Craft Beer Monday Review: Marisol

I know what you are thinking. Should I keep calling anything by Goose Island a local craft beer or even a craft beer at all, but in this specific case I must say that it should be. It is made in Chicago for Rick Bayless and his Frontera Grill and only available at there and at his Frontera Tortas little spot in O'Hare.

Waiting for a plane, I saw that I had about 45 minutes to kill and I was trolling through the airport as I usually do looking for interesting tap handle offerings, and when I saw a round blue tap handle which I didn't recognize at all, surrounded by a Goose Island Matilda and a Negro Modelo handle. As I was trying to figure it out the beertender called me over, and explained what it was. I'm glad she did, it was really nice.


This beer was really quite unique and flavorful. The fancy glassware I drank it out of was fitting too because it was like a wine glass and I felt like I was a fancy person like Bingo with his high octane brews.
It was smooth and lightly sweet, a little fruit but otherwise tasting like the Latin Style White Ale that it is billed as, plus there wasn't too much of an alcohol presence. I liked it, and it actually went quite well with the guacamole and chips. I haven't eaten that stuff in years but this was just right with the refreshing Marisol to go with it.

So until I can pop into the American terminal again or head downtown I will have to do without, as it is not sold anywhere else.

CBC Rating: 4. Served on tap in the Goose Island chalice.

ABV: 6.1%.

Craft Beer Monday Review: Chief Black Hawk Porter

I was immediately attracted to this beer. Not sure if it was because of the fact that Tyranena has given me a smile or two when drinking their beer, or maybe because the name is of the greatest hockey team on ice. OK, I guess it was the actual Native American chief, but I think it really can't be that much of a coincidence.

I think it has taken me a little while but I have, unfortunately decided that I will have to beg off drinking porters anymore. I really don't enjoy them. Find for me the one to switch it back around and I will thank you then, but not now. I tasted a Baltic Porter on that otherwise wonderful afternoon at Lunar in Villa Park and didn't like it, and even my normal standby Anchor Porter is too touch to handle. Even with the Yuengling I have to make it a black and tan to be bearable.

I guess the smokiness and excessive maltiness just doesn't appeal to me anymore. I like a good rich and dark beer and I would have though this would do it, especially since I am fond of dry stouts and I have been trouble finding those these days too. But give me a smooth drinkable porter and I will relax and enjoy it. I just couldn't with this one.

It describes itself as a dark and sharply bittersweet brew, similar to what the porters drank in London. They can have it back. It was average at best, and had to wash it down with an Alpine Spring.

CBC Rating: 2. Sorry guys, I really didn't think you hit it with this one. Surprising too. Poured from the bottle into a shaker pint glass. Purchased in a Craft Your Own at Binny's.

ABV: 5.8%.

Wisconsin Craft Beer article

From the Wisconsin State Journal...

