Friends, it’s a happy time when a Sam Adams mix pack comes out. As you all know, darker, winter beers are this Captain’s favorite, but summer/spring beers are wondrous too. The most recent mixed 12er I picked up has 2 of each of the following: Boston Lager, Sam Light, Blackberry Wit (finally!), Hefewiezen, Summer Ale and Pale Ale.

I’ve chosen to review that Pale Ale today because I have about three minutes. And the review will be simple, as this beer is basically exactly what you’d expect from a good American Pale Ale.

It’s hop forward but without any sharpness. There is no specific note of pine, grapefruit, etc—now, at times this sort of “general bitterness” would be less, say, intriguing than I like out of a beer. But if you’re eating a good meal, cooling down after exercise, starting off your morning, etc, sometimes you just want a good, balanced pale ale. Not a Pliny the Elder that you’ll taste for hours. Not a Ruinator that will, well, ruin your taste buds for the rest of the day. You just want a drinkable beer. That’s what this is. It’s a pleasantly bitter, refreshing beer with subtle, bready malt and firm but not overbearing hops. Serve it cold when the weather’s hot and then get me three to five more and a sandwich. Turkey club. Mustard, yeah. But no mayo. That stuff’s wack, man.

New year, new beers! We’re back and much the same as ever, beervolk! New Year’s Eve was an extravaganza of wonderful beers and I shall try to get to many of them in time. But I begin 2009 with a review of a good old brew from Yuengling. As I was on the east coast, finally my longing thirst for said brewery was slaked. Today we discuss their Lord Chesterfield Ale. Or rather I dogmatically drone; you read receptively.

You all know what we in the Hall think of Yuengling Lager. It is superb. Liquid pleasure. Their Lord Chesterfiled Ale is perhaps less distinct than the lager, but it is a very good beer. And what it lacks in unique notes, it makes up for by exemplifying the taste of a basic ale. It has the characteristics of a good German beer. The hops are there in the aroma and brace the malt flavor, ultimately defining the finish. The light golden body and thin white head contain more malt-hop interplay than you might expect from the beer’s appearance. The flavor is simple but satisfying and refreshing. This could be a dinner, hors d’ouvre or session beer. Or all three at once. Whatever your thing is, man.

The Sarge brewed what I guess I’ll call a Holiday Ale if I must classify it. The beer is spicy, rich and bursting with a crisp tartness supplied by copius additions of fresh and dried cranberries. A lovely amber hue.

My beer is a Scotch Ale and, if I may be so bold, manages to both cleave faithfully to its style while boasting notes of honey, spice and a secret hobo twist I’ll never reveal. Oh… OK… the secret ingredient is… is… RIGHT BEHIND YOU! AAUUGH!!!!! GLAUAWAUGH!!!!!

*Except that “you” means “me.”

I’ll start as I usually do when discussing a beer brewed by a macro-brewery—I had my reservations, I prefer to support smaller breweries, I didn’t expect much, etc etc. Well… this is a good beer.

Anheuser-Busch, hiding beneath the cloak of Michelob and rakishly twirling its mustache, does some things right every once in a while. It’s almost as if Michelob is their Mr. Hyde who only comes out at night, makes decently good beers, and then recedes into the Dickensian, foggy streets of a watery beer London morning. Or something. You get the picture despite my unwieldy metaphor*. Amber Bock is pretty good… their regular ‘ol Michelob is fine and Michelob Light is light on taste but very refreshing. Ultra is worthless, of course, and I have yet to get my hands on their new Pale Ale but this, the Jack’s Pumpkin Spice Ale… well, I’ve gotten two six-packs so far.

The color is a rich, dark orange-amber. Man, I really should have taken a picture of the glass (meh—it was dark out and… I am powerfully lazy). It’s a lovely colored beer with a sturdy, almost creamy white head on its shoulders that hangs around for the first few sips. The aroma is dominated by malt and spice. The flavor is almost like semi-sweet pie was used during the brewing process; like some wacky brewmaster used 80% 2-row malts and 20% pumpkin pie. And then rounded things out with a mild hop addition just to keep the sweetness in check. The 5.5% A.B.V. is basically unnoticeable but surely provides a bit of bite to the brew. Hints of cinnamon and ginger and the lightest clove and coriander notes further shade the complexity of the beer. At the finish, the mildly sweet pumpkin bread/pie flavor returns in all its subtle malty goodness, bidding you take another sip and buy another six-pack.

