If you are a fellow wandering expatriate of the beervana of the Beautiful Pac Nor West. If your mouth is dry and dusty from the road because you have not found a watering hole that serves a brew fit to wet your mouth. If you are willing to spend hours wandering from liquor store to liquor store in hope of finding a bottle of well made craft suds: Then you have come to the right place. Pull up a stool, and grab a pint, because you are among friends.
Container: Straight from the bottle
Location Bought: WPAFB Class Six, Ohio, August 2010
Location/Situation Enjoyed Under: In a cruddy Hotel, called the Hope, more like Hopeless.
Appearance: Deep brown, to Black, nice light amber color head.
First Reaction: What a great stout! It is definitely mellowed by the amber, but lucky for this beer I love Ambers as well!
My first reaction really was Damn this is a good stout, but obviously the amber mellowed and brought the beer down before a classic strong stout finish. The beer is a nice ride starting with a strong stout front, then mellowing to a nice Amber center that is deep and rich yet light enough to be enjoyed in the heat of the day, while not being oppressive as a full stout can be. It finished with a nice hop bite, just enough to be an excellent cap to a great beer.
I really like this beer and wish I could find it more readily further south from here. I know many may have tried a Black and Tan made by that brewery with a huge and rather annoying East Coast fan buy following, Cough*Yeungling*Cough. But don't pass this by if you didn't like that one, this is a different beast entirely and any good beer lover owes this a fair open minded try I think you will be pleasantly surprised.
Brewery's Description:
A beer lover's dream! This classic Irish stout and amber lager blend is malty, yet pleasantly bitter with many complex flavor notes. Look for a deep brown-black color and full-body. Saranac Black and Tan is a judicious melding of our Irish style Stout with and all malt German style Amber Lager. The result is a brew that is hearty, pleasantly bitter, and full of flavor, yet can be enjoyed bottle after bottle. Our unique Black and Tan has multiple flavor notes.
Location Bought: WPAFB Class Six, Ohio, August 2010
Location/Situation Enjoyed Under: In a cruddy hotel.
Appearance: Deep Brown Black with a frothy white head
First Reaction: A nice bittersweet, almost like semi-sweet chocolate front. When I first tasted it I wasn't sure I was going to like it. I thought In had found yet another "Porter" that would leave me wishing for a swift return to the true hearty Porters of Stumptown. But it definitely grows upon you after the second sip. I really wish I could have enjoyed this beer from a frosty glass instead of the bottle. After a couple sips and letting the beer settle its flavors really opened up and you could appreciate more of the beers complexities. This is definitely an excellent regional beer and I encourage anyone who comes across it to enjoy a bottle, it really is a pleasure. This is on the bitter end for a porter, so If you tend to prefer Stouts over Porters I think you may find this to be just the thing to wet your palate with.
I wish I had more time here now simply to try the rest of this family of beers.
Brewery's Description:
Thanks to our craft brewing process, when you take a swig of our Edmund Fitzgerald, it will taste smoky, robust, dark, and bittersweet. Named after the ship that frequently docked in Cleveland and sunk in Lake Superior in 1975, our Porter combines a complex, roasty aroma with a bittersweet, chocolate-coffee taste.
So in the true style of a North West Beerophite we have our first guest commentary. There is nothing that goes with a good craft brew like an intelligent conversation, so talking about things that interests us is a favorite activity among us beer snobs.
Kyle has written a great commentary on a subject that I'm sure many can relate to. I would like to thank Kyle for being the first to contriubte to our little support group here.
I figured I would just lay down a little info on how I plan to talk about the beers that I review- both good and bad.
I plan on laying out the basics of the beers such as brewery, style, ABV, etc. I will also pull in some of the information and descriptions that the brewery uses for the beer and then give my reactions and comparisons to what they say.
basically I plan on laying it out like this:
Brewery:
Style:
ABV:
Container:
Location Bought:
Location/Situation Enjoyed Under:
Appearance:
First Reaction:
Of course this will blog will be permeated by the occasional ranting and random off topic information and tidbits.
By the way if this seems a little ego infused and self serving....yeah its mine, go away if you don't like it.
I have an admission to make: I am a beer snob. Not only that but I am proud of it. If you do not consider yourself to be a fellow sucker for good suds, just turn around now and go drink a Bud Light.
Growing up in the beautiful beer paradise of the Northwest, and even worse turning 21 and going to College in Portland Oregon simply sealed my fate. And you know what I love it. I love the fact that I could go to any number of brew pubs and ale houses and know that there would be at a minimum 15 beers on tap. I love that I could go to a different one every night for two weeks and never repeat one unless I wanted to. I also love turning my nose up at shitty beers and calling out watered down barely alcoholic water to be exactly what it is.
I realized that I like and love a few things in this world very very much. Three of these are Beer, Bourbon, and writing, the rest you either know, or I do not think at this time you need to know. Writing may seem to be a strange passion for those of you who know me. Several of you are probably looking around rather confused because when it comes to the mechanics of writing such as spelling and grammar I am a train wreck. But I like to think that I am good at stringing together the words of this mess that is the English language into some rather eloquent and descriptive verse. So have decided that now that I have been uprooted from my brewed beverage paradise and dropped smack dab in the middle of a beer purgatory I will combine these loves and start to chronicle my experiences with the beers I encounter as I crisscross the greatest country in the world, and even wander off to the domains of lesser peoples.
When it comes to beer I am very opinionated. If I like it I like it and if I hate it I might give it a second try but no more than that. There are many beers out there that fall in my drinkable category, but they are stop gaps for use only when the cream of the crop are conspicuously absent. I feel I must be upfront and honest, to me the only real beer is a dark one. I prefer Porters above all else, but it will be cold day in hell when I turn down a Stout. To be fair there are some amazing light beers out there too and I will give them the justice they deserve. I have had my fair share of excellent Blonds, Wheats, Browns, Ambers, Whites, Cask Ales, Lagers, Pilsners and what I feel is one of the most underrated and unappreciated beers out there, the Rye. I will also admit that I feel no love for the newest love child of popular beer culture, the India Pale Ale. Try and try as I might I just cannot make myself willingly partake in an IPA when there is any other good option. There have been one or two that I felt were worth a second try but as a whole I find them to be a waste of good beer ingredients and brewing time.
Besides beer I also love to imbibe in another truly American creation: Bourbon. Now we need to have another little heart to heart on this one. You may be a kindred soul of mine when it comes to beer, but if the first thing that came to mind when you saw Bourbon was a European house of royalty from France you should leave. Now one positive side action of my recent uprooting is that I am much closer to Kentucky, home to the distilleries of the greatest Bourbons available. Now technically Bourbon only has to be made in America, but its named for Bourbon county Kentucky for crying out loud, so to me a true bourbon must come from Kentucky. There is one notable exception to this in my mind, but that my friends is a discussion for a later time.
If you decide to read this you need to be prepared for it. I am to put it lightly, irreverent. I have my personal biases and they will come through in my reviews. Anyone who attempts to make it seem like they are fair and unbiased across the board is a fool lying to themselves. This will be critical, cynical, sarcastic and at times downright insulting to some people sensibilities. There will be off color jokes, political jabs and obscure historical references which if you don't get will hopefully inflame your desire to learn about where we have come from, and because like it or not history has a lot to say about where we are going.
Well look there, this is the introduction statement, I'm not even reviewing or critiquing anything and I'm already bloviating. Feel free to leave your well thought out commentary and discussion I welcome the conversation. Should anyone like to write up their own review, or lament about the lack of decent brew in their current part of the country feel free to send them my way and I'll post them up.