 Wisconsin a hotbed for craft brewing

BARRY ADAMS |
Tuesday, March 13, 2012

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WISCONSIN DELLS — Tanner Brethorst has spent the last 14 months building a brewery with the help of family and friends who have invested money and provided help with engineering and construction.
And now, the work is paying off.
Brethorst, a former home brewer, last week brewed his first commercial batch of beer at his $700,000 Port Huron Brewing Co. in this city’s industrial park.
Bottles and kegs of the Honey Blonde Ale will be ready for sale by early next month, but the title as the state’s newest brewery likely won’t last long.
And that’s just fine with Brethorst and most other craft brewers in the state. The goal for the small, independent brewers is to collectively continue to take market share from MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch InBev. Despite the booming popularity of craft beer, it accounts for only about 8 percent of all beer sold in the state.
“We’re not going after each other. It’s about chipping away at that other 92 percent,” Brethorst said while seated in his still-unfinished tasting room. “I really don’t care how many breweries start up.”
According to the Wisconsin Brewers Guild, there are more than 50 small breweries and brewpubs in the state employing more than 1,000 people, and those numbers continue to grow as start-ups come online and existing breweries expand.
In Madison, former home brewer Page Buchanan last year opened the House of Brews at 4539 Helgesen Drive. Buchanan spent months converting a 4,800-square-foot space in a Far East Side industrial park into a brewery.
On the North Side, Ale Asylum is building a $6.75 million, 46,000-square-foot brewery, tap room and restaurant at 2102 Pankratz St. near the Dane County Regional Airport. The brewery currently is in a 10,000-square-foot building at 3698 Kinsman Blvd. The new facility will have an annual capacity of 46,000 barrels. When the brewery opened in 2006, it made 2,500 barrels a year.
New Glarus expands
Growth at New Glarus Brewery also is continuing. Sales are up 20 percent this year and president Deb Carey said she needs more room for beer and tourists.
A $6 million project, scheduled to begin in April, will include a 17,000-square-foot warehouse while doubling the size of the visitor center.
She’s also hired an engineer to study how the brewery can use wind and solar energy.
She expects her brewmaster husband and his staff to make 125,000 barrels this year compared with 109,000 in 2011.
“If you’re trying to create jobs in Wisconsin, you need to be partnering with small brewers. There’s no doubt about it,” Carey said. “I don’t see it slowing down.”
Points north
The Stevens Point Brewery, founded in 1857, has spent $2.6 million since 2009 expanding capacity and improving efficiency, including a $1.1 million project under way that will increase capacity to 120,000 barrels.
In 2009, the brewery made 70,000 barrels, about 40 percent of it for other brewing companies, spokeswoman Julie Birrenkott said.
Just down the road in Plover, Marc Butterra, brewmaster and owner of O’so Brewing Co., said he spent $750,000 to move to a larger facility that would allow him to increase production from 1,900 to 5,000 barrels. But it took a year to secure financing before he was approved by Rosholt-based Community First Bank.
“We struck out with a lot of big banks,” said Butterra, who opened his brewery in 2007. He employs 14 people and distributes his beer in all but seven Wisconsin counties. “The promising thing is that when (beer drinkers) say they’ve never heard of us, that means there’s room to grow.”
The Brewers Association is scheduled to release its industry statistics next week but the numbers will be up over 2010, said Paul Gatza, director of the Colorado-based organization. More than 200 breweries opened in 2011 and craft beer sales (by dollars) were up 15 percent in the first half of the year.
“Most of the new openings are very small packaging breweries aimed, at least at first, toward (supplying) beer for a limited number of accounts in a very local area,” Gatza said.
And that’s the business plan Brethorst is using for his Port Huron Brewing Co., named after his grandfather’s 1917 steam tractor and located in Wisconsin Dells, a popular tourist destination and a place flush with restaurants and bars.
Brethorst, 34, who grew up in Lodi and has an agriculture business degree from UW-Madison, spent 12 weeks at the country’s oldest brewing school, Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago. He then spent seven years working under two of Wisconsin’s most knowledgeable and innovative brewmasters: Tom Porter of Lake Louie Brewing near Arena and Kirby Nelson of Capital Brewery in Middleton.
‘Enormous pressure’
Brethorst now has his own 7,000-square-foot brewery, financed by issuing $25,000 and $50,000 shares to family and friends. His uncle, Bruce McPhee, who has a finance background, planted the seed for Brethorst to break out on his own.
“It’s enormous pressure. Your sense of responsibility is heightened quite a bit,” Brethorst said of his investors. “It makes it real tough because you have to go to Christmas and Thanksgiving and see these people.”
Brethorst was optimistic when he began converting a former ink and lithograph supply company building into a brewery in January 2011. He thought he would be brewing by June but construction and regulatory delays kept pushing back production.
But on Wednesday, he began using a restored 17-barrel brewhouse purchased from a brewery in Illinois. The plan this year is to make four styles of beer totaling 900 barrels.
Brethorst has 96 half-barrels and 44,000 bottles waiting to be filled. The only other craft brewer in the immediate area is Moose Jaw Pizza & Dells Brewing Co., founded in 2002 in Lake Delton but which only began bottling its Rustic Red beer in December.
“There’s a lot of opportunity here,” Brethorst said. “There’s a lot of outlets to get our beer to and still stay local.”