So… well done, you sneaky mega brewery. Next back to Stone or Otter Creek for me, but well done. I doff my bowler and twirl my ebony cane to you.

* Really more of a simile as I led with the “as if” there… but only a pompous asshat would point that out in an annotation below the main text.

There has been a lot of hoopla about this Budweiser / ImBev business recently, huh? Yeah. Great. As this Captain has said before, I care little for who owns Bud. Or any huge brewery, really. Keep Sam Adams and Yuengling and certain others under the same ownership, I implore you, but for the mega fellahs? Meh. I do find it amusing though, that this new pseudo-craft offering arrogantly titled “American Ale” hit the shelves at about the same time as the ownership of the brewery jumped across the pond to Belgium (a country that knows its beer, at least).

I have mixed feelings about big breweries riding the coat tails of the craft and micro breweries into the world of fine beer-making. The Big Guys almost killed good beer, dammit! But still, I have resolved to keep this review as objective as possible, focusing on the beer and not the brewer.

OK. So. It’s ruddy brown in color. It was a lighter shade than I expected and semi-translucent. The head was thick enough and white. I looked at it for a while. Then I sniffed at it some. Lightly sweet malt notes and… lightly sweet malt notes. Barely any aroma hops to speak of. After pacing for a bit, I took a big sip and swished it around, pacing again. My palate was awash in deep deliberation as I swallowed the beer and sought additional notes in the finish. Which did show up in the form of a some bittering hops. All cascade hops in this beer. (Good American grown plants. And American barley, too. Hoo-ah.)

So here’s the deal: it’s OK. It’s not a bad beer. I enjoyed it even. But it is extremely simple. It’s Ale 101: malt flavor balanced by hop flavor; medium-bodied mouthfeel and calm carbonation. There is nothing distinct about this beer. So I take some issue with its authoritative name American Ale. There are many, MANY examples of beer that are distinctly American, very much ale and very much unique and excellent. This is… drinkable. It’s beer for people who don’t much care about beer but for some reason want to look like they do at the moment when they select this brew. So while it ain’t bad, I think I’ve purchased my last Budweiser American Ale. Unless there’s some wickedpissah sale.

Free beer is welcome arms flung wide open.

I’m still not sure how Trader Joe’s sells so much good beer for less than $6 a six pack ($5.99 in this case but still, dammit!) but they do, and it leads me to try a lot of relatively obscure brews I otherwise would never have found.

But it’s well they do. Black Toad Ale is true to its name with a few surprises. It pours out into a deep, dark beer. Black-brown. No reddishness, just dark. There’s not much head but there is plenty of flavor, dammit. Deep roasty malts give the beer a toasted bread flavor. This is braced by a subtly bitter hop presence. The hops aren’t sharp, aren’t pronounced, but they do their job.

You get a malty, semi-sweet, very dark beer. It’s not wild in any way but it’s very satisfying. I think.

So Brigadier Bock and I gathered around the table with the following braus:

Pliny the Elder Double IPA (which has been available in the bottle for all of maybe 3 months) which is just an excellent beer. Hailed by many a beer lover as the pinnacle of its style.

Arrogant Bastard’s Double Bastard which, always delicious, was made extra special by the fact that the bottle we got was just about a year old (selected by the resident Beer Guru over at Red Carpet). The hops had mellowed and the flavor ripened. Greatness in beer.

A Flemish sour ale… damn which one was it? Not Rodenbach… uh… whatever it was good—much more mellow than other sharp, very sour offerings I’ve tried.

Um… there were more… I don’t quite recall… ANYWAY! This beer.

Lagunitas generally makes damn good beer. Their IPA and Copper Ale are both amazing. This beer is damn good. I’m a bit confused by it and not sure how to classify it but it was good. I’ll say that. As you might have gleaned from the bottle shot above, it scores a (very specific) 40.63 IBUs. That’s decently bitter, but not getting into anything extreme. The A.B.V. is a hearty 7.6% which is up there, but again, when you’re drinking a lot of beer madness, that’s not the upper echelon.

The thing that confused me about this beer was the cream aspect. When I poured the beer into a fine, crystal beer glass, I was confused by its clarity. It had the orange-amber look of standard ale and was rather translucent. “BWAAAAA!?!?” I exclaimed, my bowler knocked loose by my flailing arms. I was expecting a thick, opaque beer. Hmm….

