Now, ordinarily I’m not one to promote gambling, but I thought this promotion was pretty funny.

To win, simply place a straight wager of $20 or more on any NFL or NCAA Football Game this weekend. Every time you place a wager, your name is entered into a draw so the more bets you place, the better your chances of winning.

At the end of the weekend, we’ll do the draw and 10 Lucky Gamers will win their weight in Sportsbook.com beer.

I’m very curious as to what Sportsbook.com beer tastes like, but frankly I’m not willing to put $20 in the pot to gain a chance. Especially since I have about a thimbleful’s knowledge of sports beyond what the Packers are doing, and I can’t even watch their game tonight.

Bah.

Cheers.

It is with much anticipation that I write this review. The way I’ve been reviewing beers is having the thing in front of me and opening it, pouring it, first sip and all that and immediately writing my impression of the beer so that it certainly is fresh in my mind as I write.

I’ve written before about how much I like this breweries beers, and have yet to be truly disappointed in its offerings.  I am also a bit apprehensive with this one, since I am notedly a huge hop fan and don’t want to be led astray. I’m sure it won’t be a Furious, but I’m hoping for something that will make me stand up and say “WHOOOO”.

Is that asking too much? We’ll see.

Sprecher Double India Pale Ale comes in the nice 16 ounce bottle. Opening it has a nice hoppy smell coming from the bottle, and it pours a deep golden, somewhere between 12 and 14 on the SRM scale. there is a faint head that drops quickly. There is more malt presence in the smell than I’d prefer, but we’ll see how it flies.

Ooh, that is nice. Very well balanced not as punchy in the back of the mouth as I hoped, but there is definitely  a hop presence along with the heavy bitterness I expected. The beer actually hides the 8.4%ABV very well in its balance, I’m impressed. There is still the lingering sweetness that I’m not as fond of in the finish, but overall a decent beer. I’ll hoist one mug up for this one too. I won’t buy another sample pack just for this beer, but I won’t turn it down if offered, either. Actually, thats not a very good descriptor for me, is it? I won’t turn down most beers offered to me. So, this beer doesn’t make me stand up and say WOOOO but I did nod my head in appreciation.

Cheers!

By the Bye, I can’t find the actual beer on their site. I did find a bunch of others that look very interesting, though. If someone in marketing and packaging reads this, I would be HUGELY interested in purchasing a sample pack with more of the Premium Reserve and Limited Release in! Of course, maybe not a lot of other people would. I’m not saying… I’m just saying. (A tag line the local radio guys used to use all the time in Duluth, I thought it was hilarious. Had to be there probably, but what can I say, this IPA is 8.4%)

I just might have converted my wife over to the dry hoppy side, or at least away from the more fruity sweet beers. The other day we opened a beer that had been languishing in sad lonely neglect in the back of the kegerator because I just didn’t feel like tackling it knowing the results wouldn’t be to my tastes.

My loving lovely wife takes a few swigs after I took the top off and passed it on. (Those are the rules, you see, if I open it I get to take the top off to “quality check”. I would hate to be responsible for passing on a sub par or tainted beer if I open it. For the record, this rule mostly applies to spouses.)

She looked at me and said “This is too sweet for me”.

“Its too sweet for me”

Music to my ears! Get out the brew kettle its time to crank out a couple IPA’s and dry stouts and that kick butt tripel I did years ago!

Well, it might not seem all that exciting to read about, but I thought it was super cool that our tastes in beer are aligning more closely. When we first met she liked Woodchuck Hard Cider!

Love you, hon…

Cheers!

Oh dear me, what did I find in the beer store! Another Sprecher sample pack, this one with two beers that I’ve been wanting to try! Now, it may seem a bit odd that I purchased the 8 pack of pint bottles just for two of the beers in there, but I’ve reviewed several other beers from Sprecher and I really don’t mind having to drink the others in there as well. I consider it as doing good for the rest of the world, right? Journalistic integrity requires that I spend really more than I should to get the low down skinny on two beers in a sample pack that I haven’t tried, doesn’t it?

That would of course assume first that I was a journalist, which I’m not, and second that they have integrity, which my experience tells me they also do not. Journalistic integrity may rank right up there with postal service, military intelligence and darkly bright.

On to the review.

The Abbey Triple pours cloudy golden, perhaps 12 on the SRM scale and has the distinctive “Belgian” yeast presence with a citrus hint and subtle alcohol tones. Oh my, a quick look at the bottle reveals 8.4% ABV, this might be a fun nap time for Brewdad. The head disappears immediately.

The first sip is heavier than I would expect from a Triple (Tripel). There is definately some great warming in the cheeks and tongue and that citrus note from the yeast. It is a little more sweet than I would prefer but still drinkable.

Overall, this will be a fun glass to drink. I don’t think I would be able to handle more than a pint of this one without regretting it, but I will raise one frosty mug to this one. Not the best I’ve had from Sprecher, but certainly not something to turn away from either.

Cheers.

Of time, that is.

I had this great idea of searching YouTube for beer ads. I don’t think I cringed so many times in fifteen minutes before in my life! I would put a couple of examples here, but frankly, I won’t subject you to that. Searching the spoofs ended up making me laugh once in a while though. I’ll not be doing that search again. It used to be I could find some hilarious beer commercials from around the world. They would run the gamut from risque’ to slapstick and I would get a hearty laugh.

