A Double IPA is the Technical Death Metal of Beers

Posted on 2011/03/13 by Melkor

Two Great Tastes...

Reasoning: Fanatically beloved by adherents and dismissed as ludicrous wankery by detractors, neither the beer nor the music is for weak-willed pantywaists. Creating both requires a high degree of technical proficiency, and any slacking will result in an unbalanced mixture that will ruin your entire day, and possibly make you swear off the style forever.

Beer style description: A double IPA is primarily a showcase for hops, with plenty of bitterness, flavor and aroma provided by the beer lover’s favorite flower. Typically in the 8% to 10% ABV range, most double IPAs use a ton of barley to provide for a decently malty backbone, with dextrose used occasionally as an adjunct.
Metal subgenre description: Death metal with highly complex song structures not unlike those encountered in some forms of jazz.

Representative brews:
Russian River – Pliny the Elder
Port Brewing – Hop 15
Three Floyds – Dreadnaught
Dogfish Head – 90 Minute IPA
Ninkasi – Tricerahops IPA
Bell’s – Hopslam Ale

Representative bands/albums:
Death — Individual Thought Patterns
Demilich — Nespithe
Gorguts — From Wisdom to Hate
Cryptopsy — None So Vile
Augury — Concealed
Necrophagist — Onset of Putrefaction

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Chicago: Part III – Hopleaf Bar

Posted on 2011/03/06 by Doug

Goose Island Green Line and my "Beers" notebook. Martha has a "Birds" notebook as well, which means all that's missing is a "Blastbeats" notebook.

Thursday in Chicago was to be our big night out, as we had no daytime commitments on Friday other than exploring the Loop, visiting museums, and nearly killing ourselves with the cheese and tomato casserole some Chicago eateries call “pizza.” We made plans to meet a number of friends at Hopleaf, an Uptown beer bar that had been recommended by many, many friends ahead of our visit.

We arrived early, so I decided to start the night easy with the Goose Island Green Line pale ale, which is a draft-only beer available only within Chicago city limits. I figured the novelty made it worth a try, but I found myself with no desire to have a second. Forgettable pale with a bit of a soapy aroma and flavor.

Bell's Cherry Stout. Tastes nothing like vomit.

I had a taste of Jolly Pumpkin’s Madugara Obscura, which is a sour stout. It resides in a bizarre land between a Flanders red ale and an imperial stout, which is to say it’s interesting, though you have to be in just the right mood to have it. And I wasn’t in the right mood, so I tried the Bell’s Cherry Stout. I was slightly apprehensive, as the last craft brew I tried that used Michigan sour cherries (which shall remain nameless) holds the dubious honor of being the worst craft beer I’ve ever tasted (my tasting notes said simply, “vomit”). My fears were unfounded. The interplay of sweet and tart cherries with the roast malts is quite lovely. Something like a licorice flavor results, which is curious. There’s a tart, cleansing finish with a light lingering coffee-like bitterness. My only complaint is that the body was a little thin.

For third round, I decided to give one of the sour ales from New Belgium a try. New Belgium is best known for Fat Tire, a well made and drinkable if unspectacular amber ale. Their brewmaster came to them from Rodenbach, who are known as one of the finest Flanders red ale producers. The Rodenbach Grand Cru is an essential experience for anyone exploring sour ales. I’ll admit I was intrigued by this fact, and I’d been curious about trying a New Belgium sour for some time. It took all of two sips of La Terroir to convince me that if Fat Tire is all you know about New Belgium, then you are vastly underestimating the capability of that brewery. La Terroir, a blonde ale aged for 2 years and dry-hopped with Amarillo, is deliciously fruity, tart and refreshing. Marmalade and jam plus sweet and sour fruits jump out at you in both aroma and flavor, with a slightly puckering tart finish that refreshes like excellent lemonade. Highly recommended. Easily the beer of the night, and up there with the Dreadnaught as best beer of the week. Naturally, I didn’t take a picture.

Bell's 25th Anniversary Ale. The beer is not as fancy as the label. Also, our clever candle lighting solution didn't help my cell phone camera as much as we hoped.

Round four was the Bell’s 25th Anniversary Ale, which was hugely malty with a moderate hop presence. I remember thinking that it was far less spectacular of a beer than you might expect for such a significant anniversary. Round five was the always awesome Three Floyds Alpha King pale ale, which is one of the few American pale ales I get excited about. There was also a great deal of good food, including steak frites, mussels, and squash in phyllo dough.

