Founders Cerise

I recently spotted some Founders Cerise at the Gomer’s in Parkville when I was up there a week or so ago. In my mind, this was going to be a cherry stout, like Bell’s, but of course, it isn’t. I’ve been eating a lot better lately, so this is the first beer I’ve had in several weeks.

Founders Cerise is made with tart Michigan cherries, and according to the website, five cherry additions are made at various times throughout the fermentation process for “the ultimate balance between tartness and sweetness.” The beer weighs in at 15 IBU’s and 6.5% ABV.

Cerise pours a cloudy reddish-pinkish-orangeish-brownish color (think dirty dishwater!) and I got very little foam that completely died down almost immediately. For being a cherry fruit beer, I get a little cherry on the nose, but really not much in the aroma.

The flavor, however, is all cherry! The first sip was sweet and tart at the same time, even getting a little pinch in the inside of my cheeks like I get from sour Belgians, although I don’t think there are any funky bugs in this beer to make it sour, rather that comes from just the cherries.

No hops to speak of, for me, which makes sense for a fruit beer where the fruit is the centerpiece. If I could think of a graphical representation for this beer, it is hits my tongue with a stripe of tart right down the middle wrapped in sweetness along the edges. It sounds weird, but I think you’ll know what I mean when you taste it! There is a nice amount of carbonation to give a touch of prickly sensation with each sip, but really this a lot like drinking a dry carbonated cherry juice.

The alcohol on this beer is virtually impossible to detect, and there is no medicinal or extract-y quality to this beer. I thought I was getting a hint of what seemed like coriander, to me (which makes no sense at all!), but as I sipped more it morphed into more of a vanilla flavor.

Cerise is delicious and an excellent example of how to do a fruit beer without making it go too far in one direction or another. True to the website’s claims, Founders really does strike a wonderful balance between the tart and the sweet. If you like cherries you’ll love this beer, and I think it would pair up great with chocolate desserts, chocolate, ice cream (vanilla, chocolate or cherry) or cheesecake. It could probably even be used in a reduction to pour over ice cream or cheesecake, and I dare to say this would be a great beer for an ice cream float, too! Another winner from Founders. YUM!

On a Health Kick

Since I’ve moved to Kansas City I’ve gone out a lot, eaten at a lot of restaurants, etc and gained a fair amount of weight that I don’t particularly like, so I’ve been watching my diet, including cutting out empty calories (all things that would make it on the Liquid Diet!), so my posting has been non-existant as of late. For the next month or two, I’m probably not going to be drinking more than a beer or two a week, so I will try to make them things I haven’t reviewed before to give you something to read, and I apologize, but it has to be done!

Additionally, I have a few of my Wisconsin beer reviews from Fall to post, so that will give you something to look at, although none of those beers are available here, unfortunately.

I picked up some Lagunitas Brown Shugga recently, so that will probably be my next review. Stay tuned!

What Would You Do With Two Left Hands?

The answer, of course, is drink ‘em! Left Hand Brewing Company is a nice brewery out of Longmont, CO. Today I’m reviewing their classic Milk Stout, as well as a Vol. 1 of their new Fade to Black Series, an export stout. One of their most famous beers is their Milk Stout, a great example of the “sweet stout” style. The sweet stout style (also referred to as milk stouts or cream stouts) gets its designation from the addition of lactose to the beer. Lactose is an unfermentable sugar, so the yeast in beer that eats the sugars and poops alcohol (more or less) can’t do anything with lactose. As a result, the lactose sweetens the beer. Since lactose is the primary sugar found in dairy products, hence the “milk” and “cream” terms used to describe these stouts.

Left Hand’s version is a classic. The beer pours black (some very minute highlights in the very bottom of my snifter) and the off-white head disappears quickly. The aroma on this beer is awesome, smelling mostly of coffee and sweet chocolate. It’s one of my favorite aroma beers. Milk Stout weighs in at 5.9% alcohol and 25 IBU’s. The flavor is roasty malt with a silky mouthfeel that is shockingly similar to milk! The nice texture of the beer comes from a relatively low carbonation, the lactose, as well as some oats in the beer.

Milk Stout is difficult, for me, to drink slowly. The smoothness of the beer and it’s sweetness make it a chugger! As far as the sweetness goes, it’s not quite like a dessert beer, and there is some good bitterness from the roasted malts, but it still leans toward a sweet finish, as opposed to a dry stout. This would be great with ice cream and probably something like strawberries. I highly recommend this beer if you’ve never had it.

