Birthdays, beer and Blades of Steel

April 17, 2011 at 10:08 pm (beer)

My lovely and talented friend Nick suggested we have a beer potluck for our birthdays.
We did.
It was glorious.
In a crazily amazing gift from the universe, Garrison arrived in Vancouver the day of the gathering at Chez Lesbos. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME. Needless to say, we had some. And a lot of other stuff. Nick and his equally lovely fiancée Lauren brought a shit-ton of beer. I love that I can count on them for beer and beer snobbery (and we will seriously miss the HELL out of you two when you depart the Great White North for your respective fancypants Ivy League educational experiences). Katie and G-Hump showed up with some Innis and Gunn and a couple of Belgian beer and Ashley and Derek obliged my request to bring me a Garrison Mixed 6.
ON TO THE BEER!

A shot of most of the beer.

First up, I made everyone drink Garrison because I rave about it.

The comments were:
Me: FUCK YES, GARRISON IN VANCOUVER.
Lauren: That’s like a punch in the face with hops…but with a smooth finish!
Nick: Jesus, yeah, it is. It’s good though.
Chloe: FUCK YES, GARRISON IN VANCOUVER.
I have others backing up my ranting. Huzzah.

Nick shows off beer #2

Rogue Northwestern and Garrison.

I will admit that I was geekily excited for this because I watch Deadliest Catch. I also fucking love Rogue. I found this one to be pretty hoppy, but didn’t have the “punch in the face” hops taste that I dislike about a lot of ales. It was a good way to start the evening and it followed the Garrison IPA well. I’m by no means a giant fan of hoppy beer still, but I’m starting to find specific ones that I really like. Chloe agrees; hoppy, but not overly so, but she’s still more of a dark beer girl.

The one on the far right is up next: Samuel Smith Imperial Stout

Chloe made a good point: It was really sweet with an almost port-like quality. And it totally did seem like a beerport. Y’all know I love me my stouts and I did like this, but I didn’t *love* it. The colour was fabulous and had a great head and was smooth. But it was sweet and lacked a bit of that coffee/chocolate/roasty flavor that I’ve come to expect in a stout. I’ll probably try it again though, and I’ll definitely pick up a bottle when I eventually get around to making my stout chocolate cake.

Nest beer!

Made with real owl! (not really). Lauren loves owls so I wasn’t overly surprised that she arrived with a beer with an owl on the cap. If only the beer was as tasty as that owl is cute. The general consensus was “HOLY FUCK THAT IS SWEET” and both Chloe and Nick made some interesting faces upon tasting it. I’ve since seen a few other kinds from this line and I’m tempted to give ’em a shot out of sheer curiosity.

Upright

I had such high hopes for this. Open fermented beer, the beer nerds online go mental for it but damn. I was totally disappointed. As strange as the owl beer was, this one wins for strangest and, well, worst. The first couple of sips were ok. Not great, but ok. But then it tasted like vinegar. No really. Actual vinegar. I couldn’t finish my glass. Chloe and someone else said it tasted like wine that had gone bad. Upright does a hot pepper beer that I might try because I like stuff in that vein, but I will not be trying the Six again.

Moylan’s Irish Red

I’ve had a lot of Irish Reds. I’ve had some godawful ones, and some amazing ones. This was an incredibly interesting one. It had low carbonation, was surprisingly balanced and had a great roasty finish. I don’t think I’ve had a Red quite like it. I’m definitely going to get this again.

Ok. So it was at about this point that Katie came out of the bathroom wearing one of my bras over her shirt (i’m not putting that picture up) and I realized how much (strong) beer we’d consumed so some of the details are a tad fuzzy.
Drinking this later didn’t help:

In this, you can see O Pale Ale, Edelweiss, Brooklyn, and the Tripel I forget the name of.

The O was GREAT. I need to get that again.
Brooklyn. Nothing needs to be said aside from excellent. I’ve had it before and I will continue to drink it. It’s in my top 5 stouts for sure.
Edelweiss, from what I recall, was a wheat beer and was really smooth with a citrusy-clovey taste. And so was the Tripel.

Russell Blood Alley Bitter

Nick: Hey, look at this. Have you had this?
Me: Russell? Seriously?
Nick: I KNOW! But they’ve been doing new and interesting things, and this is really good. I was surprised that something this good can come from Surrey. SURREY!
Russell, I hate most of what you make but you make a good bitter.

Bees!

We had an owl beer and a bee beer. I’ve had some of the Fullers stuff before and it’s not terrible. Chloe had more of this than I did and she said it’s sweet, but not sickly sweet and is completely drinkable, but it’s not something that makes you go “OMFG this is brilliant”.

After we had consumed everything containing alcohol in the apartment, I mentioned that I had Blades of Steel on the Wii. The guys lost their minds and then had a serious male bonding session.

To those who’ve given me suggestions on what to drink. I have not forgotten, I’ve just been unemployed forever and figured that using the limited funds I had to pay rent were slightly more important than beer. I have the list saved and will be getting to them over the next few months. I will still publicly acknowledge your awesome taste in beer when I get to it 😀