Morning beer reader! Meaning good afternoon, beer reader. Remember when days actually started at the crack of noon? When not dressing until 4 on a Tuesday was standard even though you made your 2 o’clock class? I don’t exactly recall that, but I guess you do. Whatever. With age comes maturity and mornings, I guess. And you know what else comes with maturity? Beer. That was a very feeble course I plotted, I know. But you know what’s not feeble? The quality of the New Belgium brewery’s Fat Tire Amber Ale. If you’ve never had a Fat Tire, you should have the privilege of suffrage stripped from you along with that awful fedora. They’re never coming back, dude. Live with it.

Anyway! Fat Tire is available coast to coast in many fine bars on tap and in most fine bottle shops* in, uh, the bottle. Once I poured some into a can so I could drink it while giving a talk to the Ft. Lauderdale Sheriff’s Union, but I doubt that counts. I do this brew a disservice by not having a picture of it poured into a clear glass… it really is a beautiful hue of amber-brown, with a creamy head that locks in the fine flavor. Read on for fun, buddy!

Fat Tire is one of the best balanced beers around. It’s body is a nice, full malt flavor, with a baked bready taste. The malt, more pervasive than the hops in the aroma, is nicely balanced by a crisp but gentle hoppiness in the taste. In many beers, the malt and hops seem to be competing for flavor dominance, like so many pugilists, pugiling around the ring. Y’know, like:

“Hops has malt on the ropes and he’s really working the body! And aroma! But what’s this!? Malt has landed a solid blow to the (beer’s) head! Now a screaming Greek woman has entered the ring and she’s swinging a tennis racket around and weeping! What the hell!?”

Anyway… Fat Tire is wonderfully balanced. The malt and hops walk down a country lane in Autumn, holding hands and laughing, rather than shouldering each other out, like on a busy Denver sidewalk. The mouthfeel of this brau** is unique as well… it strikes me as almost velvety with some of the sips. The carbonation is not low or anything, but the beer manages to have a “New Castle-y” full bodied aroma, taste and finish while staying rather light compared to, say, Elvis in 1977. Or an Imperial Stout.

*that’s what they call a liquor store in the UK and Australia and stuff. I’m extremely cultured.

**from the German for “evanescent.”