Fade to Black

In the past, Left Hand’s winter seasonal beer was always Snow Bound Spiced Strong Ale. This year, they decided to retire the beer and start a new series, called Fade to Black (reflecting the overall lack of sunlight from October through March). According to Left Hand, the name and packaging will be the same each year, but the style will vary. For the inaugural beer, Left hand chose an export style stout.

Export (or “foreign”) stouts are stouts that were originally brewed for export to foreign countries, particularly England’s colonies in the tropics. To survive the trip better, these beers are brewed for a higher gravity (more alcohol), which acts as a preservative. Export stouts can be of the dry or sweet style. Vol. 1 weighs in at 8.5%ABV, 30 IBU’s and according to Left Hand, “Pours black with licorice, espresso bean, molasses and black cardamom notes.” They also add the marketingspeak that the flavors “give way to a feeling of self-loathing, burnt opportunities and smoked relationships.” The overall marketing package of the Fade to Black series is a little unusual, with the dark imagery in the marketing language, the neo-tribal label and being named after a Metallica song about suicide, but maybe depression and suicide sell lots of beer!

Volume 1 poured, as you would guess, black as coal. No highlights to speak of in this beer. It’s opaque and black and despite a vigorous pour had a very small tan head that faded quickly (common for higher alcohol beers). The aroma on this beer is typical stout aroma, with roasty malt, maybe a little cocoa, and a subtle hint of smoke.

Contrary to the aroma, the first sip really nailed me with the smoke flavor. This is just like the smokiness that is found in a lot of Scottish ales, so I think it a smoky note from the deeply roasted malts, rather than the addition of any smoke flavoring agents or even smoked malts. The smokiness really comes through in the second half of the sip. This is a neat beer because the flavors seem to really “light up” different parts of my tongue, and they seem layered, almost as if the brewer designed one to develop after another.

The sip starts with a heavy mouthfeel, with some roastiness on the front of my tongue, then both sides of my tongue and cheeks seem to come alive with a good amount of bitterness (a little hop bitterness, but mostly from the roasted malts), and then the smoke rolls in and hits the back of my tongue and palate.

As with Scottish ales, the smokiness seems to die down with each subsequent sip as my palate fatigues. The beer is nice and smooth with a hint of carbonation, and for an 8.5% ABV the alcohol is not apparent at all. This is a fairly complex beer and well-suited to being drunk in quiet contemplation. I look forward to seeing what Left Hand thinks up for Fade to Black in 2010!

New Glarus Unplugged Berliner Weiss

© 2008 by Jesse Friedman

I have a snow day today (boy, Kansas City has been hammered this winter) and for later on (it’s only 10:00AM) I’m planning on drinking a couple/few stouts I have in the fridge, but in the meantime, this is a review of a beer I was lucky enough to have in Wisconsin when I was there in early October. It is the first Berliner Weiss I’ve drunk. The more I think about the great beers I had in Wisconsin that weekend, the more I hope that trip becomes an annual thing!

New Glarus Brewing Company is a fantastic brewery located not too far from Madison, WI. I greatly enjoyed their Spotted Cow and, of course, their world famous Tart Raspberry beers, both of which I reviewed previously and you can find if you enter “New Glarus” in the search bar (which is now located at the top right corner of the blog… hope you like the new look!).

One of the brewery’s series of beers is their “Unplugged” series in which, “A few times a year, we will cut Dan [Carey, master brewer] loose to brew whatever he chooses, uncensored, uncut, unplugged. Always handcrafted, this beer is brewed for the adventurous soul. This is a very limited edition and we make no promises to ever brew this style again.” In other words, the Unplugged beers are adventurous one-offs with limited availability. The main bottle shop I hit in Madison had quite a few of the Unplugged beers on hand, and I imagine if I lived up there these releases would be at the top of my “to get” list. The downside is when you fall in love with one of these beers, tough luck! Here is a list of past Unplugged beers, for your interest.

Berliner Weisse (not sure why New Glarus dropped the “e” from the end) is a style of beer that is traditional to Berlin, although according to the BJCP, only two traditional breweries there still make it. The style is definitely a sleeper, but a handful of breweries produce it and I believe Kansas City’s Westside Local has one of them available. In 1809, Napoleon referred to Berliner Weisse as “the Champagne of the North” because of it’s lively character and effervescence. Berliner Weisse is a pale, low alcohol, very bubbly wheat beer that is most notable because of fermentation with Lactobacillus delbruckii, a bacteria that is the bane of the wine (and most of) the beer industry. “Lacto” beers have a sharp sourness that, in my opinion, really adds to the refreshing character of an already thirst-quenching style.

