The Four Loko Experiment

The Four Loko Experiment

Up until about a week ago I had never heard of “Four Loko”. Then I started hearing news reports about how they were banning or trying to ban it in numerous states. I asked around and most of my friends didn’t know what it was either. The ones that did responded with “Oh hell no! Don’t drink that stuff”. In short it is an alcoholic energy drink that comes in a variety of fruity flavors. It derives it’s alcohol (12%) from malt liquor and has the equivalent caffeine of about a 6-pack of coke. The can is fairly large and alcohol-wise ends up being about 4 beers. Hearing about how they are trying to ban it and how it has been responsible for alcohol poisonings across the country I did what any scientist would do, I ran to the liquor store and bought one. I got the cranberry lemonade because they were out of a bunch of flavors, I guess I wasn’t the only one with this brilliant idea. I waited until the weekend to drink it because I didn’t want to be hung over for work and I had to wait until it wasn’t my night to wake up with the baby because drinking on those nights makes my job torturous. It was with great trepidation that I cracked that bad boy open on Sunday afternoon and took the first sip. This stuff is AWFUL! I mean really terrible. I can’t imagine anyone trying to choke down more than one of these things. It’s like a Mike’s hard lemonade or a Smirnoff ice with really cheap vodka poured in. It’s sticky and sweet and thick and just tastes of hot booze. It burns the whole way down and my stomach starts rejecting it the moment it gets there. Not a good sign. .And when you finish it makes you smell like cheap alcohol, or so my wife informed me. Now, based on the hype of this stuff I expect to be wasted by half way through the can, this was not the case. In fact I finished the can off (with a lot of effort) and yes I started to feel buzzed but not about to blackout crazy drunk.

I will admit though the caffeine really does counteract the sedative effects of the alcohol for a few hours and then you crash hard. Which makes for a different kind of drunk you are drunk but not drowsy at all. If you didn’t know better, or if you are stupid, you could get yourself in trouble drinking this stuff. But that’s the thing they are trying to ban this stuff, but I could just as easily have been drinking Red Bull and vodkas (which I haven’t in years) and gotten the same result. The type of person that gets alcohol poisoning from Four Loko is the same type of person that gets poisoned from doing 21 shots in an hour on their 21st birthday. Stupid. And stupid people are going to find stupid ways to hurt themselves no matter how many laws you pass. The issue here is young people, unfamiliar with the effects of alcohol binge drinking. It’s not this one product that’s being used as a scapegoat by over-reacting lawmakers trying to score political points by “saving the children”. While you’re at it why not try to ban keg-stands and beer pong. I’ve been there, I’ve drank to the point of puking or blacking out, hell at a wedding with an open bar and an ice luge I still have issues drinking in moderation (FREE BOOZE WOO!) but now that I’m older and know what the alcohol is going to do to me I am able to handle the situation better. They say they are targeting this product specifically because it is marketed to young people. I don’t know where all this “marketing” is but I’ve never seen it, the only marketing I’ve come into contact with is the news media and the politicians telling me not to drink Four Loko and we all know if you tell people not to do something they are gonna go out and do it.

NEW POST!!

My last post was on April 16th that was a long time ago. If you know me you know that the lack of updates can be accounted for by the following factors; factor 1) I had a baby on April 27th (not me personally, technically it was my wife that had the baby) and factor 2) I am working on a PhD and have had to step it up in the lab to try and get done before my kids hit kindergarten. Therefore this has left me with little time to write silly nonsense about beer I’ve been drinking, it has, however not stopped the drinking of said beers. In fact I would argue that it has increased the motivation for me to consume as much as possible, and consume I have! I’ve had some really good beer from Rogue and Sierra Nevada as well as some more obscure microbreweries thanks to my beer of the month club. I will get to those eventually but today I wanted to talk about 2 beverages that are fresh in my mind that aren’t beer. I would like to discuss B. Nektar’s wildflower mead and my own homebrewed apple wine.

