fermenting:

Great Divide (Chocolate Oak Aged) Yeti

This is always one of my favorite beers to revisit. It pours like motor oil with an awesome, quickly dissipating head. It’s extremely rich, but not sweet or overwhelming.

The ABV (9.5%) is virtually non-existent and the combination of chocolate and oak give this iteration of Yeti a fantastic balance between roasted coffee, chocolate syrup, and vanilla. 

To top it all off? A dash of cayenne pepper in the finish that becomes more apparent as the beer reaches room temperature. Once the heat hits the back of your tongue (and always just barely there) it makes you want another sip to cleanse the heat, which causes a vicious beautiful circle of drinking. 

Great Divide makes some of the best beers in the country that are constantly and widely available, with Yeti being their flagship line. The price tag of Yeti is never low, but always worth it. 

Cambridge Brewing Co Weekapaug Gruit

Gruit is one of the wildest styles of beer you may ever have and very few breweries are making them (and even fewer are making good ones). In essence, a gruit means a variety of herbs are used in lieu of hops. 

This is the third gruit I’ve ever had, and the second best. When I poured it, everything was telling me this was going to be sour and I got excited. The nose was near perfect. The color was there. The stars were aligning. Alas, this beer was not sour, but I wasn’t upset in the least. 

Herbs. SO many herbs that near the end you’re trying to convince yourself that this is just a weird wild ale, but not convince yourself that it’s good—because it is very good. 

The selection and amount of herbs used made this a very close second to Upright’s Reggae Junkie Gruit. Upright’s had a lot more carbonation and a much better mouthfeel (which they attribute to malted spelt). If Cambridge ever ups the carbonation in this beer I think it would become a lot more accessible.

I get excited when breweries experiment in a very non-traditional way, and gruits are one of the most interesting things to experiment with. It’s hard to compare gruits to traditional beers, and I think that’s a problem people run into when reviewing or discussing them. 

If you ever see a gruit on draft or on the shelf, pick it up, because you could be very pleasantly surprised. 

New Glarus Thumbprint Barley Wine (2012)

This is an IPA lover’s barley wine. 

Allegedly 12.00% ABV. Possibly only ever brewed once. It has been sitting around since March, so it’s got a little bit of time on it (in a closet, that is). 

It’s sweet (not overly), but it’s a barley wine. I really enjoy the lack of malt. It lets the hops take the front seat, which is generally frowned upon in the world of barley wines. It almost looks like an IPA in the glass, but the smell gives it away. 

It’s only slightly boozy, and really only as it warms up. Once it gets to 55 degrees or so the sweetness is a bit more aggressive, but the hops remain strong.

Drink this cold and you’d be in trouble. This barely wine goes down a little bit too easy for being 12.00%. It reminds me of a slightly boozier Blackfoot IPA (minus the “Blackfoot Blackout”).

And this is how it starts.

It’s difficult to think of a title for a blog. It’s also hard to find room to complain about a name for a blog when the idea for a blog only ever came about in a conversation with your best friend about three years too late.

fermenting: thoughts on beer and other libations

At its most basic level, fermentation is nothing more than a chemical change. The product of fermentation is really what we are concerned with. Through a simple chemical change we are given extraordinary things. The main concern of this blog is one of these things—beer. Randomly I will talk about wine, or a particular spirit, but the majority of time you will be reading about beer and looking at pictures of beer. 

If this sounds like something you want to do, I invite you to follow me as I discuss the beer I drink. It’s going to be simple and concise. Sometimes I might use vocabulary or references you may have to look up, but that’s half the fun. 

My goal is to make understanding beer easy. If you have questions, ask. If you have corrections or opinions, share them. I’m still learning as I go, but the best part about knowing stuff is sharing it with people.