A Couple of Beers: Optimator and Full Sail Amber

Grab a chair and let’s you and I have a couple of beers.  They’ll be two very different styles.  First up, a monster of a lager from Spaten.

OPTIMATOR

Spaten’s Optimator is a doppelbock.  It was a sweet beer, like candy.  In fact, it was like mixing caramel, hard candy and whiskey together.  It was a syrupy libation, sugary sweet to my palate, not malty sweet.  It was warm.  The alcohol was present.  The hops were not, as appropriate.  It was an oily, chewy, full bodied lager.  It finished clean with a hint of grapes.  

No hops were present in the nose.  It did smell kind of like a brandy.  It reminded me of Sam Adams Utopia, which I was able to try for the first time at the 2007 Great American Beer Festival.  It was dark brown with a tint of copper ’round the edges.  Very thin, tan head.  It didn’t dissipate but did not stay thick throughout.

A doppelbock is a strong lager, seven percent alcohol and up.  It should be a smooth and malty beer with a hint of sweetness.  It is said to be a very good dessert beer.  Traditionally, the doppelbock’s name contain the suffix -ator, a tradition started by the Paulaner brewery.  They named their doppelbock Salvator (meaning “savior;” the monks understood the messianic nature of beer, too).  Other brewers began to mimic this style and also called their beers Salvator.  This was in the days prior to trademark protection.  By 1894, the Paulaner brewery was able to protect the name so other brewer’s simply kept the suffix.  

 

 

 

FULL SAIL AMBER

It’s from Bend, Oregon and crafted with elan and attitude. The beer pours an amber, orange color – which would seem right since it is an amber ale, eh? It had a small white head with tiny little bubbles that lingered on the beer, yet not so much on the glass. It was a thin blanket atop the bed of hops.

There seemed to be the tiniest taste of biscuit in the medium bodied ale. It was very lightly sweet, though even this was masked by the hops presence. The body, while it filled the mouth, seemed a bit watery, too. But the star of the show was, as mentioned in every paragraph so far, the hops.

You’ll note piney, citrus-like hops.  They use Mt. Hood (duh! Oregon! It’s brewed in the Mt. Hood area!) and Cascade. Cascade provides spicy character, too.  

 

 

Well, thanks for having a drink or two with me.  We’ll do it again.  You can find more detailed reviews of the above beers at the Bottled Llama Brewing Blog.  Subscribe to their blog and mine!

A Few Beers to Pass the Time

Back in March, my wife took me to the Great Arizona Beer Festival – for which I shall ever be grateful.  It was an absolutely perfect day in Tempe, AZ.  The temperature was around 75 F, there was no wind and not a cloud in the sky.  We spent most of the day wandering from booth to booth sampling beer.  Of course, she’s not the beer fan I am.  I’d consume my three ounce sample and then the remaining ounce and half of hers.  It was great. 

After the Festival we stopped by AJ’s Fine Foods and picked up a six pack of beers I can’t get in Kingman.  I’ve spent weeks nursing these babies; I’ve only got one left in fact.  So here’s some brief thoughts on a few so far.

The first one was Sierra Nevada’s Bigfoot Barley wine.  My wife and I both love barleywine and I’d heard so many good things about this beer.  It was the first sample we had at the Beer Fest, too.  I was sorely disappointed.  It was more like their classic Pale Ale – only on steroids.  It was unbelievably hoppy.  Supposedly there’s some complexity buried beneath that resinous monster but I could not find it.  We thought perhaps it was just too young, fresh for the beer fest.  Thus, I bought a bottle to try later.  It was no different.  Hops, hops, hops and more hops and I was bitterly disappointed.   I must say, though, it is an American barleywine.  It’s supposed to have hops.  And it’s not like drinking a bottle of squeezed hop juice, although it’s close.  No, it’s a well put together beer, just not to my liking.  A little more detailed review can be found here at the Weekly Pint.

A second beer, also from the Beer Festival, was Breckenridge Brewery’s Vanilla Porter.  I love porters and was immediately drawn to this beer.  A friend and I sampled lots of porters at the Great American Beer Festival last year; smoked porters, vanilla porters, coconut porters, coffee porters.  I wanted my wife to try this one.  She liked it very much.  It’s a sweet and refreshing beer.  The vanilla certainly dominates the flavor but it doesn’t seem out of place.  It’s not balanced but it is masterfully concocted.  I bought a bottle of it to try later.  I discovered that it’s better in three ounces than twelve.  A full bottle is just too much.  Still, I’d never pass up a pint.  Read more here.