I’ve wanted to try mead for quite some time. I’m not a Viking but I love honey and I’m fascinated by bees so mead seems like a great idea to me. I remember that when I worked at the liquor store we had one customer that made us order it for him and it was not something people knew about. Looking at the meaderies on the web it seems like the production of mead has increased in the past 10 years and there are a number of artisanal meaderies operating and selling their craft locally and to liquor stores across the country. B. Nektar is located in Michagain and I happened upon their products when I went to the beer store to try and find some Sierra Nevada 30th anniversary barleywine but came out empty on that front. I had read about B. Nektar on the web so I was excited to try out their wildflower mead. I chilled it overnight and poured myself a glass the next day. It smelled like wine and I took a sip……. and decided mead sucks. Mead, like wine, is influenced by the area it’s made in. For wine it’s the soil the grapes grow in, for mead it’s the flowers the bees collect honey from. If that’s the case, this mead tastes like Detroit. It’s just nasty. Too sweet with an odd middle and aftertaste to it I can’t describe. I drank the whole glass by taking tiny little sips but ended up throwing the rest of the bottle away because I knew there was no way I could finish it. I’d be willing to try mead again but not from this place. Total disappointment.

On to the apple wine! So the apple wine is made of 5 gallons of Acme brand apple juice, a packet of Montrachet wine yeast and a bunch of sugar I dumped it cause I couldn’t measure out 2 pounds from the 5 pound bag. At this point, the intelligent reader will be asking “Jason, that sounds awful! It’s going to make sour juice. Are you making wine in a trash bag in prison?” and my answer to that is no. I am actually following the instructions on one of the most popular recipes on the homebrew talk website. Everyone seems to love this stuff and since it cost me all of 20 bucks to make I figured I’d give it a shot. I’ve been fermenting this for 4 months and I finally bottled it last night. It needs time to carbonate and mature but what it tastes like is a very dry champagne. It’s not what I expected at all. And at about 9-10% alcohol I can see why everyone warns to be careful with this one. I should have sweetened it a little with a non-fermentable sugar but I have a feeling this is going to be really good.

So that’s that. In a few months I’ll have a ton of apple wine to give away and hopefully by then I’ll have the barleywine I want to brew in primary. I’ll update more about the delicious beer I’ve had when I can.

Abita Turbodog

My boss is from the south. As such he felt that the lack of Abita beers to my beer rotation was a glaring oversight on my part, bordering on criminal. I had seen the Abita line-up at my beer store and read about them, but hadn't have a chance to try one. Then I happened to see Abita Turbodog on the menu at Ruby Tuesday's (A restaurant I highly recommend for tiny burgers, but not their beer selection). So I ordered it and here is my review.

Poured from a 12 oz bottle into a glass. Poured a cloudy almost muddy brown. Many people have problems with haze in their beer, I am of the opinion, that as long as it doesn't negatively impact taste I don't mind some haze, especially in a dark beer. Thin brown head which reduced to practically nothing.

Smelled of chocolate and dark dried fruits.

Taste was a lot like the smell. A little sweetness upfront with some roasty grains followed by chocolate. Aftertase is the slight bitterness that comes from dark grains and is very nice in balancing out the sweetness from the chocolate. Lingers just long enough to make it's presence known but not long enough to impact the next sip.

I've ordered this beer twice now, which is the same number of times I have been to Ruby Tuesday's in the past month and really enjoyed it. It makes me want to try other offerings from this brewery like their raspberry hefeweizen, purple haze, which may just help me get over my fear of fruit flavored beers.

On another note I will be brewing a hefeweizen this weekend and posting pictures as long as my wife doesn't go into labor first, she's due on the 22nd of April so it will be cutting it close. If she gives birth while I'm brewing ...... well you can't just leave 5 gallons to boil on the stove unattended, everyone knows that.

I had a thought...

