An obscure beer blog about drinking for yourself
It sure as hell doesn’t feel like Summer on this rainy chilly night in Fresno, but the first Summer beer has arrived: Sierra Nevada Brewing’s “Summer Break IPA”.
Canning date: 3/11/22
ABV: 4.6%
Style: Hazy Session IPA
Value: A nice beer to have in the fridge all season. Good grocery store beer.
🍻👍
I am starting a new feature on the blog: Something I did while drinking a beer. (It could use a better name)
Well, I guess it’s sort of a spin-off of my Ambient Reviews.
Anyway, these are things that happened while drinking a Pale from Elk Grove’s Flatland Brewing called “The Local – Sacramento Style Pale”.
I was sitting in my backyard and…
I saw several birds. There was a sparrow and a bluejay that ate some food from my bird feeder.
I listened to the PA of this high school baseball game being played a half-block away:
🚨 Baseball Final 🚨
— Bullard Baseball (@bullardbb) March 12, 2022
Frontier 2
Bullard 10 (7-2)
WP- @jakeybarra17 7IP 4H 2R 5K@TrevorW1lson 1-3 2Rbi@StubbNick 1-1 R@beckettzavorek 4-4 (2)2b 3RBI
Listened to a hotrod rumble through my neighborhood.
Saw a squirrel bury something in my planter bed.
Agreed on how nice a day it is:
It is indeed https://t.co/zZ9mkIAq3v
— Mikey Seay (@thefresnan) March 12, 2022
Earned the “To Go Level 48” badge while checking this beer in on Untappd.
Admired my new Brumate with painted metal that makes it feel like a car finish.
And that takes us to the end of the beer. Thanks for reading! 🍻✌️
Yep. To me it is. To me. And yes I am an idiot. But…
What a good beer is can be very subjective. A large community inside Beer Twitter and beer folks in general, adore Allagash White. Some herald it as the perfect beer.
I could never stand the fucker.
A thin old tasting beer that feels like it was put through a Randall filled with smushed bananas? No thanks.
But it had been a long time since I had one. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe my palete had changed. I am wrong a lot so I could be totally off.
So I tried one again:
Yep. Still as awful as I remember. Maybe more so. So difficult to drink. Just gross.
Allagash Brewing is a great top-tier Indie brewer that I highly respect. But Belgian Wheat beers are terrible, and the King of the style is Allagash White.
I did not think it was going to go down like this. It’s red.
When I saw “fruited” West Coast IPA, my mind went to tropical; orange and pineapple. Turns out it’s cranberry and orange.
I am not too big into cranberry in beer. So it was a shock. Not expecting a beer billed as a West Coast to be like that. Not here to say it’s wrong to bring WC into it, just here to say it’s weird, dude.
But hey, I got through it. Not mad. Maybe even glad, as I would have never tried if if I had known about the berry action, so I guess I am expanding my palate and junk.
That said, I am making sure my next beer is not red.
I went to my neighborhood bottleshop today and noticed some new beers from a brewery I had never heard of called Hello Friend.
Normally I am too tight with my beer budget to risk trying something from new breweries, but today I had some rare cash to take chances with.
I look for beers with Mosaic hops first off and this brewery had several with Mosaic – if you’re a brewery that uses a lot of Mosaic you are already pulling me in, brother.
Over the past few days I have had four of their beers. One I forgot 🤷🏻♂️, but the other three were:
If I had to choose my favorite of the four three… Till I Crumble. But they are all nice beers.
Come to find out this is a brewery operating out of Berkeley’s the Rare Barrel. They are on the property but have their own “area” I suppose.
I think it’s a good idea to make a separate brewery in your own brewery, if you want to make a different style beer with its own marketing.
If you are interested and in California, you can get their beer here.