Like Sasquatch in the wild, I am seen on this website only intermittently, and in very fuzzy photographs. But Sierra Nevada’s 25th Anniversary Bigfoot barleywine compelled me out of hiding and into your shaky viewfinder (delirium tremens, I’m guessing). And like both this beer and its namesake, I will haunt your dreams.

As you know, Sierra Nevada never makes bad beer. I really don’t know how they are so consistent, like I don’t know how mutton chops are not a constitutional requirement for voting, but boy, this beer socks it to ya. I’m pretty sure I got a hangover from just one of them.

Appearance: Pours a copper red-brown, with a moderately creamy, tan, one finger head.

Smell/Taste: Smells malty-sweet with only faint hops. Initial sweet, raisiny malt flavor and noticeable alcohol spice, followed by robust piney hops. The hops last a bit long on the palette for my personal taste, blotting out the dark fruit and malty sweetness, but individual tastes may vary (I, for one, prefer a slightly more subdued hop, like a Lagunitas IPA).

Overall: Clocking in at over 9% ABV and with its lingering pine, I’d be reluctant to drink more than one or two of these per four hour drinking-window, but I heartily recommend throwing a sixer of these in your fridge to bust out when it’s somehow raining and under 40 degress IN LOS FrUCKING ANGELES.

Excellent buy.

Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier probably is German for “Sausage in a bottle,” or maybe it’s anti-semitic, or perhaps it’s simply the sounds I’ll drunkenly utter after “You’re not the boss of me!” and “You don’t own me!” Whatever the translation, there is no questioning that this beer is a smokebeer from Bamberg (like Hamburg but with more bamming), and it is deliciouß (like delicious but with more invading of France).

For non-German-speakers, smokebeer is German for beer that is smoked, although apparently not (according to “Wikipedia”) in a giant watertight doobie. In fact, Schlenkerla smokebeer uses malts that are dried over open flames–one of only two breweries to do so– giving the beer its distinctive smoky flavor.


The Smell/Appearance :
Pours a dark, reddish brown with a somewhat creamy tan head. Smells immediately of–this is weird–summer sausage or barbecue… sweet, smoky, malty, and, uh, porky? Is this beer kosher?

The Taste:
Beers that smell so distinctively rarely fail to to deliver the goods, and this beer is no exception. It tastes like sausage to the extent that beer can taste like meat, and this is somehow really good. The strength of its flavor and the maltier notes it hits are evocative of some of our previous bocks, especially the Aventinus Eisbock, but this beer has a personality all its own.

The Verdict:
Weirdly great. And it’s only 6.5% ABV, so you can drink it in lieu of Bud Ice… if you’re an asshole.

I know how he feels, though. I, too, recently disregarded throat-safety in ordering Stone’s 11th Anniversary Black IPA at Library Alehouse in Venice Beach. In my defense, I was dehydrated, confused, and surrounded by baleful yuppies drinking expensive beer. I had to do it!

Don’t get me wrong, though: this isn’t a bad beer by a long stretch. It’s an extreme beer, sure, but sometimes ambition pays off.

The Appearance and Smell
Darker than a black steer’s tookus on a moonless prairie night. Creamy head. First whiff is gin, alcohol, and pine… lots of pine. We’re talking lemon fresh Pine Sol here, floral hops up the wazoo. But don’t be deterred: good things come to those who wait.

The Taste
A piney gin flavor assaults the tastebuds at the outset here–a flavor so overwhelming that it brings a salty, 8.7% ABV tear to my eye. Unfortunately, these are not tears of joy. Stone seems to have gone too far, pushed out beyond the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. But then…

Is that a coffee and chocolate undercurrent there amidst the waves of piney hops? A bit of spice? Mother of God, do I taste bock?

Suddenly, it’s like I’m drinking a different beer. It’s now sweeter, spicier, and smoother. What happened? It’s amazing. The pine and hops are still there, but they’re in the background, not quite subtle but nicely contrapuntal.

Overall
In general, extreme beers aren’t my cup of tea, and had it not been for the well-nigh miraculous transmutation of this beer after a few sips, this review would have been very different. Stone plays with fire and emerges unscathed. Well-done, sirs.

Not for the faint of heart.

*I apologize for both the joke and the non-documentary picture. My actual picture was lost to the ether.

While the Celebrator Doppelbock is not unlike that scenario, this is no time to talk about our inevitable destruction at the lifeless hands of amoral killing machines (the subject of my next post). No!