Most importantly, there were good friends and good conversation, but I didn’t take notes on that part. So it goes.

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Chicago: Part II – Three Floyd’s Tap Takeover at Beer Bistro

Posted on 2011/03/02 by Doug

While perusing the Chicago events listings on Beer Menus for the days we would be in town, I happened across a listing for a “Three Floyds Tap Takeover” at a place called The Beer Bistro. Along with Bell’s, Three Floyds is one of the breweries whose beers I  determinedly seek out when in the Midwest. The temptation of nearly 20 lines of Three Floyds was too much to resist, so I studied the CTA maps and not only found my way out there, but managed to cobble together directions via text message so Martha could meet me.

The Beer Bistro strikes a great balance between local Chicago bar and beer nerd haven. To the left of the bar there hangs a framed Blackhawks jersey with “THE BEER BISTRO” and the number 1 sewn on it. Behind the bar there is not only the usual shelves of various bottles of hard alcohol, there is a six or seven tiered display of the many bottles of beer available. The taps are clustered mainly in the center of the bar, with the hand pump for the cask off at one end and a third clump of taps tucked away at the other end.

The food menu at Beer Bistro lists suggested beer pairings for a number of dishes. One that stuck out to me was macaroni & cheese paired with North Coast’s Old Rasputin imperial stout. Seems like an interesting pairing, though I’d be inclined to skip the mac & cheese and go right for the stout.

Owde Engwish Barley Whine. No typos, I swear.

After scanning the tap list and crossing out anything that was either a style that fails to move me (e.g. the Gumball Head wheat beer), something that didn’t seem special enough given the limited time I had (the Gold Leader lager), or something that could be found easily at other places in Chicago (the omnipresent and excellent Alpha King pale ale), I decided to start off with the Owde Engwish Barley Whine, which was supposed to be an English style barleywine. Generally, the difference between American and English barleywines is chalked up to the higher hopping rates of the former, though I think hop selection plays a major role as well. English styles traditionally go with earthy, vegetal hops like East Kent Goldings and Fuggle that reign in the sweetness of the abundant malts and provide a pleasant counterpoint. American barleywines typically use a lot of American hops, which means you get a lot of grapefruit, apricot and pine flavors mixing in with the sweet malt, and it’s not a mix that works in my opinion.

My first impression of the Owde Engwish is an excellent earthy aroma that suggests Goldings hops. This is followed by syrupy sweet malt flavors balanced well initially by a light dose of hop bitterness that turns a bit prickly before vanishing in the finish. The more I drank, the more bitter this became. I have a feeling the hops would mellow quite nicely with age and make this quite interesting.

Up next was the Hell’s Black Intelligencer, an oatmeal stout brewed with Intelligentsia Coffee and named for a line from Shakespeare’s Richard III. The coffee was the first thing to strike me, as my glass smelled like it was full of freshly roasted and ground coffee beans. The mouthfeel was wonderfully thick and velvety, as an oatmeal stout should be, with a shitload of roast barley flavor. Possibly a bit thin in the finish with something of an oily feel due to the oats and coffee? With the fairly low ABV and bitterness, you could easily drink quite a lot of this.

Three women walked in and looked around at an unusually crowded bar on a Wednesday night. “It’s all men!”, one exclaimed. The second asked, “What night is it? Wednesday?” The third observed, “It’s definitely not Ladies’ Night.” Surely there’s some sort of commentary about beer nerds in there….

Dreadnaught on the left, Arctic Panzer Wolf on the right.

Martha walked in a few minutes later, upping the XX:XY ratio in the bar ever so slightly. She checked out the menu and we decided to order a pair of double IPAs, the Dreadnaught, which I wrote about previously on this blog, and the Arctic Panzer Wolf, which Three Floyds describes as a “massive IPA.”

The Arctic Panzer Wolf is very, very pale, almost straw yellow like a light lager. The body is thin as well, with a early blast of vegetal bitterness that fades to a mildly bitter finish. Not as bitter as you would expect for 100 IBUs, and fairly sessionable for being 9.5% ABV. It reminded me of Stone’s Ruination quite a bit — take that as you will.

The Dreadnaught was noticeably fuller in body that the Arctic Panzer Wolf, with what seemed like an almost syrupy flavor in comparison. My notes say simply, “FUCKING DELICIOUS!!” I firmly stand by that statement.

It would have been fun to stay and sample some more of the wonderful tap selection, especially since a Three Floyds appearance in NYC is quite rare, but we had to get all the way across town for a dinner meetup with friends. I will definitely keep the Beer Bistro on my list for future visits to Chicago.

