AaronS

three floyd’s alpha klauss christmas porter - 7.3% abv. this is the holiday version of alpha king, one of their older beers. the malt bill is a lot darker in this version, and they add some english chocolate malt and mexican sugar, but the important thing is this shows up a lot fresher than most of the rest their beer does. this has a great combination of roasted malt and bitterness that gives way to a mixture of orange marmalade and resin with some herbal undertones. this is exactly what I love about old style american brewing - you get the well done malt notes that you’d get in an actual porter, but it’s also really hoppy and is well put together. it’s also more than a little bit frustrating that this is clean and well made the way I remember their beer being way back when, which is no longer true of most of their beer that ends up here. strongly recommended.

alesmith brewing company ipa west coast-style india pale ale - 7.25% abv. the old version of this was one of my all time favorite west coast ipas, and I'm always happy to find this relatively fresh at the grocery store. (would finding equally fresh versions of union jack or torpedo be even more exciting? I wish I could tell you.) this isn't at all the way it was - the previous c-hop (amarillo and simcoe start with c for these purposes) hop bill has been replaced with columbus and citra, the latter of which is a c-hop in name only... this is a lot lighter than torpedo is, and tastes a lot more like citra, but it's less delicate and the hops have that weird apple juice flavor you get with lesser examples of older beer. this is the kind of thing I really wanted to like more, blah blah blah.

oxbow brewing northern lager classic lager brewed for oxbow brewing co. by zero gravity craft brewing, burlington, vt - 4.5% abv. I forgot this was contract brewed when I picked it up, and while I generally like zero gravity’s stuff I don’t remember what their lagers are like so I have no idea if this arrangement is a good idea or not. this is exactly what it claims to be - a classic lager. it’s clean, is entirely beer flavored, and the small amounts of sweet malt and hints of bitterness are pretty pleasant. this has a fair amount of flavor for the abv and is extremely quaffable. recommended to anyone looking for a classic lager.

shocked and saddened that mongo doesn’t remember the picture of the chou farci I posted in 2016.

his posts in the ssäm bar thread were incredible.

I read that fuku had to change ghost kitchen operators because the previous operator wasn’t cooking the chicken through.

sierra nevada celebration fresh hop ipa - 6.8% abv. this is my yearly post about how I still like this beer, which has been around since 1982. I've probably had more than half of them at this point, and this is very much like the way I remember the rest of them. it's got cascade, centennial, and chinook, and the real way that it's different from the many generations of newer beers is the amount of caramel malt in the base that gives a fairly sweet base that stands up to all the bitterness. there's some caramel, pine, and a little bit of citrus. yesterday was the first time in a week or so that I haven't looked at the sierra website to see when this would show up, so I got this within a first few days of it being available here and there's some off notes in the background despite the fact that this was canned a month ago, which is disappointing. still recommended.

I don't know if you used the selective high school system or not, that's the one that uses a test for stuyvessant, bronx science, brooklyn tech, and a few others. it lets you into the highest ranked school the test score allows, so listing a school with too high a cutoff first doesn't reduce your chances of getting into a less selective school listed second. there's another system (that's definitely changed) that uses a lottery number and sorts grades into tiers. our lottery number makes the workings of that system irrelevant, it's almost impossible for us to get into something better than tech. really hope her practice test scores are representative of how she scores on the real test, because if they're not she's not going to a good high school. there are at least half a dozen schools we'd pick over tech, it really blows my mind that the fact that she got tier one grades at what's regarded as one of the more rigorous middle schools in the area is irrelevant. blah blah blah and blah.

I saw grid link twice this weekend. two really terrific performances of material I love, and it's hard to think there will ever be a grind core band I like more. everything really made me feel old, for a lot of reasons.

I saw it in a listicle of every similar street in NYC that had some neat stuff in brooklyn I was unaware of. must have been on brownstoner.

the shs system doesn’t penalize you for how you rank schools.

I get not wanting to go to stuy, I don't understand the belief that tech will be more pleasant. the problem is her lottery number makes her pick of those very likely to be the best choice despite her grades, and her lottery number isn't even that bad in an absolute sense. how do you know the other parents weren't being shitty to that guy? I definitely would have talked to him, I found his persona in those docs hilarious and wouldn't have been able resist seeing if it was real. I do stop to look at car wrecks when I see them. also the stuy tour is after you have to submit your rankings.

that’s a pretty solid tap list.

touring nyc public high schools! endless arguments about whether we should list blah blah blah…. my daughter’s first tier grades not mattering because of our lottery number… her odd desire to go to brooklyn tech over stuy…

bottle logic, monkish, the bruery…

isn't real restaurant the term of art?

