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.

It’s been a busy 2009 so far, beer readers. I’ve had time to sample some new brews, but I haven’t been able to tell you folks about them. My humble whatevah. Anyway, here’s a review for you. Enjoy with a side of beer.

Mission Street’s beers are very good. You may recall earlier this month when I discussed their Pale Ale. Well, what’s the logical progression? Yeh… India Pale Ale. These beers run you$5.99 a 6-pack. Good recession brew.

This IPA is a good kind of “standard bearer” brau.* Nice amber body and a dissipating white head in top. It’s very hop heavy, as is to be expected. Pine and floral hops dominate the aroma and initial flavor. The body has enough malt to stand up to the hoppy invasion** but this beer is not for those who don’t like hops. In the finish the character grows slightly more citrus in taste and the sip ends rather dry. The 6.1% ABV is surely adding a bit of taste to the beer but it’s subtle enough to remain anonymous. The active carbonation keeps the flavor movin’—serve it cold when it’s hot. Awwwwww yeah.

A  fine young beer, friends! And a Trader Joe’s-available (in fact, it may be an exclusive… someone research that and get back to me*) beer at that, so we’re talking $5.99 a six pack. Most affordable! But let’s not muddle around over who paid what for who when and why and where and let’s focus on this very decent brew. Mission Street’s Pale Ale defines its category: it has a nice golden-amber color beneath a white, medium-thickness head. The body is light and full of active carbonation. The aroma of hops defines its scent—pine and mildly grapefruit hops, to be precise—and its flavor is a lovely interplay of hops bracing a mildly sweet bready malt. It finishes hop-dry and refreshing.

Now I drank this beer in “Winter” if I may call it such here in southern, CA, and that may have been a disservice to the brew. This baby has refreshment written all over it. Or maybe it says “Mission Street” and “Pale Ale” but whatever—this would be a perfect “lawnmower beer” as I call them.** The ABV is relatively low at 4.6% and doesn’t much affect the flavor of the brew. But hey, you can have an extra one and still operate heavy (or lawn-care) machinery. Not that we at Hall of Beers condone that. Unless it’s a golf cart or jet ski or something awesome like that.

* Yeah, it’s exclusive. Those lucky skunks

** You know, “I just finished mowing the lawn and it’s hot and muggy and boy do I need a good BEER BEER BEER!”

OK… so… Beck’s Premier Light:

Meh. Not so hot. Very light malt flavor, the littlest bit of floral-bitter hops in the finish. I mean, the beer has 64 calories—where is the flavor going to hide? It’s refreshing, it’s extremely “drinkable”* meaning… refreshing. That’s about it. But… when you add..

Hooooooowee that’s good sippin’! So the other day (OK like three weeks ago) it was some, oh, 80 degrees in January. So Mrs. Beer and I went for a long bike ride and worked up a summer sweat. Some of our neighbors had just moved out and while they will be missed, they left us beer. Beck’s Premier Light beer, to be precise. So in keeping with a tried and true German tradition, we took said lager and introduced to the beer a goodly dram of lemonade. OK look, no one is saying this was the least bit original or magical or anything… I’m just saying it was delicious. This process will kind of work with your garden variety cheap beers (not Natty cheap—think Coors or Miller) but in order to be really tasty, you need to use a real German beer. Or its American equivalent. Or beer from any other country that makes a similar beer.

But if you want a guaranteed good refreshing beverage, go with:

+

=

Uh…

Well, it’s damn good.

Captain out!

*When did that become an issue? This whole Bud Light “DRINKABILITY” campaign makes me vomit with rage!

This is one of the best stouts I have tried in months. It hangs right up there with some of Rogue and New Belgium and other such top-tier brewery’s offerings. It’s… delicious. Go… go get some. Don’t bother reading this post, just go—hey get back here! OK. That’s better. Have a seat… relax…

Alaskan’s Oatmeal Stout has all the right moves, see? It’s a deep brown when viewed in bright light, black in twilight haze or a tavern’s gloom. Or like… like if you’re at home but don’t have many lights on. Moving on. A nice tan head sits above the dark body, dissipating by the time you’re a third or so of the way in there.  And by the time you’re that far in, you’re well aware that this is a damn good brew.

The oatmeal, while not providing noticable flavors (which is pretty standard) gives the beer a rich, silky smoothness to the body that I found almost unique. Sure, I’ve had plenty of other rich stouts before, from creams to oatmeals to smoked etc etc… but this beer’s texture and mouthfeel stands out from the pack.

And the taste… is good. The aroma is roasty bread and a touch of caramel with a low bitterness profile. In the actual drink and finish the hop prescence asserts itself more, blending nicely with the malt notes. The flavor maintains the toasted bread and caramel aspects from the aroma, adding a coffee and burnt biterness in. Keep in mind all this is swirling around on that amazing body and be glad this beer comes in a six pack.

