Zymurgy's Best Beer Survey

Zymurgy magazine, the journal of the American Homebrewers Association, is having it's annual Best Commercial Beers in America Survey. Import beers are also eligible, but they must be available for purchase in the United States market. To vote for your favourite beers as Best in America, send an email message to jill@brewersassociation.org by March 12th with a list of up to 20 of beers and include your full name and location. The results of the survey will be in the July/August issue and clone recipes for some of the top beers will be included.

Skagunitas Beer Tasting at the Flying Saucer

Tickets are now on sale for the Skagunitas (Ska Brewing and Lagunitas Brewing) Beer Tasting at the Flying Saucer on March 4th. $40 per person or $35 for UFO Club members. From a @FlyingSaucerHou post on Twitter:

You get to taste 6 beers & our food pairings to go along with them. A representative from both breweries will be here to host and speak about the beer and the food. Also, you'll leave with a complementary glass!

The price is reasonable enough, depending on the food being served and the beer being sampled I guess.

Captured a Bigfoot

After finishing off a couple of 400lb Monkeys, I felt ready to take on a Bigfoot. I've always been a big fan of Sierra Nevada's Bigfoot and the 2010 release finally became available at my local Spec's. With an ABV of 9.6% and IBU of 90, this is not a casual drinking beer. Pours a dark amber colour with a thin head. Aromas of sweet malts and pine. Mild hop flavours and sweet malts to start but huge pine flavours quickly dominate with a little grapefruit as well. The alcohol is definitely noticeable with an expected slight warming affect. Medium carbonation with a sticky mouthfeel. A long lingering bitter finish. With a little age on it, the harsh hop and alcohol characteristics usually settle down and mellow out.

This is one of the beers that I continue to cellar year after year and I currently have '05, '06, '07, '09 and now '10. For some very odd reason, I don't find any '08 in my cellar at all. I have no idea how that happened and I find it quite annoying to be missing a year. I hope to have my usual vertical tasting soon and see how these bold flavours have settled. I only have one bottle of the '05 left, so it will be the last of that year.

A 400lb Monkey In The Room

While doing a little research about this beer, I found out that Left Hand gave it the name 400 lb Monkey as a sort of "tribute" to a comment made by their VP of Brewing Operations in an interview. During the height of the proliferation of IPA's a few years ago, he was asked why Left Hand was not brewing one and he responded with "any monkey can throw 400 pounds of hops into a kettle and call it an IPA". I guess he wasn't a big fan of all the IPA's that had flooded onto the market at the time. When Left Hand did finally decide to produce an IPA, they chose to brew an English style which is more malty and less bold then a typical American style IPA. In fact, some may actually be disappointed with it if they think the name makes any implications regarding its flavour.

Dark golden colour with a white frothy head. Very light aromas of malt and floral hops. Biscuity and toasty malt flavours up front with a smooth moderate bitter finish but with no lingering harshness. I think it would make a great session beer if it was somewhere around 5% ABV instead of the 6.7% that it is.

Petrol Station to Host BrewDog in March

According to a recent post on the Petrol Station's Facebook page, James Watt from BrewDog will be there on March 17th and both Tactical Nuclear Penguin (32% ABV) and Sink The Bismarck (41% ABV and currently world's strongest beer) will be available.

As ridiculous as I think it is to produce beers with that high of an ABV, the beer geek in me can't help but want to know how they taste.


*** UPDATE 03/15/10 ***

Update from the Petrol Station Facebook page:

We will have hardcore ipa on tap, isle of arran paradox on cask, tokyo in bottles plus free samples of sink the bismarck, tactical nuclear penguin and nanny state