pFriem Belgian Strong Blonde

Time to see what the hype is all about. pFriem, local Oregon favorites, finally started bottling, so I now have no excuse not to try any.

This has a really nice color. It's a kind of peach-tone gradient with little bubbles and a creamy white head. It also has a great mouthfeel, rich and creamy. Smell is punchy, and I think there's a little too much coriander here for my taste. But other than coriander, it tastes kinda like banana (but less sweet), and maybe peach (though really it more looks like a peach than tastes like one). Other than that, not tons going on here, though assuming this is bottle conditioned (judging by the sediment), I could see this improving with age.

The label, incidentally, said it would taste like pear and clove. I don't really taste either.

In conclusion, this beer is good, and I look forward to trying more from pFriem. Corked and caged 375mL bottle makes for a nice presentation and is an appropriate size to share or consume by yourself. Was it worth $6? Not to me, but in the immortal parlance of LeVar Burton, you don't have to take my word for it.

de Garde Tableau Rouge

Smells sour, maybe like wild strawberries, with a slight off-note which reminds me of dishwater.
Taste is tart and dry, floral with that same wild strawberry. Lingers a bit (you'll want a glass of seltzer to go with it), but overall pretty balanced and tasty. Glad I grabbed this when I did, as it seemed to be flying off the shelves at the Whole Foods in the Pearl. Fuckin' hipsters. They can have the sour beer; I'll take the smoky beer.

Which is not to say that I don't appreciate a good sour beer now and then. Nor to espouse undue hatred on the hip—my own facial hair style is goofier than most and all of my clothes are secondhand. But there is a certain type of sour-beer-swiller (you can tell, because they were swilling IPAs two years ago) who would be just as happy sipping some carbonated apple cider vinegar as a decent beer.

A rep once explained the Cantillon mystery to me (it always tasted like vinegar to my palate). He said that Cantillon was a famous brewery that produced great sour beer, but had to ramp up production in the face of widespread demand. This caused a shift in their product towards tasting oppressively of vinegar, but with their brand recognition, whenever a neophyte sipped this vinegar brew, heralded as the best of the best, they formed an impression that vinegar was how sour beers are supposed to taste, and the rest is history. Narsty, narsty history.

Anyway de Garde is producing some pretty darn good beers, and I say that as a non-sour-head. I have noted the dishwater smell in Petit Desay, so it may simply be an ester from their house/local yeast. And this beer is pretty good as well. Not stupidly expensive (less than half the price of a Cascade), and also not terribly high in alcohol (5%). Seems like this could go with sushi or chevre or greens or maybe I'm saying that because it reminds me a little bit of a raspberry vinaigrette salad dressing.

Better than "Slowenbier"

Yes, our friends (my friends? my would-be friends?) at Schlenkerla Bierbrauerei have finally packaged their renowned Fastenbier—a Lenten smoked seasonal brew previously available on draft only, and (to date) still the top-ranked rauchbier on beer rating website (among beers with 4 or more reviews). (Editor's note: evidently it appears to be the top-ranked smoked beer on several beer reviewing websites.)

So how is it? I lovingly prize the cap off the bottle, attempting to keep it intact; it's a shiny purple one and would look great as an ornament on my Christmas tree (which is generally beer-themed). I bend it, obviously.

My hero Matt Brown at Wine Warehouse described described this as a more approachable rauchbier, and after he offered it as a featured beer at a recent tasting, he proved himself right and sold himself out of every bottle. Excepting of course the one he saved for me (like I said, he is a hero).

To smell this, the smoke is intense, and I think it's the same beechwood as their flagship line (I prefer their oak-smoked, which only costs a little more. Also I enjoy other types of wood for smoking, like applewood, but these folks are traditionalists and who am I to argue with delicious tradition?) When you sip it, it's thick, and this is the point of a Lent beer—it's designed to sustain monks who are fasting, and in Bavaria, beer still enjoys legally protected status as food. The smoke is on the acrid side, but that hefty backbone keeps it from being overpowering. The copy text for the beer says it has a 'hoppy bite', (but these are Germans we're talking about) and while it does have some bitterness to it, it's not 'American hoppy' by any stretch of the imagination. It also claims to be made with a percentage of unsmoked malt, which you might never guess, because it's pretty darn smoky.