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Chicago: Part I – Hopslam at Kasey’s Tavern

Posted on 2011/02/26 by Doug

We flew out to Chicago for a few days of mixed business and tourism. Naturally, I took advantage of the Chicago pages on Beer Menus to get a heads up on what would be available and what bars had interesting draft lineups. High on my “To-Drink” list were Bell’s and Three Floyd’s, two outstanding Midwest breweries that do not distribute to NYC. I was on the lookout for Bell’s Hopslam in particular, which is their double IPA brewed once a year.

Nothing says "Welcome to Chicago" like a goblet full of Hopslam.

Conveniently enough, I found a place on BeerMenus just down the street from our hotel called Kasey’s Tavern that had Hopslam on tap. After checking in at our hotel, Martha and I wandered down to Kasey’s to sample this beer and get some dinner.  I managed to leave my review notebook back in the hotel, so I texted myself some notes about the beer. Here they are:

“Notable pine aroma. Sweet up front. Bitter back end. Finish is equal parts hop haze and malt sweetness.”

Somewhat useful notes, if a bit on the sparse side. Here’s what else I remember: Like most good double IPAs, this is rather sweet up front, yet the hop bitterness builds at a faster rate than the malty stickiness.

Good, though not nearly as awesome as I’d built this up to be in my mind.  Naturally, that didn’t stop me from having a second right away before switching over to Bell’s utterly fantastic Two-Hearted Ale.

By the way, Kasey’s was an excellent, low-key neighborhood bar with a good selection of craft brews on tap and an interesting list of bottles from the cellar that included a number of Lost Abbey ales. The only food they officially offer is frozen pizzas, but they will order in from the bar and grill on the corner, Hackney’s Printers Row, for you.

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Nothing feeds discussion like Top 100 lists

Posted on 2011/01/29 by Doug

Over at Zythophile, a quality beer blog that focuses largely on the history of British beers and styles, there is a good post discussing the latest RateBeer Top 100 List, which is dominated by imperial stouts and double IPAs, along with some Trappist ales. From the post:

the first problem is that more normal drinkers, if they see that list, are going to look at it and get an utterly distorted and entirely false idea of what really great beer is all about. It’s like telling people that the best dishes available in restaurants are all vindaloo curries, or the best bands in the world only come from the different varieties of metal. And that won’t encourage them at all to explore the huge variety of other fantastic beers that are available.

Mind you, I have no issue with imperial stouts, double IPAs, vindaloo or extreme metal. However, there are many, many less extreme pleasures to be had in the worlds of beer, food and music. And while I’ve had about thirty of that top 100, only two of those are beers I’d consider to be “anytime” beers*, meaning the sort of beers I would want in the fridge or on tap at any moment when I happened to think “Hey, I want to have a beer!” or “Hey, I want to have another beer!!”

Martha and I frequently talk about correcting for the double IPA/imperial stout bias of reviewers on places like RateBeer and BeerAdvocate. Lists like the one linked above make that bias very clear, though they also help explain the origins of the bias. Many of the beers on that list are rare, hard-to-find, or produced only in limited quantities, which makes the drinking of those beers more of an event. Beers like Smuttynose IPA or Brooklyn Lager, two of my go-to beers, are readily available throughout the Northeast US and not likely to produce the same “HOLY FUCK! I’M DRINKING BEER I’VE ONLY READ ABOUT!” reaction as, say, drinking anything from Russian River in this part of the country. But that doesn’t take away from the quality of those two beers, both of which I’m happy to drink pint after pint of during a night out. On the other hand, as much as I love Alesmith’s Speedway Stout (#6 overall on RateBeer, apparently), I couldn’t have much more than two glasses of the stuff in a night.

There is a lot of discussion on beer geek forums about what drinkability means when reviewing a beer. Beer Advocate summarizes it in their article How to Review a Beer as “Would you have another?”. I also have a memory of Garrett Oliver defining a beer with high drinkability as something you could easily drink 3 or 4 pints of in a sitting, but I can’t seem to find where I read that. I suppose you could argue that sessionability is the more accurate term here. That is the big downfall of many of those Top 100 beers — even if you were lucky enough to be able to have multiple drinks of some of those beers in one sitting, it might be a challenge to actually finish them.

