Bill's Brew Thoughts 2/28/12

Another week, another vintage beer cracked. I took the beginning of last week's post to recap a bottle share I had been to the previous night, and I think I'm going to keep that format and split each week's post into a recap of any adventures I've had in the previous week and then the Cellar Monday half of the post. So without further ado...

This Week in Beer

There was nothing quite as exciting as a bottle share in my beer world this week. The highlight of my week (or lowlight, given how much a PITA the work is) was bottling a double IPA I brewed last month. This beer's hovering around the 8%ABV mark and features aggressive late hopping with Nelson Sauvin and Galaxy hops. These are two of my favorite hop varietals, and the white wine/grapefruit and tropical fruit notes from them respectively should play well together. I ended up with about 34 bottles, so I hope it turns out well because that's a lot of IIPA drinking in my future. I also received a trade in the mail on Tuesday with a bottle of Cantillon Fou Foune (a limited release yearly brew they do with apricots), as well as my first can of Heady Topper thrown in as an extra (opened it almost immediately, killer beer). Hopefully next week I'll be recounting the brewday for my next beer, a hoppy tripel. 

Cellar Monday

For week 3 of Cellar Monday, I pulled a bottle from another brewery that's well represented in my stash, Stone Brewing Co and their 090909 Vertical Epic Series. 

From the description on the bottle, they were going for a beer that was "reminiscent of artisanal chocolates accentuated with orange", and  nearly two and a half years after the release, I'd say the beer is drinking pretty close to that. 09 Vertical Epic's got a killer nose, with a powerful chocolate aroma that's offset by just a hint of citrus. The flavor profile has all that, but there's also a little spicy clove thrown off by the Belgian yeast that, for me, just doesn't mesh well with the rest of the beer. It only makes up a small portion of the flavor profile though, as big orange-tinted chocolate dominates the beer. The sense of sweetness and flavor from the vanilla beans really helps those chocolaty flavors pop. The beer's held up surprisingly well to aging, as I don't think I would have guessed it had a couple years on it if I was drinking it blind. No real signs of oxidation, though I'm sure some of the yeasty phenol and citrus flavors were a bit more prominent back in 2009. I've gotten to try Stone Vertical Epic beers going all the way back to 2006, and the 2009 edition is probably my second favorite behind only the 2007 version. I'm glad I have a couple more bottles of this in the cellar. 

Cellar Monday: Dogfish Head Palo Santo Marron

Before I get to this week's edition of Cellar Monday, I wanted to give a brief recap of a beer event I helped organize last night in Montclair. After a couple months of back and forth mails with the beer manager at Amanti Vino and some of my NJ beer comrades, we settled on Sunday February19th for the first ever bottle share at Amanti Vino. We had ten to eleven people up in the classroom at any point in the night, and spent about three hours going through an assortment of beers both vintage and/or not available in NJ.

The complete lineup of downed soldiers

The whole lineup, with the exception of Noble Rot, generally went over pretty well. Some personal favorites (aside from the Black Tuesday and Pretty Things Our Finest Regards that I brought) include the Hitachino Nest 3 Days Ale (this beer was mashed in when the earthquake hit Japan last year, and the wort ended up sitting in the mash tun for 3 days before it went through the rest of the brewing process), Portsmouth Black Cat Stout (a Dry Irish Stout that packed a ton of flavor into a 5.5%ABV beer), and the Boulevard/Deschutes collaboration Conflux #2 (a witbier/IPA hybrid that was drinking very nicely despite being a couple months old). Hopefully it was just the first of many such events at Amanti Vino.

As for this week's edition of Cellar Monday, the beer of choice is Dogfish Head's Palo Santo Marron, bottled in November of 2009.

Winter 2009-2010 was when my cellar first started to really grow. I started a yearly tradition of adding some of Dogfish Head's big beers (specifically, World Wide Stout and Olde School Barleywine along with Palo Santo), and decided to check in on a bottle from the first set. From the second the beer hit the glass, I could smell the unique spicy and woody notes from the Palo Santo wood. They really assert themselves and dominate the beer. There's still some milk chocolate and caramel from the base beer, but those are very much in the background. The wood aging definitely seems to be much more prominent here than in fresh bottles that I've had. The body is still somewhat of a marvel for restrained and not heavy it is. It's not light by any means, but when I hear "12% Imperial Brown Ale" I'm bracing for something that's a bit more viscous. The beer ends up being a bit more easy drinking than one would expect because of this. I did enjoy my glass of Palo Santo Marron tonight, but I prefer the better balance between base beer and wood aging that I've found in more fresh bottles.

Cellar Monday: Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout

Yikes! Just over two months since my last post. Ever since I stopped doing nightly posts, I've had a hard time getting back into the habit of making blog posts. Without a regular schedule to stick to it all kind of went to hell. No more though, as I've begun instituting Cellar Mondays. After a bump from Christmas and the Southampton Imperial Russian Stout release, my beer cellar is up at about 275 bottles, with way more upward pressure than downward. To counteract that, I've decided that every Monday I will be opening one bottle from my cellar and talking about it here. The rules are that the beer in question must be at least a year old, unless it's being stored in my cellar but I haven't actually tried it before, in which case it's fair game no matter what the age. Without further ado, the brew for the inaugural Cellar Monday is Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout.

I'll skip the back story for now, but suffice to say, Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout (BBCS) is the reason I'm writing this post tonight. It's the beer that kicked me down the proverbial rabbit hole of craft beer. Furthermore, several months into this journey, I read that BBCS, like some kinds of wine, could be aged and enjoyed for years. This idea led me to join Beer Advocate (another pivotal player in my beer obsession), and bottles of the most recent Black Chocolate Stout vintage at the time (Winter 2008-2009) became the first additions to my new beer cellar. The last of those bottles left my cellar a while ago, but I also started a new tradition the following winter of getting a case of BBCS at Christmas time to put away. This bottle came from my Winter 2009-2010 stash, more than half of which remains. I allowed the beer to warm a little from the fridge and poured it into my Founders CBS snifter, and the all-too familiar aroma that hit my nose made me crack a smile. The rich dark chocolate is there, but there's also a dark fruitiness that I can't quite pinpoint. One sip and I nail it down though. The early signs of oxidation are giving the beer a little bit of a cherry edge to it. It's not as much of a chocolate/malt bomb as a fresh bottle, some of that is muted by this new addition, but I'd honestly have to do a side by side to decide which I like better (sounds like a fun experiment for another night). Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout is one of my favorite beers fresh, and it wears a couple years of age well. I look forward to seeing how these bottles fare even further down the road.