Door,

Yes.

Eh. Depends. Sours is a wide range. I like most good saisons more than most kettle sours. But Allagash Farm to Face? Yes plz.

Correct

I'm going to be in Denver next weekend and my brother-in-law wants to go to a few breweries, which are the ones I need to get to? Bonus points for things that are reasonably close together.

Things on my radar so far include: Bierstadt Lagerhaus, Black Project, TRVE, Great Divide, Bruz, Crooked Stave, and Cerebral. What am I missing?

Oskar Blues has a location in Denver. I don't know if they brew onsite there, but I had a few pints and a nice plate of BBQ there a couple months ago.

Wouldn't go out of my way for it, but it'd be a fair stop if it's near other stuff. I know it's walkable from one of the Great Divide locations at least.

The trip to boulder for Avery is worth it IMO. There’s also about 50 other breweries up there that I can’t speak to specifically.

+1 to Avery. The actual brewery space is fantastic, great sours and stouts if you’re into those.

Yeah, Avery is great.

Bruz is way out of the way from downtown Denver.

Oskar Blues is good b/c it's downtown and they usually have good guest taps too.

If you're out riding around, New Image in Arvada (on way back from Red Rocks) is good.

That's a pretty good list so far. Other breweries near CS/Bierstadt/GD that are worth checking out are Black Shirt, Spangalang, Liberati, Epic, and Our Mutual Friend. Liberati was started by an Italian guy who adds grapes to his beers, or as they call them "Oenobeers." Some are outstanding, particularly the Recioto Denveris that tastes an awful lot like port wine. The food, Italian of course, is about as good as it gets for a brewery. Check out this Forbes article for a little more background.

Also, it appears you like sours, so you may enjoy checking out Goed Zuur (right down the street from Spangalang), which is as far as I know the only taproom dedicated solely to sour beers. The guy who opened it also owns Backcountry Pizza in Boulder, which arguably has the best tap list in the state.

The gueuze guys are right!

On that note, Denver/Boulder:
Backcountry Pizza / Avery in Boulder
Black Project / Goed Zuur in Denver
Crooked Stave is also k.
imo

or

Just forget all of it (ok well maybe not BP) and drive to Casey instead

A few minor notes:

Yes

Opened a 3F geuze during the EPIC football games on Sunday.





Almost 11 years old. It was good.

In other news, this year's Nugget Nectar bangs.

Deal lovers,

We had a nice run with the lagunitas BA stouts, but looks like that has come to an end.




Not terrible at $9.99/bomber, but a far cry from the great value the six packs were.

Kind of just thinking out loud here, kind of no idea what to do:

Where I work we brew a German hefeweizen, and it's one of our best sellers. It's by far the biggest pain in the ass to brew, because we do some process-related stuff while brewing to really push the clove/spice part of the flavor profile over the banana. The finished beer also has disastrous head/foam retention. I'm convinced the two are related, and have tried everything I know of to fix the foam retention issue to no avail. The last option was changing the brewing process itself.

So I did that for one batch to see whether it would 1) fix the foam retention and 2) not affect the flavor profile. Great success on the foam part, but to me the beer flavor was markedly different. OK, maybe just me, knowing it was different, being biased? I got around to doing triangle taste tests with all the staff. Out of 10 tasters given three samples, two of which were identical and one of which was different... one person correctly identified the samples. All tasters were asked to rate their confidence from 1 to 10 (10 most confident) and most were in the 8-10 range. Except the one actual correct taster, who had a confidence of 1. Afterwards, I had someone set up a blind triangle for me, and I got it right away, not only which sample was different, but which recipe was which.

So... now I don't quite know what to do. The foam retention/head problem is very real. The flavor change with the new process is... not real? I couldn't believe the results of the triangle test, since to me it is so easy to tell the difference. But, like, that's why you do the test, right?

I'm inclined to go with my palette, but it bugs me that I'd be ignoring the triangle test results, not to mention that it wouldn't solve the very real problem that I brew a hef that can't form/sustain a head to save its life.

RDH,

Do some more taste tests, including a few more runs by you.

It wouldn’t be surprising if you’re much more attuned to the differences than other tasters.

4 Hands Madagascar Release tomorrow in St. Louis. If anyone wants an allotment, I have a buddy coming with me thats not buying any himself.

damn, wish I would have seen this over the weekend. Definitely would have taken you up on it. Love Madagascar, and the variants this year sound great.

rdh,

I'm going to be a bit of a dick here. Hef drinkers won't notice the difference in spicing but will appreciate the better head. Change the recipe.

Not sure how that's being a dick, feedback is appreciated.

We've got a bunch of the new recipe to sell through so for now I'm in a bit of a holding pattern to see sales and if there's any public comments.

I am not at all a hazy IPA guy, but this beer was recently distributed in OH for the first time (as far as I know), and it's one of the best new beers I've had in a long, long time.



Both this and the Double IPA (Boss Tweed) were distributed here in relatively small amounts. I was only able to get 2 cans of this and none of Boss Tweed, but I can't imagine the double being better than this. (I've gotten pretty tired of double IPAs and I'm proud to have not even been tempted to buy Hopslam this year.) Anyway, I could drink gallons and gallons of this stuff and I hope they'll be distributing more in the future.

Here's the brewer's description:

The only thing that surprises me is the hop bill. I believe that I'm more of a traditional "Cs" hop fan - especially Cascade and Centennial, and I was pretty sure that I dislike Simcoe. But for whatever reason, this was perfect for me. I really wish I had a few of these to go through on Superbowl Sunday.

Fresh M43 is incredible and so crushable. I'm usually with you that I tend to prefer a good single IPA over a double, but Boss Tweed is an exception. Fantastic beer. We are supposed to start getting distro also so I'm excited about that.

We crushed so much m-43 two summers ago it was embarrassing. We were doing a lot of camping in northern Michigan so we would swing by the brewery grab a few cases for the weekend. Luckily it’s in Kroger and Meijer now and costs a lot less than it used to.

Appreciate all the thoughts on Denver. We decided we wanted to walk so we stuck to the RiNo area. Wound up stopping at Odell, Ratio, Our Mutual Friend, and then had dinner at Liberati. The first two were fine. OMF and Liberati were both fantastic plus the food at Liberati was really really good.

My wife and I did two sessions at Extreme Beer Fest this weekend which was just a total drunken mess but very fun. I tried to keep track of things but that fell away quickly. For me, the standouts included Weldwerks and Burly Oak. My wife made it a point to try every beer with pickles. I was mostly trying anything that sounded completely bizarre that I would never want to have a full pint of in a single go. Had Utopias for the first time. It was way smoother than something that strong has any right to be. I'm not sure how it is beer, but I enjoyed it.

I've never heard of oenobeers. What did you make of them?

Previously, the only oenobeers I’ve had were from Trillium and they were basically straddling the line between beer and champagne. Bone dry. A little tart. Fairly grapey and extremely carbonated. I tried one like that but these had more range. They had a DIPA that had body and was hoppy but the grape blended really well also the carbonation was more what I’d expect in a beer than the Trillium oenobeers. I didn’t enjoy the TIPA at all. It was a sugar bomb that overwhelmed everything else. Their brewer/blender seems to put a lot of care into which grapes he pairs with which beers.


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+1