I just realized I mentioned Yuengling in passing in my last post as a frame of reference. Then I remembered that Yuengling used to have a limited distribution area, in fact I had family members that would request people bring cases of it when we gathered for family events. I don't recall if it was Georgia family or Ohio family but that's not actually relevant to this post. The post is about Yuengling, my favorite lawnmower beer. Please note I don't actually have a lawn and therefore don't require a lawnmower so that's really just an expression.

It's my favorite every day beer, and at 16 dollars a case you're not going to find anything with more flavor. Hell, I can't even buy empty bottles for that cheap, sadly they use green twist offs so I can't use them when I bottle my homebrew. Yuengling is brewed in Pottsville, PA and markets itself as America's oldest brewery. They make a couple beers but my favorite is the lager. It pours a amber-light brown with the usual lager aromas of grass or hay but also some nutty maltiness. It tastes like, well first I should say it has taste. When I think American lagers I think flavorless pee-water. This tastes like beer. I would say it has a slight nuttiness and slight hop bitterness and a little malt sweetness. I've never thought to take tasting notes because it's "just Yuengling", it'd be like taking notes on coke zero (which I can put away several cans a day) but I should probably do that next time I have one. The one issue I have with Yuengling is they have consistency problems. Whether it's from green glass or poor quality control I can't say. But if you see it go ahead and try it, it's not going to knock your socks off and it's not going to win you any beer snob points but I give it my seal of approval and I hate everything.

Other beers

Before I write the reviews on my most recently brewed beer (which is awesome) and do a write up on my next beer (Bavarian Heffewiezen) I figured I should complete my reviews of the beers I got in my last beer of the month club shipment. My first shipment was amazing, exceptional even, with the exception of the weird Belgian Bock that tasted like soda with medicine in it; Barbar winterbock. I had to choke down that last bottle (my wife insisted I toss it down the drain because of the faces I was making and the terrible sounds accompanying those faces) but I refuse to throw beer away unless it is infected. I was expecting the same level of exceptionality from this shipment, and if you recall my review of the friar's Belgian style white I was let down. The other beers I got were Sweetwater's Georgia Brown, Alhambra Negra from Spain, and De Koninck Pale Ale from Belgium.

First Sweetwater: I was super excited about this one because I've heard good thing about this brewery that I've never seen around here. The first bottle was too cold I think because I drank it and said "This tastes just like Yuengling". Don't get me wrong I love Yuengling. I can get it for 15.99 a case and it's my favorite every day beer in the summer. I just expect more flavor from a brown ale than I do from a lager. My next bottle I drank warmer and there was a little more hop bitterness but no more complexity than the first bottle. I would say this is a decent, easy drinking beer, but if it costs more than 16 bucks a case I wouldn't bother with it. I think I just prefer my brown ales to have more malt character and complexity like an English brown.

Next Alhambra Negra: This is a black lager. A BLACK LAGER! It combines the easy drinking profile of a lager with the toasty deliciousness of a stout! Or so I thought. I only drank one of these cause I opened the first bottle and it tasted so much like metal I thought I was sucking on a fistful of pennies. I can't stand beers that taste metallic. If it's only a little I can deal with it but this beer took it to a new level. I'm going to have difficulty finishing the other 2 bottles, maybe I will cook with them or something.

Finally the De Koninck Pale Ale. I like this one. It's a strange little hybrid. It's got the normal flavor profile of a pale ale but the added complexity that comes from Belgian yeast. I don't know if this is typical of Belgian pale ales but it's a nice combo that makes for an interesting beer to drink.

Now I don't want anyone asking "Jason, do you hate everything cause you give a lot of negative reviews?" because in reality I like a lot of beers. I think I've just been on a bad luck streak lately. Next month I am getting my next shipment and hopefully I will have 4 glowing reviews about the beer. And if I get my friend in California to send me the Sierra Nevada 30th anniversary series then I hear those are amazing so I bet I'll have good things to say about them, unless they taste like metal. Or soap. Or hotdogs.

