Quick Sips: He'Brew Funky Jewbelation blended barrel-aged sour ale

The He'Brew line by Shmaltz Brewing tend to be big and interesting, but few have been as interesting as this blend of six big fat ales aged in bourbon and rye whiskey barrels. A bunch of beers from their line (many limited) were aged anywhere from 3 months to over a year in these barrels, and then were blended together to make this beer.

Oh yeah, and for good measure, it's a sour beer, too.

When your blended beer outlines a bunch of brews that look like barrel-aged monsters stuffed into bourbon and rye-whiskey casks, the last thing you expect is for it to smell SOUR. Yet it does. Turns out the "funky" part of the name means it's a wild ale. Totally unexpected when I bought this! Maybe I should have read up on it first ... ?

Nah. Buying blind is half the fun of trying new beers.

Anyway, the aroma is like a boozy malt vinegar, but in a pleasant way (if you can imagine it). The taste follows suit. There is good sourness upfront with booze that quickly slices through. There is a lot happening behind this -- this beer is a blend of some tasty and imposing ales, after all -- but the taste finishes on rye whiskey that is, again, sour. Those two elements dominate everything else. The backbone of this beer wants to be a nice brown ale, but there is so much pure FUNK happening that all the brown is funked right out of it.

Throw in the whiskey and bourbon and it threatens to be a mess. At times it is, and at times it's a mess of joy. Hard to decide which, but I lean towards the former. This is an interesting, complex beer, but there might be a little too much going on for its own good. Hard to wrap my head around it with just one bottle.

If you like challenging beers and the idea of a barrel-aged dark sour sounds good to you, worth picking up if you can still find it. IF. I drank this (and wrote most of this) about a year ago.

Cheers!

Quick Sips: Deschutes Black Butte XXIII

NOTE: This review is made nearly six months after the beer was enjoyed, so take any assessments with that in mind.

Deschutes. I'm a New Jersey guy, so their amazing beers are not available to me unless I trade beer. And that's exactly how I got Deschutes Black Butte XXIII, a big ass porter (almost 11%) brewed with cocoa nibs, orange peel, and with a portion aged in bourbon barrels, available exactly ONCE.

Wait, a portion aged in bourbon barrels? Nonsense! Because despite only 25% of this being bourbon barrel aged, it's BOOZY as fark! Anyway ...

Pour it and take a whiff. The nose is alcohol and chocolate with deep sweet breads. Even by the smell, this beer means business.

You need to drink the damn thing, though, so you pour a glass and despite the high alcohol some nice carbonation is there – this beer poured with a rich, frothy head that quickly disappeared – but it’s gone fast, giving the beer a silky, slightly slick feel on the palate.

The taste? Mild chocolate in front with some bourbon heat in the middle. Orange notes poke through in the end. This beer is 10.8% with some fairly complex flavors (bourbon, orange, chocolate, etc.), but most of them fight pretty hard for dominance. The beer could have used some time for all these elements to come together a little more smoothly. Deschutes recognizes this by putting a best AFTER date on the bottle of 6/15/12 despite this being a 2011 beer. (Who does that?) Despite the BEST AFTER, I drank this beer around July 2012, after their recommended date, and it STILL needed more time.

One thing that surprised me was the booze. The bourbon isn’t overpowering sure, but it’s far more present in the middle than you’d expect considering the barrel-aged portion makes up only 25% of this blend. And as this beer warms it just gets boozier and boozier.

All that said, it's easy to see why the special editions of Black Butte are sought after each year. This beer is complex and delicious, definitely worth sinking into if you're a beer geek, but take a pass if you just want a good beer beer.

Quick Sips: Flying Fish Exit 8 Chestnut Brown Ale

I love Flying Fish. Maybe it's bias. When I was first discovering craft beer in the mid-1990s -- we called it "microbrew" then -- Flying Fish was not only one of the early breweries that caught my attention, they were actually local! A brewery from New Jersey! That was novel at the time, since the only beers being brewed in New Jersey were either Budweiser in Newark and stuff like Rheingold.

Flying Fish, though, they started making great beers and pushing into the local market. Before long they became a staple in my regular beer buying. Their core beers are all solid brews, but the fun stuff is their Exit Series, a series of beers brewed with a New Jersey theme. That might mean local ingredients, it might mean a local theme, or it just might mean a simple twist that makes it Jersey.

The latest in that series is Exit 8, a chestnut brown ale brewed with Belgian yeast, with Jersey chestnuts and honey. and other than their Exit 4 (one of the best American trippels on the market), it just might be their best beer.

Pour this sucker and a nutty, chestnut-laden aroma hits your nose, though it’s not the roasted chestnut I expected. The Belgian yeast gives it a muddy, herbal quality that spins the chestnuts you expect into new territory. Give it a taste and you'll find that the honey is a pleasant note in the background, right at the finish. It’s the nutty flavor that dominates. Quite tasty, probably IDEAL for a winter/holiday release rather than the spring release this beer got.

This beer tastes great, though I wonder how this beer would be without the Belgian yeast. The character of the yeast gets in the way of the interesting stuff going on with the chestnut and honey, which leaves me wondering if an English strain wouldn't let the beer shine through more.

That said, how can I complain when the beer is so good, especially since the FF people know what the hell they're doing and I'm just a dude with a blog? This is a great brew that competes not only with the best of the Exit Series, but also with the best New Jersey has to offer. It came out earlier in 2012 and was released in limited quantities, so grab it if you see it.

Bell's Week: Hopslam

The beer geeks are going mad about this one, I'm sure.

Here's the thing about Bell's Hopslam. There is MADNESS surrounding its release each year. Madness! The beer is released once a year. Nothing special there, many craft beers are. Yet people buy it by the case -- bad idea, this is a beer best consumed within two months (8 weeks) of release -- drive miles out of their way to get it, and brag with abandon at having snagged some. The hype in beer enthusiast communities around this beer is INSANE.

The thing is, is this a good beer? Actually, hell YES it is. I've had it each of the last three years. With no Bell's available in New Jersey I've actually had to trade through the mail to get it. Glad I did. It's damn delicious. It really is.

But is it worth the insanity and hype that follows it? Is it one of the best beers in the world, as many would insist?

No. And let me explain, because it IS an excellent beer.

Hopslam is really really good. It's a double IPA released once each winter, usually around February. It's brewed with a load of honey, which gives it a wonderful sweetness, and it's also hopped to high hell. Tons of dry-hopping, I suspect, because while the beer has loads of hop character in the glass, it's got less bitterness than you'd expect in the taste. The aroma is wonderful. The taste is potent (backed by a huge 10% ABV) but very drinkable. The honey comes through nicely. It's super tasty, well-balanced, and overall awesome.

But dammit, this is NOT one of the world's top beers! Beer Advocate has it ranked in the Top 20, and Ratebeer has it at a more modest #26 overall. This IS a damn good beer, and if you can get it, get some. Drink it. Enjoy it. I have and I love it. But it's not so good that it warrants waiting on line (some people do), getting on waiting lists (ditto), or bragging as if you just snagged something super elusive like Westy 12 (considered by many the best beer in the world), because you didn't.

It's Hopslam. It's really good. But calm down, folks.