first sip when it was only slightly roasty, yummily malty, and a tiny bit hoppy in a good way.    It went perfectly with the almost buttery, rich manilla clams.    This is just a good beer!

I couldn’t have been happier.   Even better is that I get to post more than one positive Frosty review in a row.  =)

I say “Damn you Seasonal Beers” because I know this stuff won’t be around long and I hate not being able to re-find stuff I enjoy swilling.    According to the info I could find online, it may already be out of production.   Sigh.   At least I’ve still got five more to swill before they’re all gone.

Cheers and swill on!

For some time now, skylark and I have had an argument. He has claimed that you were unimaginative. He claimed that all your beers tasted the same. He claimed you weren’t the awesome microbrew heroes you claimed to be.

And all this time I defended you. I said “No, 1554 is original!”. “New Belgium is awesome”. “They GET it.” I believed it in my heart… and then I saw this.

There you were, nestled up next to the Pabst Blue Ribbon. And me, standing there mouth agape. How could I face skylark now? It’s like I was the guy angrily defending the fidelity of his best girl…while she bangs some guy under the bleachers at the monster truck rally.

Good bye New Belgium. You can keep the singing fish plaque and the Garth Brooks CD. You’ll need it where you’re going.

- Frosty

You can imagine my chagrin this year however, when I bought this brew expecting that early dose of autumn goodness. Instead I was met with … well … nothing. Its a malty fall like beer I guess. But it lacks any pumpkin flavor. I mean none. Zip. Nada. So how do they justify calling it pumpkin ale? Maybe they brewed it IN a pumpkin patch.

It doesn’t taste bad…just incomplete. And a beer that makes me feel cheated deserves a little squashing. Get it?  Squash…pumpkin? I kill me.

    Not only am I going to get serious and systematic, I’m going full-blown Nerd on this.  I’m going to get out my taped-in-the-center glasses, put aside my rock tumbler, and present a plot of data taken so far that should illustrate which beers are the cream of this awful crop.  It boils down to this — a beer that is bad should be cheap, right?  So which beers give you the best bang in quality for the least buck (and I do mean a buck, or maybe upwards of $1.40 for the more expensive malt liquors)?  Let’s take a look at the price of beers rated so far (in cents per ounce) versus the quality I gave it (the rating, out of six).  I took the liberty of futzing with the rating dimension a bit, but you’ll forgive me, right?  Here are the results:

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    Well, there you have it folks.  Beers in the upper left corner are the ones you should aim for, being passable in quality and easy on the wallet.  Beers down in the lower right corner have the nerve to be more expensive than other beers of better quality.  Let’s put aside the Bud / Clamato abomination as an outlier obviously concocted by forces of evil.  Within the standard, non-clam-based beers, you’ll want to avoid Mickey’s and Schlitz, and instead opt to crack open a screw-top of King Cobra, Steel Reserve, or better yet Natural Ice.  The Natural Ice price is skewed a bit low since you can buy it in 24-packs, so I’d bet the little Natty Ice dot would move closer to the pack if you could buy it in 40 oz bottles.  Which would be nice, since I can’t be hauling around a 24-pack of cans to the bus station…

After trying this stuff a couple of weeks ago, it left me pleasantly wanting more, so Frosty and I managed to escape back to Belmont Station on Friday for lunch so that I could pick up a six pack.

I tried it again with dinner tonight:  Roast Turkey breast, Fried Stuffing, Corn on the Cob, and turkey gravy…all lovingly home made.   Food of the gods washed down with beer of the gods lite.

Wild Raspberry Ale doesn’t rate as highly as Stumptown Tart, but only because it doesn’t have the same depth of flavor.    Wild’s flavor is light, clean, definitely fruity, with a slightly sour wine-like finish.    It’s essentially Stumptown Lite, and that’s not a bad thing.     It’s not a clean drinking meal beer, it’s one of those winding down, sip to relax beers.     You could easily pack away 2 or 3 of these whereas you’d have to “work” to do the same thing with the real Stumptown.

Let’s see what Frosty thinks when I pack some of this along on our upcoming two-family camping trip.

It would have been a great beer had the heavy handed berry molesters at Laughing Dog not dumped way too many huckleberries in this hootch.   It had a great huckleberry flavor, but that’s all you could taste.   I’m sure there was a beer in there somewhere,  but it was hidden behind someone’s idea of Huckleberry nirvana.

This one gets a solid two and a short essay in pictures.

This,

Plus This,

Plus this,

Equals this.

Don’t let this be YOUR huckleberry.    Now go wash your eyeballs out with soap.