What happened to all the good beer ads? Ever so often I see one posted on the various forums but my searching was in vane.. vein? Perhaps I need to rethink my search parameters.

To that end, I’ll enter our weekend on this note:

Cheers!

I’ve got the bird in the oven, there is a light dusting of snow outside, the sun is just lightening the horizon, Sumatra coffee in my cup no cream this morning and the kids are still asleep. (That has to be the longest run on sentence I’ve written in a long time.)

I’m not a morning person, but for special occasions I enjoy getting up before everyone else and just savoring the silence. I hope everyone reading this gets a few minutes to themselves today. I’m grateful for so many things, family, health, and love.

There are a few things I’m disappointed about though. Specifically the two XL smack packs of yeast in my fridge that goes to the unbrewed nut brown ale and pumpkin spice ale sitting still in the box in my garage. Wouldn’t it have been nice to sit around the dinner table with a nice brown ale to wash down the turkey? Finish up with a tall pumpkin ale as everyone else is eating pie?

Mmmmmm….

Oh well, if I get to it this weekend it ought to be ready for Christmas.

Off on a complete tangent, has any one else thought of how karmically insulting it is to be a turkey processed for food? Have your neck chopped off and body disemboweled, then have your neck shoved into your empty body cavity and guts packed into where your head used to be. :(  There has to be a case for wild turkey if I’ve ever seen one. Then you have a connection with that bird, you took its life, prepared it and ate it. My apologies for waxing grotesque, I blame it on the latest book I’m reading, a compilation of Poe.

Cheers!

If you’ve brewed a few batches and been able to let them sit for a few months you might notice something.

I like my beer at about four months, it seems to have those “green” flavors mellowed and yet not lost the hop bite. There is no way I can describe from a chemical standpoint what goes on while a beer ages, but I know a month in a secondary isn’t going to hurt a beer. A month in primary is another story.

One of the best things I have done for my beer is leaving it in secondary longer than the instructions recommend. The general rule of thumb is “One-two-three” One week primary, two week secondary and three week bottle before its ready to drink. I like to keep it in the secondary well over a month. Now I just realized that is keeping with standard convention. Since I keg, once it goes into the “bottle” its ready to drink!

An epiphany of kegging, unbelievable. Standard convention has it sitting out of primary for five weeks before being served. Here I thought I was so smart, once again proving my guts told me right and general convention is there usually for a good reason.

Back on point, take everything we’ve been told by mass marketed macro brew commercials and discard them. Fresh beer that is four months old is good. Beechwood aged, cold brewed, cold filtered, fresh brewed date stamped beer has probably been over processed.

Take a strong heady barley wine and let it sit for a year or two and then see how good it tastes! My brother sent along a nice bottle of barley wine that sat in the fridge, we didn’t open it until our anniversary last month. WOW, was that a great beer! Thanks Scott!

Cheers

Kansas City presents us with Boulevard Brewing Co.’s Lunar Ale. A bottle conditioned amber red beer that smells just like a wheat! Poured into a glass it give a huge frothy light head. The sips are a cool mix of a traditional Weissen with the yeasty tones alone with the darker grain almost nuttiness.

The kids are stirring from their naps, so I’ll have to be brief.

This ends up being a nice shift of pace for wheat beers, and a creative addition of darker grain, both taste testers of the house enjoy this one and give it a solid mug up. Incidentally, our local store is selling the six packs at just under $3, so I couldn’t go wrong.

I look forward to trying other Boulevard beers,

Cheers!

“Hon, what am I going to write about today?”

“Don’t know”

*click*

*click*

FOX News 9, Turkeys Fed Beer To Fatten Up Before Thanksgiving!

Oh my goodness, its like they knew I was wondering! And the classic quote that they didn’t air but alluded to, his turkeys never seemed tipsy. Our anchor woman quips “thats because he’s tipsy too!”

Class, pure class! Of course he has to be feeding the turkeys Coors. Why not Pabst, or Old Mil?

Cheers!

Don’t ask me what made me think of this, but I was remembering a stupid beer game we used to play in college. Cartoon Network used to play old roadrunner cartoons Saturday nights… or maybe it was a local cable channel, I don’t recall. Thats beside the point, anyway, what we would do is sit around the T.V. and drink as Wile E. fell.

Not much of a point to the “game”, but some episodes had us turning it off sooner than others.  For some odd reason, the details of those nights no longer seem too sharp.

Other times we would play President and A…, well, we’d play a card game that was a lot of fun when you were winning because as President you got to make up ridiculous rules that everyone else had to follow. Of course, if someone broke the rule they would have to drink.

In retrospect, I’m glad 1) that I survived relatively intact and 2) I no longer participate in such games. Those times demonstrate a perspective of beer as a tool for stupidity instead of a well crafted product to be savored.

I still look forward to the occasional games of Euchre, Cribbage or Hold’em though. Great card games that don’t revolve around a group of folks shouting “DRINK”! I wonder what I would think of my future self back then, had I been able to see ahead?

Crazy ramblings of a dad in need of a nap.

Cheers!