SLC (3 of 3)

Ok last post about Salt Lake City, hopefully the next post I write will be about Sierra Nevada's 30th anniversary series the first of which, an imperial stout, has been released recently and I am on the prowl for it. Anyway this last post is about odds and ends. I had 2 other beers on my trip and they were both delicous, one was a local brew from Wasatch Brewery in Utah the second was something everyone's probably had but me but I'll tell you about it anyway.

Wasatch Brewery's Devastator double bock- I had this one night at dinner when I got tired of messing around with the watery junk on tap. I didn't have high hopes but was proven wrong. This was a good double bock. It was sweet but more complex than just sugar. There was caramel and maltiness with no sticky cloying aftertaste. At 8% alcohol I was thinking it might be hot and boozy but it wasn't it was smooth and tasty. I would order this beer again.

The second beer was Negra Modelo. I know this is a standard beer but I have never had it before. You see Corona turned me off to Mexican beer with fruit floating in it so when I get Mexican food I usually skip beer all together. I had heard this particular beer was decent so I ordered it my last night in town when we went out for dinner. It came with a little piece of lime in the bottle and no glass to pour it in, but I figured when in Rome (or Mexico, or Utah I guess) and just went along with it. I have to admit it was not bad, not bad at all. I could see this being my go to Mexican resturant beer. It had a decent amount of malt flavor, clean aftertaste and I liked the lime in it, but I've said before I have no problem adding fruit to beer (I like the lemon in Hefes).

So there you go, 2 beers I didn't hate.

SLC (part 2 of 3)

This is part 2 of 3 of my beer adventure in Salt Lake City (or Dumb Lake City if you read the last post). I don't carry around a tasting notebook with me so you will have to forgive the less than formal evaluations I am giving the beer on this trip, but if you want to get that fancy maybe Beer Advocate has them listed. That being said on to the red rock!

Red Rock Brewing company is another brew pub in SLC. I think they are the less famous of the 2. Their food was really good but this isn't a food blog (Note to self: Make a food blog) so let's get down to the business at hand, beer. We actually went to Red Rock twice. The first time I got an Oatmeal Stout and then saw a special edition Belgian beer aged in oak in cork finished bomber bottles. It was $15 so I did what anyone would do, I didn't order the one I wanted and ended up spending $10 on beer I didn't really want and obsessed about the Belgian for 2 days until I went back and got it. But we'll get there. First the oatmeal stout. It was good, the problem with that assessment is I don't know why. It wasn't complex, there was no coffee or toasty malts, no cocoa or burnt flavors. What it did have was a nice full oatmeal mouthfeel and some residual malt sweetness. It was very "drinkable" to borrow a phrase from beer commercials. I could easily put away a 6 pack of this stout and might go buy it if it were available around here.

The second beer I got was an Irish red ale. I wasn't expecting much but what I got was a really well balanced malty ale with a good amount of floral hop aroma and resinous and floral hop flavor. I really liked this beer too and would pay money for it again.

So why did I say I was going to be mean? Like I said I obsessed about the oak aged Belgian: Reve they called it, French for dream. More like Utah-ian for crap.

They wanted to make a high alcohol beer fine, but there are several factors you must be mindful of when doing so: 1) You need to use malt, you can't just pour in a crap-ton of corn sugar to boost your alcohol or it will become cidery, 2) If you use a yeast that leaves a ton of sugar behind you need hops or something to cut the sweetness 3) If you're going to use Belgian yeast, pick the right one. They failed at every one of these. This beer was a mess. Aroma was hard cider. Taste was so sweet that even my non-beer drinking friends that tried it remarked on how sweet it was. It also tasted like cider with Belgian yeast it in. The cloying sweetness paired with the thickness made it so I couldn't even finish the bottle (that and I had a flight to catch). They needed to use more malt or just make the alcohol content lower, pick a Belgian yeast with a higher attenuation, add less corn sugar and maybe add some more hops or some kind of spices to increase the complexity of this beer also if you're going to age it in an oak cask maybe age it long enough so I can taste some hit of oak. I got nothing from this, maybe the sugar burned out my palate early or maybe it wasn't there. But if you are going to hand number each bottle of a beer take your time aging it and do it right.