Craft Beer Monday Review: Pale Ale

Not much to say for this one, unfortunately. Unlike most of Bell's attempts. It doesn't really fit any one style, expect maybe an American Pale Ale but it is rather weak and only mildly bitter. I guess Bell's put all their efforts into Two-Hearted and their Harvest Ale, and kind of just settled with this one.

Actually , they do say it this way:

"Pale Ale stands apart from the model of completely hop-dominated pale ales, offering a noticeable degree of malt body to counter the hop bitterness."


Surprising from a brewery that makes a delicious summer beer like Oberon and even their Third Coast Beer, for a blonde is actually a little like a Czech pilsner and is worth talking about.
Pours a nice brown IPA color, but with very little familiar smell and only slightly bitter but with a strong grainy taste that overpowers you. I made the mistake of drinking the last of it in one big swig and I think I got all the grains together. I think it could have been blended a lot better.


Drank straight from the bottle picked up at the craft your own six-pack at Binny's.

CBC Rating: 2
ABV: 5.2%

Craft Beer Monday Review: Dirty Bastard

Thank you so much, Founder's, for making one of my favorite styles. So far they have done a pretty good job with the few I have tried, most recently this one. A good quality Scotch Ale, or a Wee Heavy, I have started to see a little more but I have been drinking Belhaven from Scotland and Robert the Bruce from Three Floyd's for years because that is all I could find.

I was talking to drinker Sweeney Tom who attended a beer club meeting recently where the tastings involved scotch ales and they were taught of all the differences and what they all meant. I wish I had attended that class too.

Instead, I will just review this one.


It really packs a punch, comes at you out of nowhere. I started it when it was really chilled down, but due to the alcohol level it took me a while to work it through. It was a butt-kicker to be honest. But the flavors that erupted were many and strong. It started strong alcohol with a syrupy consistency yet a tang of the hops and rich taste I get from the malt presence. After a while tastes of caramel and raisins developed, with an very slight sourness there too. But this sourness, unlike some of the others (like this one) was from the aged fruit, I think, and not so almost a vinegar taste I thought I could detect in those others.
I had to take my time with this one: it lasted the entire third period.


CBC Rating: 5. A beer I have been looking for for a long time.

ABV: 8.5%

Any other thoughts by you out there? I would like to hear it.

Beer News For April 2012

Binny's reports that they are now making available Milwaukee Brewing beers, those that are only available in Wisconsin up to now, or can be tasted at the Milwaukee Ale House. See reviews here and here.

Apparently the labels and packages have changed since I last tasted it in the fall. Besides the Louie's Demise and Pull Chain I had only tasted a few seasonals so I look forward to the variety 12 packs Binny's will be selling there now.


Upon their celebration of their 15th anniversary, Two Brothers announces this:

First, We will be celebrating our 15th anniversary this year with our project, 15 Beers for 15 Years. We will be bringing back 14 of our favorite artisan brews, some you may remember and some may have been before you even knew we were around.  Then we will finish with a brand new 15th anniversary artisan beer you won't soon forget.  The 15 Beers of 15 Years project will run all summer long and give you something new to look forward to every few weeks. 

Finally, there is another wonderful device out there that can be used to store your beer: Brew Cave.
Including a keg tap and enough shelves to store an additional 30 cases, this is all you will ever need. It might take up half my garage, but so what is a garage made for anyway? Storing a car? And in all these colors, 21 I think?
Now to just find a way to convince my wife that $3800 of the money we were setting aside for college can be better used! 

Craft Beer Monday Review: Monarch White Beer

Every year Two Brothers releases their anniversary beer, their Monarch White. I reviewed this briefly before, on the visit there. See it here. But this was the first time I have had the chance to take a regular tasting away from the brewery.

This beer was a little different than what I would expect: it is a Belgian, a style which many craft breweries try to brew, and it is one that I would expect TB to be able to manage, since their flagship is a European style beer and it is really good. But most Belgians I have had have more alcohol in them. This one is a session beer.


Not that there is anything wrong with that, but since the flavor is much more bold with more alcohol, the crisp and mellower flavors of this one, I think, work against it. It is more of a refresher, with its clean tastes and and subtle spiciness. I think it should be more of a summer beer than a springtime beer, if you ask me. 


