An Amateur Beer Snob: July 2011

Monday, July 25, 2011

Beer of the week: Brooklyn Pennant Ale '55

Beer score: 8.5

Web site: Brooklyn Brewery
ABV: 5.0

IBU: 24

Has a slightly dark, almost burnt blonde color to it in the glass, and a perfect quality beer scent. The Scottish Maris Otter malt brings a solid, almost cake-like sweetness, but it’s a soft sweetness, not overpowering but obviously there. The bitterness is strong at first taste, then fades away a little but returns on the way down. This is one of the most well-balanced beers I’ve ever tasted, with a perfect mix of hops and malt, and one of the better pale ales from the U.S. The name of this brew comes from the 1955 World Series when the Brooklyn Dodgers defeated the Yankees.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Beer of the week: La Fin Du Monde

Beer score: 8.7

Web site: Unibroue

ABV: 9.0

IBU: 19

Normally I'm not a big fan of Canadian beers, but this fine beverage from Quebec brewer Unibroue can give most beers in Europe a run for their money. This is a Belgian-style ale that's been triple fermented. Pours with a cloudy gold color and has a strong wheat and fruity smell. I'd be surprised if there's not been a touch of citrus and honey added to this drink. In the drinking there's just a little too much carbonation for my liking, almost like you're drinking champagne, but it's not too bad. The flavor starts off fruity for the first sip or two, but then a strong bitter and alcohol flavors kicks in. If you are a fan of Belgian-style brews, you are more than likely going to enjoy this one. I can't quite classify La Fin Du Monde as a favorite, but it's darn close, and I'd never turn one down.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Beer of the week: Guilford Golden Ale

Beer score: 4.1

Web site: Natty Greene's Brewing Co.

ABV: 3.8

IBU: unknown

I was really looking forward to this lighter American ale. It's from a regional brewery in Greensboro, North Carolina, and I always like trying something new. Plus, I was in the mood for a brew that wasn't real heavy, and I had hoped this beer would suffice. It didn't. Sorry, but the smell assaulted me right off the bat with a skunkiness reminiscent of something like Old Milwaukee. The flavor has sort of a light, bread-like quality, but that's it. Nothing special here, and the fizz was a bit too much, though not overpowering. Also, I found three different Web addresses for the brewing company, none of which was working, so I'm not sure if this company is still in business or not; apparently they are also a restaurant and pub. I've included a link above just in case the site was only down temporarily. Regardless of my all-around disappointment, this was just one brew, so I'll give this brewery another shot at some point.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Beer of the week: Hell's Belle

Beer score: 7.2

Web site: Big Ross Brewing Co.

ABV: 7.0

IBU: 30

Has a nice, light floral quality to it with a very pleasant scent that wafts up from the glass. There’s just a touch of almost IPA-like bitterness on the tip of the tongue with this drink. Just a hint of spice and sweetness here. Very restrained in its fruitiness, but there are fruity undercurrents here. Light enough you could drink several in one sitting, but does have a complex flavor that keeps you guessing. Comes from the Big Ross Brewing Co. of Raleigh, North Carolina. The bottle calls this a "Belgian Style Ale," and that's right on the nose, almost like a white ale.

About the beer rankings

The listings commonly found to the right of this text will include the name of the beer, a link to the brewer's website (if there is one), my numerical ranking based upon my own scale of 0.1 to 10.0, and a little of my personal thoughts about each beer. Here and there I might also throw in a few funny or interesting quotes about beer as well as any other information I think would be of interest. And if you’re curious about my ranking systems, let’s just say that a 5.0 is a decent beer, a 1.0 is an awful beer and a 10.0 is a fantastic beer. It's simple and meant to be.

ABV: This stands for alcohol by volume. It is a percentage of alcohol in the drink. Most beers are usually somewhere around five percent in the U.S. I only recently decided to add this after some prodding by readers.

IBU: This stand for International Bitterness Units. It's a scale for measuring the basic bitterness of a beer, though that's truly oversimplifying things. Some beers might have a higher IBU but not taste quite so bitter because of the amount of malt added. I suppose a more accurate way to gauge this would be to say the IBU reflects the amount of hops in a beer. Truly heavy beers will have an IBU of 30 to 50, while lighter brews will be 10 or even less. The IBU isn't always readily available, but I'll add it whenever I can find it.

The story behind this blog

Prior to the mid-90s I was your typical American beer drinker. Budweiser was pretty much it for me. But I made friends in the mid-90s who introduced me to good beer. I mean really good beer. From then on, my tastes in beer have bordered on snobbery. Then, for Christmas 1997 some friends gave me a present of one of those large boxes of different types of Saranac beer. So, on December 20, 1997, I started “Ty’s pages for Beer Snobs” on the Geocities Web sites. The site wasn’t for brewing experts, but was meant to be more of a laid-back list of beers I had tasted and my brief thoughts about them. Again, this wasn’t for the experts, but I did try to toss in a little education here and there, things I had learned about beer over the years. In 2009 Geocities decided to shut down. That meant after 12 years of writing about beer, I had to find a new venue. That's where this blog comes in. This is meant to be a very casual blog, without getting into all the science and yaddy yaddy about beer. It's meant to be a blog for people who want to taste good beer, but who don't really care about all the hops and yeast and recipes that go into beer. Also, I came up with the idea to self-publish an ebook titled “An Amateur Beer Snob’s Guide to Beer,” which reprints much of what was to be found on my old Web site. The ebook itself is now available on the Kindle from Amazon and online at Smashwords.

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