And… yet another deep doff of the cap. What… a… beer. I finally spotted a Sam Adams Holiday Pack the other day and leapt onto it, shattering every bottle and injuring a small Navajo boy. I wept at the lost beer for several hours and then, assured the young lad was resting soundly, went out for another Holiday Pack. And this baby packs a punch. Of great beer. We’re talking 2 Boston Lagers, 2 Winter Ales (oh man), 2 Cranberry Lambics (aw yeah), 2 Old Fezziwig Ales (ooh spelling… I really should check that…), 2 Holiday Porters (hell yeah) and 2 of these babies. Or, in latin effin beerum bliss, man. Um.

Where to begin? With the pour? Good thinking. I used a room temperature spherical glass, of course. The beer is a deep, rich mahogany brown. The head is a rich tan color and pour carefully: if you do, you have a thick foam friend for most of the brau!* If you don’t… I hope you have some time on your hands to let it dissipate. Maybe try to get some weeding done? ANYWAY! The aroma of this lovely stout is rich bread—almost sweet enough to have a coffee cake scent—and hints of hops and spice.

Ah and then you drink it. Happy day. Rich, thick and smooth (just like so many corpulent, balding hedge fund managers). The thick, cream body is provided by the use of unmalted barley in the brewing process. This is barley that has not been allowed to germinate and convert its starches to fermentable sugars, for those of you who didn’t know (you should likely caaaaaaalllll someone. Maybe your local homebrew store). The unmalted barley contributes a thickness to the beer because its starches don’t break down into alcohol and CO2. We lazy homebrewers use dry malt extract for the same effect.

Moving along—the good brewers at Samuel Adams saw fit to use chocolate and caramel malts. The beer is a mouth-party** of malt: toasted bread, coffee, dark chocolate, amazing. A generous addition of English hops balance but do not interfere with the malt backbone. The beer has just enough spice to keep it deftly balanced but still big. And beautiful. 

* from the German for “barley sac”

** just go with it…

All I can think of at the moment is that scene in Dances With Wolves where Kevin Costner is yelling “Tatonka!” and making little horns with his fingers. Always good for a larf. Watch that movie and see how many times he flops onto his back in a comical manner… I believe the count is 4 which may not seem high but when you focus on it, it… is.

OK… on to the beer! BJ’s, a limited California chain, has some great food and some damn good beer, not to mention excellent prices on their 5 and 7 glass five ounce beer sampler flights. A great way to have a lot of great beer. I could (and likely will eventually) write at some length on each of their 6 standard beers and rotating seasonals, but I’m going to focus on their Tatonka Stout this time. Thus the heading of this review. Yeh…

The Tatonka Stout is BJ’s darkest and most, shall we say, serious offering. It is in the Imperial Stout style, meaning a few things: it is high in ABV (just a hair over 8%—bam!), it is dark as the bajeezus with a thick, creamy head and it is big on flavor. Let’s start with the head and body. That thick creamy foamy top stays with you the whole way. After each sip, you can see a new ring of caramel-white foam clinging to the glass, telling you the history of your beer like so many tree’s rings. The mouthfeel is, in typical Imperial (or “double” sometimes) stout fashion, full but not heavy. It almost has a light milky quality, silkily gliding around until you quaff the beer down.

The taste… big, deep, roasty malt dominates the flavor. The brew has notes of burnt grain, coffee and black bread to it. Those bold flavors are balanced by a bracing hop bitterness that begins to overtake your your tastebuds after the finish*. I love it, but for the more timid, callow, foppish among us, the powerful flavors and unique body of this Imperial stout may be too much. Not that their opinions count.

* Awesome alliteration as always, Captain!

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.

Yes, the calendar says late autumn but, except for 3, maybe 4 days last week, the thermometer says 80 degrees out. And the barometer says… says… oh my god, you ATE the barometer!? Jesus, man! What were you thinking!?Well, we’ll deal with that mess later. For now… yes… Pacifico–a summer beer’s near-vernal reprise.

OK so let’s just say it: this light lager beer has basically no “beer” qualities to it. That is not to say it’s not, in its own way a quality brewed beverage, it’s just that the usual criteria for beer assessment—IBU’s, hop variations, malt balance, toasted or smokey or molasses notes, et all—basically can’t be applied.

Pacifico has no hop aroma to speak of. The littlest bit of bitterness in the taste and finish exists but it’s entirely unrecognizable as hops. The malt body is light and mildly sweet. It doesn’t taste “malty” per say, just… lightly “beery,” if I may. Here’s the thing: whether it’s July and you just mowed the lawn or it’s November and you put on a sweater and then went outside and remembered you live in California, this is a damn refreshing beer. And frankly even when there is a winter chill to the air sometimes I will reach for a Pacifico (provided there is not a Sierra Nevada Celebration or Yuengling or Sam Adams Anything or… yeah…) with pleasure and quaff it down in 3 to 5 sips. Not a lot of taste, maybe, but treat it like the refreshing beverage it is, toss in a lime and you’re golden, baby. Very pale golden with a finger width of rapidly dispersing head if you poured it right.

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.