It's unfiltered and vintage dated "Anno Domini MMXV", but I drank it fresh. I guess it might do things over time, but it's hard for me to imagine what. Especially being brewed as a once-a-year seasonal, I think you'd be ill-advised to put this one away.

Anyway, this beer is a success, and may finally (please?) make 2015 the Year of the Smoky Beer, which I have been predicting (unsuccessfully) for the past three years (at least). Restauranteurs and chefs love 'em; they hold up much better with food than many other beverages (beers included). The brew is a success for being thick and substantial, which keeps smoke from becoming acrid or overwhelming (for another example, see New Holland Charkoota Rye, though for the past few years this has been only available in a brandy-barrel aged variety, which is also fantastic, but buries the lede a bit)

Woodland Empire Crispy Apple Turnover

I bought this at Beer Mongers late into (yet not at the end of) an evening of attempting to keep pace with my one-time beer mentor, fulfilling my role as Portland tour guide over an epic few nights of bar hopping.

I'm not sure why exactly I lighted on this one, but I'm glad I did. Probably because of the word "Crispy," which is irresistible to drunk people, and arguably impossible for a beer to be (though 'crisp' is another matter). The beer itself, while made with apples, doesn't beat you over the head with them, and the finish, surprisingly, is a sort of caramel that turns into... flaky pastry flavor? Like a croissant? The name seems pretty apt really, and the really special part is that even though it's slightly warming at 10% (you would not know this, to taste it), it doesn't linger or coat your palate. It's pretty good. Smell wise, I guess it could smell more appley. And taste-wise too. Why are they called Apple Jacks if they don't taste like apple? It also has an aspect of 'generic strong beer' that I could do without.

The label is cool too. A dog with ram horns, a Dungeons and Dragons d20, and a sword with elvish on it. I guess ultimately I could take or leave this beer, but it's decent, so if you think you might like it, I'm not gonna say you nay.

Deschutes - Black Butte XXVI

This is how some of my reviews look before I type them up. In the interest of illegibility and poor search-engine optimization, I have presented this in its original formatting:

Seems Deschutes is about the same age I am. Had this on draft and it was still pretty rough, but I'm optimistic for it in months/years to come.

Burnside Brewing Sweet Heat

Smells like apricot and tastes like it too, but punctuated with a ton of carbonation and some serious, lingering spicy heat. Apart from that, it's a kinda watery, fizzy wheat beer (I believe it says it's a wheat beer). You would have to like apricot to enjoy this, as well as spicy food. I don't really enjoy either, so my enjoyment is hindered, but it's decent nonetheless. Certainly a good price, and a lot of flavor for not too high of an ABV, so it's got that going for it too. Pair this one with chicken wings or something... I'm sure someone has come up with a better food paring than that, but I can't think of one. Weird label on this one, or rather a weird mascot for Burnside—looks like some kind of succubus or sphinx or something holding a pitcher.

Crux - Tough Love

Tough indeed. The wax dip on this bottle was thick but tidy—reassuring compared to New Glarus' thin, melt-prone paste and Three Floyd's flamboyant, un-trimmed  hanging wax strands. It seems designed impervious to oxygen, knives, and small arms fire. I check my hands after finally removing enough to get at the cap. Amazingly I am not bleeding, though I would consider this packaging a safety hazard. I try several bottle openers before I find one which can get in between the cap and the rest of the wax, and after a couple of yanks, I remove it to reveal...

A fucking cork. The way this has been sealed, I can only assume it's designed for Sam Calagione's distant descendants to excavate, send to a lab, and attempt to re-create at some craft brewery a thousand years in the future. I don't even have a corkscrew (apparently neither does my roommate, which explains why his bottles of wine haven't been opened), but for some reason I have a 'vintage cork extractor' which is basically a couple of sharp, pointy shivs (my sensitive hands are not out of the woods yet, it seems, and I fear bloodshed) which are designed to remove a cork otherwise in danger of disintegrating by... evidently annihilating it, because it's pretty torn up once I finally get it out. By this point, I could really use a drink, of which this vessel fortunately contains several.

It's still a little hot (and fresh; I should've realized from the packaging that this one was designed to be aged for the long haul). It tastes a bit Scotchy, which it should from the barrel-aging, along with some astringent leather, soy sauce, anise, and chocolate. I wish I had cellared this one longer, but I was celebrating finishing a project, and my storage conditions aren't ideal. For the price (around $1/oz), I probably won't buy another to lay down, though it's definitely good.