Part 3 will conclude this series and cover odds and ends I had in bottles.

Salt Lake City

I just got home from my business trip to Salt Lake City. I did not enjoy this city which is why I have changed the name to Dumb Lake City, the weak beer was at least partially responsible for this name change, but not totally. Anyway, we have a lot of ground to cover so let's get to work on this multi-part series.

First the brewpubs;

Squatter's Brew Pub: I had a beer sampler here. Now, if you know me, you know I LOVE beer samplers, something about the tiny glasses and the number of beers I get to try makes me very excited. Now before I start bad mouthing this place I want to make sure you realize a few things, first I don't care what the percent alcohol of a beer is. If it tastes good it can be 4 or it can be 10, doesn't matter to me. I don't drink to get drunk. That being said, if you know anything about making beer you know that sugars and other compounds extracted from malted grain give beer both its flavor and it's alcohol. If you skimp on the malt you lower the alcohol content and flavor of your beer. With SLC's "no beer on tap above 4%" law that's what the brewers around here do, skimp. They do normal beers in bottles but we'll get to that later. My beer sampler contained a hefeweizen, an unfiltered ... thing, a pilsner, a pale ale, an amber and an oatmeal stout. Everything but the oatmeal stout sucked. They were all lacking flavor and tasted watered down, the hefe lacked any of the flavor characteristics I associate with the style (yeast, citrus, little bit of tartness) and had no aroma, the unfiltered thing was a hot mess that's all I can say. I don't normally care for pilsners, this one didn't make me want to change my opinion of them, it was fine I guess if you're into pilsners. The amber reminded me a little bit of Sweetwater's Georgia Brown ale, but once again watered down, the pale was ...... unremarkable since I can't remember drinking it. The stout was ok. Hints of coffee and a malt. Too sweet to get any toasty or burnt flavors from it. I would actually drink a whole pint of this, which is more than I can say about the rest of the bunch.

Someone at my table got a bottle of their double IPA Hop Rising. 9% alcohol trying to be a hop bomb. This thing tasted like hops, I've give them that. That's all it tasted like. It smelled like sticking my nose into a bag of hops pellets, which I do every time I brew, and tasted like a tea made of hops. There was no finesse here just straight up hoppiness. I enjoyed it and as a once and a while treat it would be great but I would never buy a 6-pack of this.

So this place was a total let down, which is odd because a lot of the bars in the area have huge signs up proclaiming they serve Squatter's beers on tap. To me that seems like the people around here give them way to much credit for what they are making which is mediocre beer. If they were able to take the limitations placed on them and make something remarkable then yeah yell it from the rooftops that you're selling it. But if you're a steakhouse and your window has a neon-sign telling everyone you proudly serve steak-ums you may want to rethink your business model.

Next time: Redrock Brew Pub (maybe I won't be as mean)

((I'm going to be just as mean))

Sherwood Forest

Things with disclaimers in the name usually aren't good; American Style cheese-food, Vegan jerky-style treat, Uncle Jeb's shrimp-esque product (now with less beaks!) for example. This is not always the case Morningstar farms used to make a burger-style cheese pocket that was awesome and truth be told I like American "cheese" for grilled cheese sandwiches. So it was with some trepidation that I tried one of my new beer of the month club beers, Sherwood Forest Belgian-style White. What does that mean exactly? It's Belgian-like that's what. That translates to we'll give it a try to emulate the style but we won't try very hard.