But then, when I took a sip, there in the mouthfeel was indeed a creamy quality! So they’re not goddamn liars. At least in this instance. I’m not sure if it’s by some addition of lactose or the specific grains used (oh, I’ll look into it. Some other time) but here was a beer that, for all intents and purposes tasted like a standard, good ale—a good bready malt flavor braced by solid, slightly citrus hops. But the mouthfeel was a rich, almost oily surprise. Neither a negative nor, frankly, a positive thing in the bigger picture—this cream quality—but it was interesting to try. Mmhmm. Mhm.

Have we truly overlooked this amazing beer to date? My gawd, man! It’s a damn fine brew. One of the finest widely available, I’ll venture. A few words on history and classification, a few on the brew, and then I’m going to weep softly for a while. Just ‘cuz.

OK so no one knows exactly what “steam” means when attached to beer. Not even the guys at Anchor Brewing. It’s lost in bearded, tobacco-juice-stained, old-tyme-prospecty history. But at some point steam beer meant beer brewed out West. Now, well, it’s patented and applies legally only to this beer. But as a style, you can generalize it to say steam beer is brewed with lager ingredients but at ale temperatures (i.e. not refrigerated during its fermentation and not clarified).

What does that get you? It gets you a rich, malty glass of delicious. At just under 5% ABV, this can be a delicious sidekick to a fine meal or it can be a session beer slurped whilst strumming the old ukulele. The hop presence is subtle and balancing—roasty, bready malt defines this amber brew. The carbonation is not overly active, letting the subtle barley malt notes play across your contented tongue.

So good work, old-tymey prospector brewers. Your legacy lives on. Until I drink it. But then I go get more.

Afternoon, beervolk. Just a simple, straightforward review of a simple, straightforward beer today. None of my usual odd, byzantine ramblings about obscure, wacked-out beers. You may notice that I recently passed ONE HUNDRED POSTS in the venerable Hall of Beers. I’m not going to make a big deal out of it* or anything. I’m a humble, beer-loving servant, beer reader. So I’ll just carry on. But props, yo. Props.

OK… Pete’s Wicked Ale. When Pete’s first came out… seems like about a decade hence (but likely that’s just when their distribution reached where I then hung my hat) it seemed like a quality micro-brew. Now, after the—most welcome—deluge of fine, hand-crafted beers, I still respect the beer as a good craft effort (their distribution reach alone makes the term “micro” inaccurate) that comes across more like, well… a good effort. It’s a good beer! It is. But it’s nothing wild. Nothing crazy. A good session beer; a great alternative to Bud Light or Becks or some ubiquitous brau from a B-List bottle shop… but… it’s just not very unique.

But damn, is it drinkable. The lightly roasted hops lend the brew a nice ruby-brownish color with a good head on top. The malt flavor is light and a bit toasty, with low sweetness. The hops are there in the body and finish, but very light. What this beer really is all about is right in the name… ALE. It’s not a style-bender or crazy sub-category or anything nuts… it’s ale. Not a copper ale, not a Scotch Ale, not an India Pale nor malty Wassail! It’s just got subtle but pleasant flavors of roasted barley and Brewer’s Gold hops married in water and brought to life by an unassertive yeast strain.

They can call it “Wicked.” I’ll stick with Ale. Captain OUT!

* but you’d better, man.

Mornin, beervolk. Last night, for my first shot at this beer, I had a healthy 22 ounce dose. And 22 ounces is the way to roll with Moylan Celts Golden Ale. It is indeed, as it proclaims right on its label, in fact, a “session beer.” Now I know, I know… you may be saying: “Captain! ALL beers are session beers, no!?” Well, yes. Ish. I wouldn’t sit down to a “session” with a Flemish sour ale or a Belgian Kasteel, but yes, when it comes to members of the Fleet, most beers are session beers. So instead think of the brau* like this: I went for a bike ride, and when I got home, within 2 minutes I was slurping this ale from a frosty mug and, goodness, I was refreshed. But also not robbed of taste!

As you can see, it’s a rather light golden ale—lighter both in color and body than many offerings in this style. And while its flavors are light too, they are subtle, complex and pleasing. Its fast-moving carbonation swirls flavors across the tongue and, interestingly, the first flavor I picked up was NOT expected… it was… The X Factor! Honey! Honey? Yeah… a light but unmistakable honey flavor broke through the pale malt body. The maltiness is light: bready but with no roasted notes. The hops are never pronounced, but rather add a gentle bitter balance to the sweet malt flavors you that have to pay attention to in order to notice.

So not a wildly complex beer… no crazy flavors… just a good, easy sippin’ session brau. Prost!

* from the German for “Schnauser.”