An Amateur Beer Snob: September 2011

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Beer of the week: Duck-Rabbit Amber Ale

Beer score: 5.7
Web site: The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery

ABV: 5.5

IBU: unknown

Pours a very dark blonde color, almost like a tea. Has a bit of a burnt caramel in the scent over the glass. Not a lot of foam or carbonation, but not flat. Quite wet, and a little more sturdy than your typical amber ale. Starts off (very) slightly sweet, but the hoppy bitterness grows in strength on the back of the tongue and the more you drink. A touch of caramel in the taste, with maybe a bare hint of fruitiness. This is quite the respectable beer, though I wouldn't classify it necessarily as a great beer. This brew is light enough and flavorful enough that a beer snob could drink it all day without being embarrassed, so if you're a beer snob looking for something you can keep on hand in your fridge for regular, every-day drinking, this would not be a bad choice by any means. The craft brew comes to us from Farmville, North Carolina.

Friday, September 9, 2011

Beer of the week: St. Cloud Belgian White

Beer score: 2.2
Web site: St. Cloud

ABV: 5.4

IBU: 12

Has a light, dirty straw color to it as it comes out of the bottle and hits the glass. The smell is kind of noxious, and the taste doesn't improve it any. There's some citrus accents in the smell, just a little, and that is stronger in the flavor once you sip. There's a little bit of a wheat taste here, but that's overpowered by a sour bitterness that quickly explodes any potential for this beer to be good. Honestly, this is without a doubt the worst beer with the words "Belgian White" on its label that I've ever had. This stuff is made by Winery Exchange, a supplier of premium beers to grocery stores and other such markets, and I'm thinking they should stick to the wine business.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Beer of the week: Carolina Pale Ale

Beer score: 6.3
Web site: Carolina Brewing Company

ABV: 5.6

IBU: 40

Coming to us from Holly Springs, North Carolina, this isn't a bad brew. It's got a slightly dark golden color in a glass, and I have to admit it's a little more sturdy than it looks. I wouldn't classify this as a great beer, but the brewers have nothing to be ashamed of here. There was no head whatsoever when I poured it, which is neither here nor there in my opinion, but some folks like more head on their brew. Quite wet with a slight hoppy bitterness that grows stronger the more it lingers on the tongue, but without becoming overly strong. Kind of a flowery smell here, with a touch of malt graininess and maybe a little lemon or orange zest. The style is American pale ale, but it's definitely on the lighter side of any pale ales. Somewhat on the average side, but not atrocious by any means. You could do a lot worse, believe me.

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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