The first part of the year is a good time to acquaint new readers with what goes on here. So for this post, I’m bringing up the subject of beer reviews.
I basically have two kinds of articles about beers I’m drinking: 1) the regular “beer review” of a beer I bought with my own allowance just so I can offer my opinions on it, and 2) “beer preview” of a beer that has been provided gratis by the brewer’s PR people, or a local distributor. I try to simply describe the beer without rendering a quality judgement one way or the other, but after all, no one’s going to send me their worst beer.
This here is a “preview” of a beer sent to me from Stone Brewing Berlin, It’s the first European outpost of an American craft brewer, opened in 2016. Among the projects done in Berlin, which have found their way back to the States, is a series of 14 “Groundbreaking Collaborations” with other brewers, mostly American, offered in 750 ml corked champagne bottles. This beer goes by the unwieldy name Stone (Berlin) Collab 04 Lost Abbey Sticks n’ Stones. The beer was a project with three Stone Berlin brewers and Tomme Arthur, founder of California’s Port Brewing/The Lost Abbey. The beer is a dark lager, strong at 8.3% above, which gets its name from having been aged in granite barrels on wood chips.
The one fly in the ointment is that this was sent to me during the deep freeze earlier this month, and arrived frozen solid. Luck was on my side, since it was packaged in a champagne bottle, which is meant to endure a couple rounds of freezing. I was able to get it defrosted with the bottle cracking, my only concern being that the cork looked like it might pop off any second. But that didn’t happen. My other concern was that if this was bottle conditioned or had residual yeast in it, that might have been killed to throw the flavor off. I could not get any confirmation whether there was any yeast to be expected, but as it turned out, the taste was not affected. And because of the possibility of the cork spouting out, with hilarious consequences, I recorded the tasting for my One Take Beer Review YouTube series.
The beer pours a deep brown, but with highlights showing through. A thick head kicks up, then settles to a thin “pond scum” of foam.
The smell is surprisingly light, not with a lot of alcohol or malt, but at least any yeast in the bottle didn’t die and skunk it up. Taste is malty without the astringency of dark malt, and just an edge of German noble hops. The extra malt does get a bit sticky on my lips. The flavor does not go off as the bottle dwindles. There is some yeast sediment, or perhaps hop bits, at the bottom. The alcohol in this large bottle makes my toes start to curl, but it’s not “hot” with alcohol at any time. This is a big version of a German style beer, as filtered through the experience of American brewers.
