Odd Side Ales Hipster Brunch

12 oz bottle - traded for.

So every once in a while I trade beer. One of (I mean a couple of) my friends compared this to Pokemon card trading. And yeah I guess its kind of like that.

But, it's one of the few ways I can try beer that isn't distributed to NJ or NY.

This beer was very highly touted on Beeradvocate.com (a website I frequent for forums, ratings, and trading), however it (and Odd Side Ales) most recently came under fire for dealing with a beer infection poorly. I had hoped that the infection hadn't affected the bottle I traded for.

Hipster Brunch is an imperial stout brewed with bacon, coffee, and maple syrup, and then aged in bourbon barrels. It clocks in at 10% ABV.

Hipster Brunch pours black with a 2 cm milk chocolate colored head.

Smells vanilla, maple, and salty bacon. But there's some tart cherry in there as well. Which is not a good sign.

Taste is more promising up front: first salty bacon (where's the smokiness?) and sweet maple and vanilla. Not getting any coffee which is disappointing. There's some sour/tart cherry on the end. Clear sign of infection. I'm happy I opened and drank this right away. I feel like waiting even a week more and this beer would be undrinkable.

The beer has a fairly thick feel to it. Had there not been that sour/tartness on the end, I feel like this would have worked really well with the beer.

Overall I feel like this could have been a great beer. It just falls short based on a couple of things:

1. The fact that there's most likely some micro-organisms in there creating some unintended flavors. With a manufacturing date of sometime in November of 2015, there's no way that the flavors of a 10% imperial stout should change this quickly without the influence of unintended bacteria/micro-organisms.

2. Can't taste the coffee!

3. There's no smokiness to the bacon. I would have guess salted caramel instead of bacon had no one told me what it was.

4. I think I would prefer all of these items in a non-barrel aged imperial stout. It seems like there's almost too much going on here.


Overal Rating: 5.35/10

Tsingtao and Suntory (China Beer)

I lived in China for a year teaching 4th grade at an international school. China isn't known for it's world class craft beer, and import laws make it tough for imports. That's not to say there wasn't any craft beer in China - there was. There was many a night where I could enjoy Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout, Old Rasputin Nitro, or any of the various Rogue offerings that made it to the local bottle shops. There was also a couple of craft breweries within walking distance from my house:

Boxing Cat Brewery: Probably my favorite of the 3, since it was fairly inexpensive, especially if you went during happy hour - about 5 bucks a pint. Since I'm typically used to NYC prices, this is a steal. They had a solid core lineup and experimented with seasonal offerings. I'd give the place 8.5/10.

Liquid Laundry: Boxing Cat's more upscale (and pricier) younger brother (same owner), they tend to have not only their own beers (which tend to be a little more creative and edgy than Boxing Cat's) as well as some of Boxing Cat's and some other local and foreign brews. They even had Founders, Boulevard, and Stillwater on tap at various points. And in Shanghai, that's pretty exciting. 8/10

Shanghai Brewery: Standard brews in standard styles. There wasn't anything exciting about this place. If you wanted a pretty standard pale ale or stout or IPA, this was a good place to go. The problem was, none of the beer really stood out for me. The food was good though, and the outdoor seating was nice. 7/10


But, in all honesty, probably my favorite beers to drink in Shanghai were Suntory and Tsingtao. And no, not because they were mind blowing-ly crisp. It's because a lot of enjoyment of beer has to do with the setting (location/time/place/who your with/emotions) in which you are drinking this beer. These were the beers that usually accompanied family meals around a large table at Lotus Eatery (my favorite restaurant in Shanghai), the beers I bought at the local Watson's and carried to my favorite Wonton Soup Place (RIP Trinidad Hong Wonton). These were the beers that I ordered bottle after bottle of as we sat around Huoguo (hot pot) and laughed about the stupid things kids did at school (or the stupid things we did at school) and complained about how terrible our principal was. These were the beers I drank as I sat at the airport waiting to head home at Christmas to surprise my mother (who had no idea I was coming home) and the first I had when I got back to Shanghai afterwards. And these were the beers I got so drunk off of at the holiday party that I threw up out of the window of a cab.

So, while flavor-wise, these beers may not necessarily wow you, and they may not even be worth trying in general, for me they are a great reminder of the memories I've created with the great (and not so great) people during the year I spent in Shanghai.

My Top 10 Without Repeating Styles

One of the first things I thought I'd do when I got back into writing about beer was to talk about my top 10 favorite beers without repeating styles. Basically, even though I really enjoy barrel aged stouts and barleywines, only 1 of each can make the list. Also, as such, these beers are more likely to be on the harder to get/less session-able side.

These are the beers that made the cut:

1. (Barrel Aged Barleywine) Goose Island King Henry: basically Bourbon County Barleywine Rare (it spent 2 years in barrels that had previously held BCBS Rare, and before that Pappy Van Winkle 23 year bourbon), this beer was exceptional from the first sip (and I only got 4 ounces). Vanilla, bourbon, and caramel. One of the few beers where I literally said "holy shit" after the first sip; it really doesn't get much better than this.