Yes, imperial stouts, double IPAs, and high gravity abbey ales are difficult to make and even more difficult to make well, but it is also a challenge to make a high quality session beer. Composing a solid and listenable 10 minute prog rock anthem is difficult, yet crafting an excellent three-minute pop or rock song is a challenge in its own right.

Ultimately, we either need to correctly weight for sessionability or build multiple top beer lists — those for special occasions and those for every day.

*For the record, those are Russian River’s Pliny the Elder and Bell’s Two Hearted Ale.

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Three Floyds! In Brooklyn!!!

Posted on 2011/01/08 by Doug

This afternoon, we set out to North Brooklyn for a cask ale festival only to discover the line for beer stretched the length of the entire bar. Nothing on the beer list was worth waiting in a line half that long, so we left and walked up to the Brooklyn Brewery, only to find a line outside the door there as well. Seems we were destined to fail in North Side today, so we walked down to another beer bar, Spuyten Duyvil, which was on the way to the subway. Even if we were crowded out, we wouldn’t need to walk much more to jump on the train to go home.

The bar turned out to be relatively empty, so we walked in, grabbed a table and checked out the menu. The first thing I saw was Three Floyds Dreadnaught, and I didn’t bother looking any further.  Three Floyds is, in my admittedly limited opinion, the best Indiana brewery. Somehow, I managed to completely miss out on them during the 8 years I lived in Indiana and have only developed an appreciation for them since moving to Brooklyn, where I have found Three Floyds beers twice in the 8 1/2 years I’ve been here.

The Dreadnaught was also a favorite beer of a guy named Tom who Martha and I knew through an online forum. Tom and I bonded a bit online over our love of American craft beers, and the similarity of our tastes meant I was inclined to seek out any suggestions he had. Martha and I never got the chance to met Tom before he died suddenly of heart failure at age 29, but he made enough of an impression on us that we still talk about him and drink to his memory on occasion.

Imperial IPA, served in an Imperial Wine Glass

As for the beer itself, it is a delight for hopheads. I would place it up among the likes of Russian River’s Pliny the Elder, Port Brewing’s Hop 15 and Dogfish Head’s 90 Minute IPA in terms of quality. The nose greets you with pine and resiny aromas along with a bit of alcohol. There are biscuit and caramel malt flavors and a bit of golden syrup up front with lots of hop flavors following up — pine, grapefruit, orange and grass feature in the bouquet. The finish is surprisingly clean with a little syrupy stickiness and not much lingering bitterness. My only complaint is that there were no more bottles left at the bar.

We also had Three Floyd’s Broo Doo Harvest Ale, which is their wet-hopped IPA. It has the usual green, grassy aromas I expect from wet hopped ales. Broodoo is a smooth drinking, medium bodied ale with a pleasant vegetal bitterness in the finish. I suspect I would have enjoyed this more if I didn’t drink it after the Dreadnaught.

In the end, this turned out to be the sort of night where it was a good thing that our original plans fell through.

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Harvest Fest 2010

Posted on 2010/12/02 by Doug

On 1 December, our friends at Beer Table held an event they called Harvest Fest 2010 in honor of the release of the newest edition of the J.W. Lees Harvest Ale. None of the 2010 vintage was actually available, but that was perfectly forgivable as they not only had a cask of the 2009 vintage, but they also had two wood pins on the bar of the 2009 ale aged in Lagavulin and sherry casks.

The evening started with a glass of the 2009 Harvest Ale and a plate of charcuterie from Dickson’s Farmstand, which included the first American ham I have ever enjoyed. For comparison’s sake, we had glasses of Thomas Hardy’s Ale, the other classic English barleywine, from 1993 and 1998. On another trip to Beer Table, I had the 1996 Thomas Hardy’s and thought it was one of the best alcoholic beverages I’ve had the joy to taste. The 98 and 93 didn’t quite live up to the promise. I seem to have misplaced my tasting notes from that night, but I remember the 98 being slightly medicinal and the 93 being described by the guy from Dickson’s Farmstand as “coffee and toothpaste”.

We moved on to a phenomenal cheese plate and a couple barrel-aged versions of the JW Lee’s Harvest Ale. The first was aged in Lagavulin casks, making for a combination of two of my favorite alcoholic beverages in one glass. I made a round trip between my apartment and Beer Table just to have more of this that night. I made at least three more trips to Beer Table to continue savoring the total fucking awesomeness in the following days. The malty sweetness of the barleywine meets the peatiness of the whiskey in an all-out blast of deliciousness.