that restaurant is in the four season's on the edge of dc's nicest neighborhood. and they mention that.

industrial arts brewing wrench hazy india pale lush & zesty - 7.1% abv. this is another what I think will be the best thing in the bodega post. I've followed the guy behind industrial arts for a long time and liked the majority of the stuff I've had from him, but it's been a while since I've liked one of the one off hoppy beers as much as this and I was happy to find reasonably fresh cans of this on my way home. this is yet another ne ipa hopped with citra and mosaic, but these cans are a little more bitter than most hazy ipas and there's a nice mixture of grapefruit and the usual tropical stuff, and there's some melon and under ripe fruit in the finish. this isn't that detailed, but it's very pleasant and it's been a long time since I've had one of their one off that was anywhere near as good as this.

the woman who served me that told me I probably couldn’t eat it and was polite about it when I bought a second plate of food.

jester king nani ?! japanese-style rice lager - 4.8% abv. this one was made with jasmine rice and sorachi ace hops, which is surprising to me because it tastes nothing like brooklyn brewery’s distinctive saison made with the same hops. this is terrific though, there’s some very light grain notes followed by green tea and mint. that’s stolen from the commercial description, but it’s dead on and better than whatever I would come up with. this really has a lot if flavor for a lager, is completely unique in my experience, and tastes really good. recommended.

lawson's finest sip of sunshine india pale ale - brewed at two roads in connecticut, 8% abv. I'm always embarrassed by how excited about this I was at some point, but it's pretty good sometimes and it was by far the freshest thing in the bodega tonight. there's a nice write up on the lawson's website that I won't bother regurgitating, we all know this is a version of their original citra focused dipa made to be contract brewed, and so on. these cans are almost exactly two weeks old, which is often the sweet spot for "juicy" beer, and there is actually a decent version of the usual citra mango flavors, which are followed by a little bit of pine. this is pretty sweet though, and there's some unpleasant malt stuff in the background that you usually only get in much older beer.

schilling konstantin austrian-style märzen - 5% abv. apparently austrian-style means the kind of amber lager that a lot of german brewers make for the us market, which I should know because I’m pretty sure I’ve had this before. going to schilling’s website tells me this was double decoction mashed and nothing else, but this does have really spectacular malt notes and not much else. this tastes more or less the same as the ayinger beer above it - there’s a nice mixture of caramel and bread with a little bit of herbal hops in the back ground - and while this is a little bit sweeter and the ayinger beer tasted a little more like hops everything about this tastes better and has more depth. I don’t like schilling’s pale lagers as much as the suarez or OEC ones but this is about as good as it gets. strongly recommended and so on.

ayinger privatbraueri oktober fest-märzen authentic bavarian festival lager - 5.8% abv. this is a nice, simple lager. it’s copper colored and some pleasant, straight forward malt notes followed by a little bit of herbal bitterness.

augustiner-bräu münchen maximator starkbier - 7.5% abv. this was one of the first dopplebocke that I had way back when, and I’m sure this beer goes back many hundreds of years. I haven’t seen this in a while, and picked it up without knowing that it’s a seasonal made for lent. this kind of beer should age pretty well (I’ve had really old schbeiderwiesse ones that were sublime) and I’d be surprised if it was brewed for this year’s lent. there’s a some bready caramel at first, followed by a little molasses and some pear. this is far from skunked but there is a little bit of acrid stuff in the finish.

I attended dessert fest this weekend, which was the first festival I’ve been to since the third lolapalooza. they had two stages going on friday, so you only had to choose who you were seeing for the few minutes that the stages overlapped, but there on saturday there were two smaller stages going while the bigger bands you were there to see set up and you had to choose who to watch. I guess most people know how festivals work… the definite highlight was seeing godflesh, which was the first time I’d seen a justin broaderick band in the almost thirty years that I’ve listened to his music. (I know I missed godflesh in high school, but I don’t remember having an opportunity to see jesu even though they were one of my favorite bands for a few years.) they had an immense guitar and bass sound, and the older, lower tempo material they played towards the end of their set was terrific. large parts of the boris set were really enjoyable, but parts of it were really boring, which is typical of boris over the last fifteen years even if they only played material from twenty years ago. conan was really good, the melvins are always good, heavy temple is good, colour haze was terrific (and closer to prog than metal), seeing mondo generator play a kyuss song was terrific even if the rest of their set was boring despite a terrific drum performance, and seeing djunah, whose singer sounds a lot like pj harvey playing harsher music, was a welcome respite from watching hairy dudes play guitar solos. tldr? godflesh rules