2. (Barrel Aged Imperial Stout) Goose Island Bourbon County Coffee, 2013 Vintage: This will easily be a top 5 favorite beer of all time. Coffee and bourbon. Roasty and chocolately malt. Smooth as satin.

3. (Imperial IPA) Trillium Artaic: Pure juice. A true testament to what can, and is gradually more commonly being done, with hops.

4. (Porter) Funky Buddha's Maple Bacon Coffee, which tastes exactly light you think it would - the salty/savoriness of the bacon is perfect against the sweetness of the maple; the coffee's just a bonus here. I'd drink this for breakfast any day.

5. (Milk Stout - technically Imperial Milk Stout) Omnipollo Omniprairie: A salted caramel milk stout. And it tastes exactly like salted caramel chocolate milk. I can't think of any other way of describing this. And yes, it was as fantastic as it sounds. This collaboration between Denmark's Omnipollo and the US's Prairie definitely needs to be brewed again.

6. (Barrel Aged Old Ale) The Bruery Sucre: Every year The Bruery releases their anniversary Old Ale under the french name of that anniversary's symbol (Sucre = sugar, their 6th anniversary ale). Sucre has been by farm my favorite (the bourbon barrel and port barrel particularly stick out). Profound sweetness - dark fruit, caramel, and a fairly well hidden 17-ish% ABV. This is one of my go-to celebratory beers, and the one (well, I cracked more than one) I rang the new year in with in 2016.

7. (American Pale Wheat) Trillium Pier: The best of two worlds: juicy hoppiness that Trillium is known for in their pales and IPAs and a sweet wheat-y taste providing a backbone to it. One of my favorite Trillium offerings I've drank so far.

8. (Cream Ale) Carton Cafe y Churro: I had a hard time deciding between this and Regular Coffee, but this eventually won out. A regular coffee variant (basically, think coffee with cream and two sugars) with essentially a churro dunked into it (cinnamon + vanilla). And that's what this tastes like. Really. It's fantastic.

9. (American Imperial Stout) Grimm Double Negative: Black as night with tastes of dark malt, bitter chocolate, caramel, and dark fruits, I'd be happy sipping this any night of the week.

10. (Barrel Aged Imperial Red) Captain Lawrence Trans-Atlantic Red: Captain Lawrence and Jameson's collaboration, one of the smoothest beers I've ever tasted. Pure malty goodness: caramel, vanilla, whiskey. No burn. (Dangerously) Easy drinking for 7% too.



Honorable mentions; Firestone Walker Sucaba, Goose Island Bourbon County Regal Rye, JW Lees Harvest Ale (Calvados Casks), Grimm Tesseract, Stone Xocoveza, Kane Mexican Brunch, Tree House Dopplegnager, and Westbrook 4th Anniversary.

NYC Craft Beer Fest Spring 2016

Great selection of breweries, terrible selection of beer.

It seem as though the event organizers went to a distributor and asked for the cheepest craft beer they could find. Then they had volunteers, who had zero knowledge of the beer itself, pouring (got a couple "this one's light, the other is dark, but I've never tasted them so I can't tell you"s from pourers). The few booths that did have people from the breweries pouring were the best (Sierra Nevada, Sixpoint, Montauk, Gunhill, and maybe 1 or 2 others - total maybe 1/15 of all stands).

To top it off, some of the breweries ran completely out of beer before the general admission was even let into the building (New Holland specifically, but a few others as well). Others ran out, but they had more beer, but it took 20+ minutes to restock. Not acceptable when I've paid close to $60 for 2.5 hours of craft beer.

I bought my ticket early and paid $55 + fees. Anyone who paid over $70 (VIP + fees) was basically scammed in my opinion.

This will be my last year attending this festival. Past years had been better but it seems as though the organizers stopped giving a crap about the experience and instead care only about profit. What a shame.

Magnify Woah Equinox

Picked up a growler of Magnify's Woah Equinox on 3/24. Drank today, Easter Sunday, 3/27. This is the second Woah variant behind Woah Nelly.

Pours a hazy yellow. Looks almost like pure pineapple juice. If someone poured this from a pineaple or guava juice container, you wouldn't know the difference from the look of it.

Or the smell. Smells like pure pineapple/guava/candied citrus. Really a lot like juice.

Tastes the same: pineapple, guava, candied orange and lemon. Really juicy (but not in an overly sweet way). Almost similar to the juice bombs coming out of Trillium brewing. Might be the juiciest IPA I've had out of NJ. It really is just a pure tropical juice bomb. I can (and did) drink this all day. The moderate carbonation and slightly thick (think actual pineapple juice, not quite OJ thickness) feel really add to the overall enjoyment of the beer and works incredibly well with the flavors.

Overall, one of my favorite new beers of 2016 and a top contender for favorite NJ beer. I'm definitely looking forward to drinking more beer from Magnify Brewing, especially in the Woah series.

Overall Rating: 9.3/10

(Since I've come back from China - which explains the absence, as Google and Google related services were blocked - I'm changing the rating system to a 10 point scale since it gives a better gauge than the previous 5 point scale)

I'll be posting more frequently from here on out, minimum once a week (hopefully)!