On to Wolaver’s Organic Brown Ale. This review is going to be painfully short. Because really, the beer was good. Not awesome, not bad. Just one of those good beers. Calming and enjoyable. The beer version of smoking a nice cigar on a leather sofa.

Unfortunately, its hot outside, I’m getting that sweaty leg on leather thing, and the AC is on so the cigar smoke is swirling around the house making me cough. In other words, Wolaver’s Organic Brown is great beer, but is here too early. Come back in November dear Wolaver, when I’m ready to lement the loss of Oregon sun by wallowing in Thanksgiving turkey and dark malty beer. August is not for you.

Budweiser Ice

The Least Interesting Man in the World Drinks Bud Ice

He lives in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. He works in accounting for an insurance company that serves other accounting companies. His favorite restaurant is Applebee’s. He is, in short, the least interesting man in the world. And he drinks Budweiser Ice.

Some facts about this man:

• His beard is not on his organ donation card. In fact, there is nothing particularly of interest on his organ donation card.
• He has never surfed, arm wrestled a dangerous foreigner, nor smoked a cigar in a high-g spinning test chamber. He has, however, scored a hole-in-one in frisbee golf.
• A CD, chosen at random from his collection, is 85% likely to contain vocals from Rob Thomas.
• The image on his desktop is one of the default selections that comes with Windows. It is centered, not stretched or tiled.
• Behind his beard, there is not a chin. There isn’t a fist, either. There is another long boring story about the 2006 draft of his fantasy football team.
• He is neither a lover, nor a fighter.

This man doesn’t always drink beer, but when he does, he makes it Bud Ice. Yes, Bud Ice, the beer so devoid of notable qualities one way or the other — it is not a very good beer to drink, and yet not bad enough to at least be an interesting story, like “Country Club” malt liquor. It comes and goes through your life like a ciper, the null set of beer-ness, the beer you’ve probably have had but don’t recall. Have a drink, won’t you, and when you do, please think about the least interesting man in the world.

[end commercial]

[and, end any idea of Walt Liquor's that he could make decent commercials]

Wrong in oh so many ways was the sheer glut of people at the Brewfest early in the day on Saturday.  Frosty and I were somewhat surprised by the enormity of the crowds and the lines for beer.    These things in isolation may not have been horrible, but with the site arrayed as it was, you couldn’t navigate through the crush of people to find where the beer lines ended and where the slothful masses of Portland decided to park their beer swilling asses.   Even so, I did manage to try four offerings and was increasingly disappointed as each foul, but temptingly named, brew assaulted my gasping taste buds.   I was ready to put the poor things out of their misery after taste #3, but tried one more swill hoping to salvage what few remained.

Next year I think I may offer up my services as a ‘Beer Logistician’ and try to inject a little bit of sanity and order into the festivities that have clearly outgrown this outdated setup.  Maybe then I can make better beer choices too.

The one bright spot of the hour or two spent in this roiling sea of humanity was the short trip to the “Beer Chips” tent to pick up a snack and a eye full of the gold lame wrapped models selling $1 bags of chips.   Both the chips and the models were things of beauty.  Alas, only one of the two were we allowed to shove in our mouths and that ended up being the chips.

We tried two of their three varieties.  The baseline “Beer” flavored offering was fantastic.  Salty, slightly sweet, and faintly beery.  A fantastic chip all around.  The Spicy Bloody Mary chips weren’t spicy and only very faintly “bloody” by tasting vaguely of ketchup.   Not a fantastic chip, but still very edible.  I was hoping for something different and didn’t get it with the Bloody Mary chips.  My reviews are often tainted with the disappointment of crushed expectations.   Can’t win them all.

Assuming that I’m willing to man-up and attempt another Brewfest run next year, it’ll definitely be the plan to show up right at opening on any of the four days of the run.  Any later than that and beer loses its appeal when you have to grind up against humanity in order to sample the questionable Brewfest offerings.   Till next year……

First off, as we all know I am a sucker for labels. For a homebrew, this one has got a great one. An oregon license plate “Hit n Run” with the alchohol level (just a guess or the real valu?) and IPA as the registration stickers. Nice. Well done.

Beyond the label, it proved to be a very easy drinking IPA. Mr. Edwards apologized ahead of time that it was a little weak. But in a world where IPAs and IIPAs seem to overcompensate for art with more hops, I found it enjoyable. I love a hoppy beer, but it can definitely be taken too far. I could say that Hit ‘n Run needs more hops but I won’t. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Just do what the big microbrewers do (ahem, Fat Tire), just name it something different! If it tastes kinda like an IPA but is easy drinking, just call it Easy Rider IPA or something and put something about how you were trying to capture the drinkability of a lager and the hop-roots of an IPA. Viola!