what beers are you drinking? (post-apocalypse)

[AaronS]

omnipollo x närke kulturbryggeri tärt-kaggen! barrel aged imperial porter with heather honey, coconut & muscavado sugar a pastry version of ”kaggen”. the legends at närke kulturbryggeri came to the church to help us make a beautiful heather honey imperial porter. after extended maturation on steel we transferred this dark beer into select bourbon barrels and gave it a respectful yet customary omnipollo® cake treatment. enthusiastically crafted at our church brewery in sundbyberg, sweden. - brewed at omnipollo, 13% abv. this is a lot simpler than the two beers above it - there's a big honeyed note that gives way to some bourbon and toasted coconut, which is followed by even more sweetness. meh.

[AaronS]

to øl mine is bigger than yours barley wine-style ale - brewed at de proef, 12.5% abv. de proef is a belgian brewery that used to make beer for mikkeller, to øl, and omnipollo, among others, that made my the beer I liked best for a long time. their beer hasn’t been available in nyc for a long time, both good and bad reasons, and while this isn’t really that old it is the last of my stash and so on. I had a bunch of these that I planned to hold onto for a while, but these aren’t holding up as well as I thought they’d be despite their high abv. (sierra and jw lees beers that are older than this taste better when stored the same way.) maybe I should have held on to these longer, while the malt flavors are falling apart there’s some nice dried fruit followed by marmalade, grapefruit, vanilla, and pine, along  with some malt sweetness underneath. this isn’t as bad as I thought it was at first, and so on.

[AaronS]

anchorage brewing company calbaza boreal saison brewed with mosaic and galaxy hops, fermented and aged in foeders with saison yeast, brett, and oro de cabeza from the barrel. bottled conditioned for natural fermentation batch # 1 2014 - 7% abv. I was pretty excited to find this in a manhattan beer time capsule the other day, anchorage's bretty beers were always among my favorites, I drank a bunch of this (and the version that jolly pumpkin made) when it first came out, and I haven't seen an anchorage brett beer in a pretty long time. this is quite a bit older than the oldest anchorage beer I've had, I had a stash of the brett ipa they made for mikkeller that was terrific for about six years before it started to go, but this was cheap and I'm nostalgic blah blah blah. so this is quite a bit simpler than it was when it was first issued and no longer has the really beautiful deep brett notes that it used to, but what is here is pretty nice and this is in remarkably good shape. there's a big sour grapefruit note that's pretty tart in a pleasant way that dominates, and there's a lot of stuff underneath it - the kinds of oak buttery notes you get in a shitty chardonnay, some brett, some tropical fruit, and even a hint of malt sweetness. I'm really pleasantly surprised by how I like this. mildly recommended.

[AaronS]

schönramer dunkel - 5% abv. apparently schönramer is a german brewery that's been around for hundreds of years. they just started sending beer to new york, although I could have sworn I used to see these labels around when I first moved here. if that's true (blah blah) I was really missing out (whah whah) because this is an exceptionally good beer. the bottle has a best by june 2026 label on it, and it doesn't taste as crisp as a really fresh lager would, but there's a really enjoyable mixture of toasty malt, some sweetness, and a herbal finish that's a little bit sweet and has a mixture of burnt coffee and honey. there's a really impressive amount of detail for something with this abv, everything is well balanced, and so on, but it's really the incredibly well done malt notes that set this apart. highly recommended.