Putting that aside, I thought it was, after all, a little unimaginative, and falls a little short of those I can compare it with, the classic Belgians (St. Bernardus) or even Allagash. I know it is sometimes not fair to compare it to "the world class" beers out there, or those breweries who only brew one style, but in the past TB has managed to dominate styles no one else wants to tackle (try DD, Cane and Ebel or Northwind to see what I mean).

CBC Review: 3. Swapped with SteveA for this one, he purchased in the case from Costco, he tells me. Drank straight from the bottle on Easter.

ABV: 4.5%.

 

The First Oberon of the Season

Steve-o and I went to Sheffield's last week for the big launch of Oberon for the year. I think it is interesting of them to even bother, since it was mid-March and it is a summer beer. Plus you can get it as late as October, so the big launches are really not necessary, unless they are totally out of it, I suppose.

But it was really good, I have to say. It is available everywhere now, and at normal Bell's prices. Why they charge what they do I am not sure, but I guess it seems to work for them (usually 1.50 more per six-pack than others.) I personally think it is because they are making up for the extra amount to pay in bottle rental in Michigan.

At Sheffield's it was packed in there, and was pretty brisk (in business and in cold winds, since we were camped by the door all night). As a side note, I think looking back on it we could have experimented more in the other Founder's choices than we did, since they were the beer of the month on sale.

But anyway, welcome back Oberon. They sure were delicious. I am sad to say Bingo wasn't there, since he was the one who turned me onto Oberon in the first place. Please come back, Bingo.

Craft Beer Monday Review: Headless Man Amber Alt

So far, I have been pleased with the offerings by Tyranena in the past, like Rocky's Revenge and Chief Blackhawk Porter. Even though it is not too far for us here, right near Milwaukee, I have never been there. I hope to maybe this summer.

This one, the Headless Man Amber Alt, is another good tasty brew. Along the lines of other alts, this one has the smallest of bites, but is tasty, not too overly malty but nicely balanced. It is also slightly sweet, which is a little unusual for the alts I have tasted (like Iron Works). This is easy for me to review since I really like these lagers types of beer anyway. I know it is an ale, but it is very lager-y.
As far as the "headless man", this refers to the various stone formations that can be found that were built by local tribes long ago. In this particular case, quoting Tyranena:

Not far from the brewery, lying preserved on the floor of Rock Lake, are two effigy mounds - a Headless Man and a Turtle.  Legend tells us, as the Turtle can survive on both land and in water, its spirit helped guide the Headless Man into the afterlife.  May the Turtle's spirit guide you to happiness with a Headless Man Amber Alt.

I am very pleased also to see Tyranena available around here more and more. It used to be only reserved for my Woodman's trips. I will still pick it up there when I go. It is cheaper anyway there.

CBC Rating: 4. Purchased as a part of a Craft your Own at Binnys. Poured into a shaker pint glass.
ABV: 5%.

Craft Beer Monday Review: Paddy Pale Ale

Visited the Onion Brewpub over the weekend and was able to sample a couple of their beers. I will try to get back there with a friend and try some others, and I will have a paddle and review the pub.
But for now I only had a so-so Red Ale, which was rather light and noting special, plus a limited seasonal. They bartendress said that a lot of people were asking for a St Patrick's Day beer so they did this one.

But also on the menu was one that I had tried in the can before, called Paddy Pale Ale. I tried this one on tap, and it was quite an improvement over the red ale. Just look how glowing it looks. You might say that is because of the sun just on the other side of this glass, but who knows?

Comparing it to the canned variety, I can't really say, they both were very good. But if I might make a criticism it would be that the can designs can use a massive improvement. They are not very bold or colorful and make them look kind of cheap.

I like the crispness of this one, without an overpowering amount of hops. Good fresh smells and colors, I think they did a good job with it. If you want a bolder variety, their Hop Slayer (also served in a can that needs work) is the one for you.
I can't wait to return to try some of the others and maybe eat there too.

CBC Rating: 4. Enjoyed in the glass at the pub and in the can too.
ABV: 5.4%