The sherry cask was inevitably a bit of a letdown. The “master’s blend”, featuring a bit of each of the three casks of JW Lee’s getting together in one glass was quite interesting.

And the rest of the evening is a bit hazy. I can’t find the tasting notes now, but I distinctly recall the words “VICTORY BLEED!” being written rather prominently.

Very metal.

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Uinta Labyrinth Black Ale

Posted on 2010/11/15 by Doug

It works with dinner, it works with dessert, and it works AS dessert.

Utah is not a state that comes to mind when thinking of American microbrews. Hell, Utah tends to rank in the low 40’s or even 50th when making any sort of list about drinking in the USA. Yet Uinta Brewing Company has been crafting beer in Salt Lake City since 1993. Earlier this year they debuted the Crooked Line Series, which are high alcohol (>8%) beers bottled in 750 mL bottles. The Labyrinth Black Ale was the first I picked up.

They call this a black ale, though it drinks more like an imperial stout. Brewed with liquorice sticks and aged in oak barrels. A soft roast aroma leads into a incredible THICK, almost syrupy mouthfeel. The beer is more sweet than bitter, which is unusual for an imperial stout. A fair bit of molasses, some dark chocolate and dark roasted malts are the dominant flavors. A little oak is detectable as well. Some noticeable alcohol, but still way, way, way too easy drinking for 13.2%. Delightful and delicious.

It’s safe to say I will soon be checking out the rest of the Crooked Line series, which includes a Double IPA and a Barrel-aged Barleywine.

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Rochefort – A Holy Trinity of Ales

Posted on 2010/11/14 by Doug

Belgian beer has a rather widespread good reputation, and Trappist Ales tend to stand out in the memory of anyone who knows a little bit about good Belgian ale. I suspect there are people out there who think that all Belgian beer is made by monks toiling away under vows of silence while observing their vows of obedience by dedicating their non-praying, non-eating waking hours to toiling away over malt, hops, candi sugar, water and yeast.

A Holy Trinity of Beers: Rochefort 6, 8, and 10

There are six Trappist breweries in Belgium, and they deserve their reputation for producing quality ales. I imagine part of their success comes from the fact they make a limited amount of beer in a limited set of styles, which are generally the same styles they have been making for many years. The Rochefort beers, brewed at the Abbey of Notre-Dame de Saint-Rémy, exemplify this idea. Rochefort produces three beers, the 6, 8 and 10, whose names reference their original gravities. All three beers begin with the same two grains, two hop varieties, local water, and yeast strains. The 8 and the 10 have candi sugar added to increase the original gravity to the desired level. Tasting the three in succession is an interesting adventure.

The 6 is the lightest and least strong of the beers, though at 7.5% ABV, it still packs a bit of a punch. I would also rate it the least impressive of the three. It has a slightly soapy smell and a quickly disappearing head. The color is a dark, reddish amber or perhaps light brown that is just light enough to see through. Compared to the 8 and 10, the 6 is a little thin and spicy. There is a decent malt presence and a bright, lingering finish, but the thin body makes for some slight disappointment in the overall experience.

The 8 is 9.2% ABV, deep brown with hints of red, and welcomes you with a lovely, malty aroma. In short, this is gorgeous. There are flavors of dark fruits, brown sugar, medium malt and a little bit of spice. Still a bit of brightness at the front and the back of the flavor with some noticeable alcohol in the finish. In short, this is gorgeous. If you haven’t had a chance to try this yet, it is worth the effort.

Proof that Trappist monks love us and want us to be happy.

And then there’s the 10. So deep brown it’s almost black like the color of charred oak, the 10 welcomes you with an aroma that is equal parts malt, booze and pipe tobacco. The flavor has dates and figs up front, a spicy wash over the tongue in the middle and a warm lingering finish. The flavor of this is so complex that it seems a little bit different with every taste. One minute you have tobacco and malt and the next minute you have brown bread and spices. This is great for savoring as an after-dinner drink. In fact, I would put this up as one of the best beers in the world, period. It’s a beer more suited to a good novel than a football game, but it is worth the time and effort to seek out and savor.

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Brazen Head Cask Festival – 6 November 2010

Posted on 2010/11/11 by Doug

When I moved to Brooklyn in the summer of 2002, The Brazen Head was one of seven bars in all of NYC that served hand-drawn cask ales (i.e. unfiltered, non-artificially carbonated ales served at cellar temperature) on a regular basis. I would guess there are now at least seven bars in walking distance of Brazen Head serving cask ales as the total number of cask outlets in NYC has gotten closer to triple digits than single digits.