The third beer would be Corsendonk’s Abbey Brown ale.  It’s actually a dubble and was superb; rich and sweet and refined.  It felt like an old liquor, if that makes any sense.  The Corsendonk website is classic.  By the way, you may not find the beer as Abbey Brown Ale.  At the website, and some rating sites, it goes by the name Pater.  Smoke and alchohol is what I remember most about it.  I would love to get a few more bottles.  What really made me angry, though, was this:  a few weeks after I drank the beer I was looking through my glass collection (somewhere I got 24 different gold rimmed glasses with 24 different brewery logos on them – a few different styles of glasses, don’t know if they are legitimately “official” glasses, but still) and I discovered I had a Corsendonk glass!  If I’d been paying attention I could have used that glass when drinking the beer.  Alas, I’m not he who pays much attention.  Well, read more about the Abbey Brown here.

The Expert Jerk: What the ******** is Banquet Beer, anyway?

Why ask me a question about Coors?  Do I seem to be a Coors drinker?  Does it appear that I even care?  Oh, I’m just some jerk sent here to answer lame questions, is that it?  Whatever.  Since I’m a jerk and I exist only to serve the Great Questioners, here goes:  What is ‘banquet beer?’

Only the god of cowboys really knows, and he’s too stupid to remember or to be able to explain it to anyone.  So, we’re on our own trying to decipher Coors’ idiotic moniker.

Oh, all right.  Maybe not totally on our own.  According to the official Coors website (yes, I went there.  I didn’t enjoy it.  It made me deathly ill for weeks, but, hey, what do you care – you needed answers!) the name was added to the label in 1936 because miners in the 1800s threw parties called ‘banquets’ and drank Coors at them.  Yeah, that’s right.  Parties from the 1800s changed Coors label in 1936.  Brilliant.

So, let’s consider. Miners spend all day in dark underground caverns with a bunch of other guys.  They are all jacked up on weird chemicals wafting through the mine shafts, not to mention they are oxygen deprived.  At the end of the day, these madmen are released from their tunnels.  Drooling with stupidity and streaked with the underbelly of earth entrails they sally forth into the night demanding ‘banquets!’  They probably eat bits of bark, armadillo parts, any rodent stupid enough to get in their way – and they demand a drink to accompany this feast.  A sane person has just tossed away a big case of Coors pee.  The miners find it and declare it a treasure beyond all treasures.  “It done taste jes’ like’n’ that whizz we done drank last yonder weekend,” says one of the depraved inmates – miners! – to another.  The chief of the nuts declares the beer to be their ‘banquet beer.’  The Coors brewery hears of this.  They’re happy that someone finally likes their beer so they adopt the appellation.  Great stuff, eh? 

I mean, truly, not even the Coors company knows why it’s called ‘banquet beer’ other than that one obscure reference, yet it’s become ‘iconic’ of the igit canned beer.  Whatever.  You know what else is just spiffy?  If you go to most craft beer websites there’s a link called ‘Our Beers.’  Notice the ’s’ at the end of beer, denoting more than one.  At the Coors website, that option is singular.  One beer.  That’s it.  For however many years.  These idiots don’t even have to keep track of more than one beer and they still don’t know the roots of the name.

Well, I hope yer all happy now.  I have answered a question in a jerky fashion and uncovered more Coors stupidness.  And made myself sick in the process, what with all the cowboy beer viewing I had to do. 

On Organic Beers

Organic beers are proliferating.  I called our local craft beer guy today and asked him what he had.  Mothership Wit was all, but after a brief conversation he decided to order some of Samuel Smith’s organic beer’s.  So, in about two weeks we’ll have some new stuff to try in Kingman.  Cool.

Well, I wrote this article on Associated Content about organic beers.  Please read it.  I’ll be honest, I get paid for page views.  So, you’ll help me out and you’ll learn a bit about some cool new brews.  Thanks.

The Great Lines of Dialogue – Movie Quotes You Must Know – Even More

Let’s say you’re at work.  You and a co-worker engage in a rubber band war.  Your opponent misses you regularly.  There is but one way to gloat:  ala Doug MacKenzie from Strange Brew.  You say:  “The power of the force stopped you, you hosers.”  (Remember, that’s when the hockey team was bearing down on him and stopped at the proper note).

When you get reprimanded and fired for the rubber band war, don’t get a lawyer.  Remember, “lawyers are for sucks,” as Doug said.

One of my favorite lines (again from Doug):  “There’s no way I’d crash this, this is a beer truck, eh!”

I learned to end all of my sentences with “eh.”  Pretty cool, eh?