Unfortunately, it has been a few months since I drank this beer, and my notes were sparse, to say the least. I was pouring the beer in a white plastic hotel cup, so the photo above gives you an idea of what it really looks like! I did note that the New Glarus beer smelled like a “normal sour beer,” which to me means a Flanders red or brown along the lines of Rodenbach, La Folie, etc. These beers are “infected” purposefully with two bugs that create some acetic acid, giving a sharp sourness with a lot of vinegar (acetic acid) notes. I remember being mildly disappointed that, after quite a while of searching for a Berliner Weisse to try, it was simply going to taste like any number of other widely available sour beers I’ve already had.

That impression changed with my first sip, however. While the nose seemed to carry some vinegar-y notes, the flavor was less sour/enamel stripping as something like La Folie (and probably less tart than Rodenbach, in my opinion), but it was smoother and carried some different flavors like sour grapes and lemon. The finish was dry, and there was tons of carbonation. There was some characteristic “Belgian funk” in the flavor, too, but really it was an awesome beer. At low alcohol (most tend to be well below 5%, usually in the 3-4% range), a ton of carbonation, and a light tartness, this beer would be an excellent summer refresher and a great session beer, if you could get enough of it! I imagine it could pair well with some cheeses, too, with the carbonation really lifting the fats off the palate.

A New Look for 2010

As much as I hate to give up the nifty Bigfoot bottle 2009 bottlecap header from 2009′s theme, I figured 2010 deserves a new look to the site. I think this one is super clean and easy to read, so while it’s a little on the sterile side I think it’s a nice look. Let me know what you think!

Goose Island Oatmeal Stout – First Post of 2010

Well, the new year is here, and it’s time to drink some beer! I had a fun, but relatively unfortunate New Year’s Eve, where I drank Miller Lite (OMG, I seriously can’t drink this crap anymore), mostly in big gulps for the playing of Flip Cup and Beirut (like Beer Pong, only you throw the ball instead of using a paddle). All in all, I found out I excel at both sports, and the one good thing about that yellow crap is that it IS light and it is low in alcohol, so drinking a ton of it like I did is easy. Unfortunately, it tears my stomach up like you wouldn’t believe. Now that that’s behind me, let’s look at some better beer to start 2010!

If you’ve been reading my blog for any amount of time, you know I can’t do a write up of a stout without mentioning Goose Island’s incredible Bourbon County Stout. It is one of my all-time favorite beers. I’m sure I’ve had their regular Oatmeal Stout, but never in the context of a review, so here’s a revisit of this beer to see how it stands up.

Oatmeal stouts are stouts that have oatmeal in the grain bill. The addition of oatmeal is mainly to give the beer a “slick” (some say slimy) texture/mouthfeel. Some people can taste the oats, but I have yet to find a “calibration beer” to help me recognize what oats in beer taste like, so for me, it’s a texture, not a taste thing.

Goose Island’s Oatmeal Stout pours black, almost opaque, except it has some dark ruby highlights if you hold the glass up to light. The head is a fluffy tan color.

You know my nose doesn’t work so great, but I am definitely picking up on SOMETHING on the aroma… I can’t quite place it… something in the burnt sugar/toffee/caramel neighborhood… maybe a little raisin-y, too? I just can’t quite place the aroma, but it’s nice and “warm.”

The beer has a surprising amount of carbonation, almost coming off a little prickly to me. Nice roasted malt flavor on the front end that carries into the aftertaste. The finish is really dry on this, almost a little chalky or ashy. The beer may be a little cold, although Goose Island recommends it be drunk at 40°F. I tend to like my stouts at almost room temperature, which for me is upper 50′s-low 60′s.

With larger gulps of the beer I get a pretty good amount of bitterness, too. It’s tough for me to tell whether that bitterness is from the roasted grains or hops, but I think it might be a little of both. The mouthfeel is nothing special, and the dry finish borders on being astringent, almost.

This is not a bad stout, by any stretch, but as stouts are one of my favorite styles, I have gone out of my way to drink a lot of them, and I have some really good ones in the fridge right now, so this is a solid stout, but nothing that is terribly special. It’s a good beer and I would like to pair it up with some food at some point, but otherwise, there are better oatmeal stouts to be had out there with a lot more character.