Two or three times a year, the Brazen Head hosts the “Cask Head” cask ale festival, one of a number of cask festivals in the city organized by Alex Hall of Gotham Imbiber. We try to make it to each one for a couple hours, if our schedules allow. Past trips have included gems like Shawnee Craft Brewing’s “V.S.O.P” and a rare NY appearance of Three Floyds.

This past Saturday, Martha and I met up with Martha’s friend Brooke for a few rounds of whatever happened to be pouring at the time. The Brazen Head offers full and half pint portions of everything, which opens the way for tasting a wider variety. We each picked up two of the half-pint glasses and and ample supply of tickets.

Back row: Duck-Rabbit stout, Barrier ESB, Speakeasy Prohibition.
Front row: Bear Republic Pete Brown Tribute, Brooklyn Detonation, Chelsea Pumpkin Pie

When I walked in, Martha had already picked up two beers. The first was the Bear Republic Pete Brown Tribute Ale, a 6.5% ABV American brown ale that was smooth drinking with some pleasant nutty flavor though a bit heavy on the hops in the finish. The second was the Duck-Rabbit Milk Chocolate Stout, which turned out to be our collective favorite of the festival. Duck-Rabbit is a brewery from North Carolina who describe themselves as “The Dark Beer Specialist”. They get no argument from me with this stout. Lovely milk-chocolate and roast malt aromas serve as an appetizing preview to a supersmooth drinking milk stout that is neither too sweet nor too bitter. It’s almost like someone found the perfect mix of chocolate milk and a good stout.

My first trip to the cask stand netted the Brooklyn Detonation Ale and Barrier Antagonist ESB. The Detonation is a double IPA from Brooklyn Brewery which I have had on tap a couple times before and thought was a decent double IPA, if a little on the sweet side. The cask version was remarkably different, mostly due to the HUGE fuck-off citrus hop aroma that greeted the drinker. I suspect this is due to dry-hopping in the cask, though I never confirmed this. Detonation is less sweet from the cask than on tap but it still has a great big malt character in between the apricot like hops and the earthy bitter finish. The Barrier Antagonist is an ESB dry-hopped with four varieties of hop that smells like fresh-cut grass and pine and has a super hoppy flavor for the style, likely as a result of the heavy dosing of dry-hopping. Once you get past the big hop presence, it’s relatively smooth drinking but too piney in the end.

Brooke’s first beer run brought the Speakeasy Prohibition Ale, a decent American amber ale that was pleasant, unremarkable drink despite a slightly soapy aroma, and the Chelsea Brewing Company Pumpkin Pie Spiced Ale. The guy pouring the beers claimed he liked this beer a lot even though he wasn’t usually a fan of pumpkin ales. The aroma held some promise, evoking a freshly baked pumpkin pie. A bit of sourness suggested the smell of a pie that had been sitting out a bit too long. Unfortunately, the aroma was the best part of this thin, watery, slightly sour beer that Brooke poured down the sink in the womens room after we each managed two mouthfuls.

Later on, I picked up the Chelsea Brewing Company NY State of Mind Hop Harvest Ale to sample their addition to the recent influx of fresh hop beers, and I was left thinking that CBC should be placed on my “AVOID” list at future cask fests. Something of a fresh-cut grass hop profile, but ultimately watery and washed out flavor that tastes like a run-of-the-mill ale you might find at a less reputable London bar.

The other winner from the event was the Blue Point 10th Anniversary Double IPA. Like the Brooklyn Detonation, this had a huge fresh citrus and pine aroma and flavor, yet was smooth drinking. Of course, it helped that Brooke and I are both big fans of hops.

Our afternoon was rounded out with two beers from Maryland: the Oliver Ironman Pale Ale and Heavy Seas Holy Sheet. The Ironman is a pleasant, slightly metallic sessionable ale with a biscuity aroma and nice malt undertones from Oliver’s Ales, a Baltimore brewer known for producing excellent interpretations of traditional English ales. The Holy Sheet is a well-balanced dubbel that has an unfortunate medicinal flavor appearing in the middle of the taste.

The crowd seemed a little smaller than previous Cask Head events. Combined with the lack of any exceptionally high-rated or rare ales on the list, this made for a slower turnover of open casks. So it goes.

(The full cask list is available here.)

((And on a music related sidenote, we were pleasantly jarred to hear What Do You Want Me To Say? by The Dismemberment Plan come on the stereo in the middle of our visit.))

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