I love wheat beers. A lot of people don't. They either don't like the taste (fine), think they are "girl beers" (go die in a fire), or don't like how trendy they have become with even BMC dabbling in the style (don't be a baby). Label design on this one sucks (maybe I'll post a picture later) it's a half-hearted affair with a computer rendered friar Tuck I suppose we could call that foreshadowing. I cracked the friar open after a considerable amount of rolling on the floor, the beer not me, to suspend the large amount of sediment. Poured it into a tall glass, it was light yellow with little to no head. I drank it without a lemon not because I think the lemon is a moral failing like many beer snobs do, but because my wife was using our lemon for dinner and I didn't want to stand in the way of a very pregnant woman with a knife. Smelled like a good wheat beer, citrus, yeasty, little bit of spice. I was excited. Then I took a taste, and another and a third before I said "Where's the beef?" but you know with "flavor" substituted for "beef". The beer starts strong with all the tangy, citrusy flavors you expect from a wheat beer but then you swallow and it's done. The flavor is all up front and then dies. There is a lingering bitterness, almost like the pith of a citrus fruit after the swallow but it's not great and doesn't make up for what the beer lacks.

Overall it's not a bad beer it's just not great. I'll certainly finish the rest from this month's shipment with no problem I'll probably just never go out of my way to get more. I'd rather drink a franziskaner or a deathfish brewery wiess.

(PS Deathfish brewery is a local brewery I love)
((PPS by local I mean it's in my basement, but in all honesty my hefeweizen from last year was AMAZING))

Founders Breakfast Stout

The other night, Feb 11 to be exact I went out to the local Irish Pub-type establishment to celebrate the 21 st birthday of my sister, 21 being the legal age to drink in case you forgot. This particular Irish pub (Dublin Square in Bordentown) had a rather mediocre beer selection last time I was there so I resigned myself to drinking Smithwick's and Guinness...Guinnesss? Guinnessi? Multiple Guinness stouts for the evening. Lo and behold I discover they have seriously revamped their beer selection and now have some great choices!

I started with a Rogue Dead Guy, on tap mind you, which is approximately 6.4 % ABV. I enjoy Rogue's offerings as a rule (the exception being the American Amber) but their proprietary yeast strain (Pacman) does impart a sameness to their brews that I've noticed. Dead Guy, if you haven't had it, has a nice creamy full mouth feel, a good amount of maltiness and enough bitterness for balance but not the prominent punch you in the mouth bitterness, the good kind. I noticed on draft the flavors imparted by the pacman yeast were not nearly as prominent as in the bottle. A solid beer.

Then things got a little strange. I ordered a Left Hand Milk stout. I've had it before, it's dark but not heavy, sweet but not cloying. It's good. I will not go into any more detail than that because it's not what I got. They hadn't gotten the delivery in cause of the snow. What the waiter offered as a replacement was Founders Breakfast Stout. I had read about this stout on line and I love oatmeal stouts so I said sure. My friends there are 2 things wrong with this situation 1) Founders is not comparable to a sweet stout and 2) this waiter was trying to kill me.

I liked the Founders, don't get me wrong, I reeeeeeeealy liked it. My family hated it. It's reminiscent of very strong, black coffee, with some flavors of roasted and burnt malt. Light on the carbonation but there's a good reason for that, it's a double/imperial stout (8.3% alcohol). So now that I've think I've had 2 beers which puts me at about .02-.04 blood alcohol content I've really had .......well more. Trying to talk to my wife I noticed my usual eloquence was marred by impediments. the next morning I work up and my stomach hurt like I had gone out for a night of binge drinking and I couldn't figure out why. Until I checked beer advocate and realized I had more alcohol than I had intended.

So let that be a lesson to you all; waiters want to trick you into drinking high alcohol beers for some reason or another. Probably because they hate you, but that might just apply to me.

Another beer blog.

Here's another blog about beer to add to an already glutted internet. There are plenty of fine blogs about beer already out there. I don't write as well as those bloggers, I don't drink as much as them and I probably won't update as frequently as they do (I know this because I am the author of several failed blogs already). So why should you keep reading any further than this?

That's a good question.

Maybe because like me, and all the other people out there making beer, drinking beer, and writing about beer, you can't get enough of that wonderful stuff! So until I decide to give up on this blog too I will update periodically on what Jason is drinking, Jason being me in this case. Be it beer of the month club inclusions, stuff I come across at bars or the fare I brew up in my own kitchen.

Hopefully someone will find what I write entertaining even if it's only ironically.