No? No. This is the time to discuss beer, and what a beer the Celebrator Doppelbock is. From the Ayinger brewery of Bavaria, traditional home of the doppelbock, the Celebrator is deservedly a multi-award-winner, having won platinum medallions from the DLG and been cited by the Beverage Testing Institute as one of the world’s best beers. But don’t take their word for it. Take mine.

The Appearance and Smell
Pours a dark ruby brown with a thin, off-white head. Low carbonation and head retention, as is somewhat typical for doppelbocks. While Major Microbrew detected soy sauce and his sense of smell is unimpeachable, I noted the sweetness of dark fruits and chocolate.

The Taste
Even the metal taste sensors of our robot overlords would tingle at the chocolate, malt, currant, and coffee here. Despite a 6.7% ABV, not much alcohol (or hop) character, and smoothly drinkable, even creamy.

Overall
Everything about this beer, from the awesome label and plastic ram strung around the bottleneck to the taste and drinkability, are exemplary. Even worth the 8 dollars paid at Finn McCool’s in Santa Monica. And the bollocks service.

This beer lives up to its reputation: a definite buy, although it won’t protect you when the robots come for you. And they will.

My personal trainer from a couple years back once told me that to put on body mass I was going to have to dispense with binge drinking, although having “5 or 6 beers every now and again can’t hurt and can even help keep your carb intake up.” I took that caveat as a license to drink beer immediately after I work out, a practice which, while slowing my progress towards the pecs I always dreamed of (big, but not too big), has made me an alcoholic. Touché, personal trainer.

My post-gym beer of choice today was the Ur-bock Dunkel from the brewery that continues Einbeck’s six hundred years of proud bock brewing tradition, Einbecker. For the record, Einbeck was once a fairy-tale land where every citizen was his own brewer, people threw ducks at balloons, and nothing was as it seems.

The Appearance and Smell:
A light, sparse tan head quickly dissipated, revealing a moderately carbonated murky copper beer. The smell was light, sweet, and surprisingly hoppy for a bock.

The Taste:
A pleasant caramel malt flavor with a nice restrained hoppy underbelly that carries through the finish.

Overall:
Following the ass-kicking handed to me by the Aventinus Eisbock, the Ur-bock’s lightness was a bit of a relief, if somewhat less dramatic. It’s a quiet, well-balanced beer that might not blow any minds, but certainly deserves respect. Also, at 6.5% ABV, you can drink a lot more of it, or, as we say in the beer biz*, it could be a nice session beer.

Solid buy.

* Beer biz is a registered trademark of the Molson Coors Brewing Company, Golden, CO. Please drink responsibly.

Bock is a strong lager originally from the Hanseatic town of Einbeck, Germany, long brewed and drunk by Catholic monks. Although there are a number of different types of bock (as we shall see, friends), they tend to be malty, dark of color, and high in ABV, especially as compared to other lagers. As a result, some bocks are considered a meal unto themselves, a.k.a. beer for breakfast, or as an alcohol counselor once told me “an eye opener.” They tend to have a low hop character, making them sweet on the finish.

To kick things off on Hall of Beers, I had to go with an old favorite brewery of mine, G. Schneider and Sohn, the Bavarian wheat brewery responsible for the best wheats on the planet for my Deutschmark. Today, their Weizen Eisbock proves to be the fire of my loins and other parts of myself, as eisbocks are made by freeze distilling doppelbock and removing the ice to increase the alcohol content. Consequently, the Aventinus Eisbock comes in at an ass-kicking 12% ABV. Awesome!

The Appearance and Smell:
An ample, tan head, murky caramel brown color, and healthy carbonation. An aroma so robust, you can smell this beer from across the room: fruits, malts, wheat, and enough alcohol to knock out a small animal.

The Taste:
Sometimes (see Brooklyn’s Monster Ale), a really high gravity beer can bitchslap the other flavors right out of the bottle and taste like you’re drinking a pint of shots. Not so here. The alcohol is noticeable, but not overwhelming–it lends a spice and a warmth, but the malt, the cloves, the subtle raisins shine through like the heart of gold in a hooker with a heart of gold.

Overall:
This is the kind of beer that manages to walk that fine line between power and subtlety– the kind that gets me excited. If Otto von Bismarck were liquified, fermented and turned into a beer, it might be something like the Aventinus Eisbock. But also possibly not. It did make me unify Germany, though.

A definite buy.